Image: The Vivalli capital
Look around.
Cars used to come in every colour imaginable. Cherry red. Canary yellow. Deep forest green. Today? Grey. White. Black. Silver. Walk into any parking lot and you’d be forgiven for thinking colour itself had been outlawed somewhere around 2005.
Restaurants followed. Exposed concrete. Bare brick. Grey walls with grey menus in tiny grey fonts. The food is Instagram-worthy. The room feels like a very upscale bunker.
Clothes? Don’t get me started. Open any major retailer’s website right now. Count the beige. Count the black. Count the variations of grey that all have different names so we don’t notice they’re the same colour.
And then there’s McDonald’s.
McDonald’s. A brand built entirely on red and yellow and a clown. A brand so committed to colour it basically was colour — loud, obvious, unapologetic joy. Ronald McDonald was not subtle. The Golden Arches were not subtle. That was the whole point.
McDonald’s went grey.
Grey walls. Minimalist typeface. Muted palette. “Sophisticated.” When one of the most colour-committed brands in human history decides its own identity was too much, we have a problem. Not a taste problem. A values problem.
Grey Isn’t Sophisticated. Grey Is Profitable.
It’s cheaper to manufacture five neutral colourways than fifty vibrant ones. Easier to stock. Easier to sell to the broadest possible demographic. Grey doesn’t offend anyone. Grey doesn’t exclude anyone. Grey moves inventory.
So the choice was made for us. Not by taste. Not by culture. By margin analysis.
We didn’t choose grey. We were handed it. Taupe or slightly darker taupe — which would you prefer? The answer doesn’t matter because both options are the same option.
Here’s what grey actually expresses: nothing. That’s the point. Grey belongs to no one. Grey offends no one. Grey is the aesthetic of a world that decided belonging to someone was too risky.
My bright purple t-shirt? Happiness on fabric. My first car was bright red — yes, it was a cop trap, and it was worth every ticket. My office has always been yellow. Always. Because yellow is the colour of a person who decided.
Colour is how we say I am here. This is me. I chose this.
Grey is what happens when the world values profit over happiness. When optimisation replaces expression. When we let someone else answer the question “what do you love?” on our behalf.
The World Has Always Been Richer Than This
Think about the things that made you feel most alive. Not the grey ones.
The farmer’s market in summer where every stall is a different argument for what colour looks like. The festival where everyone wore something ridiculous and beautiful and entirely themselves. The grandmother’s kitchen that smelled like something specific and irreplaceable. The book that put you somewhere so vivid you could smell the rain.
These things weren’t sophisticated in the grey sense. They were full. They were tended. Someone cared enough to make them specific rather than universal, personal rather than palatable.
That’s what we’ve been losing. Not colour exactly — though yes, colour. What we’ve been losing is the willingness to tend things. To make them specific. To say this matters, and here is what it looks like when it does.
What Colour Does to You
Go to Mexico. Walk through a market in Oaxaca where the walls are painted the kind of blue that doesn’t exist in a Dulux catalogue and the textiles are so vivid they seem to vibrate. Go to Istanbul and stand in the Grand Bazaar where every surface is a different conversation about what beauty looks like. Drive along the Amalfi coast where every village is a different shade of something that has no grey in it at all.
Notice what happens to you.
You slow down. You look. You feel something loosen in your chest that you didn’t know was tight. The world stops being something to get through and starts being something to be in.
That’s not tourism. That’s your nervous system responding to an environment that was made for humans rather than optimised for throughput. Colour isn’t decoration. It’s information. It tells your body that someone cared enough to make this place specific. That you are somewhere, not just anywhere.
We are not built for grey. We never were.
Wonder Is a Skill You Can Get Back
Grey isn’t permanent. Exhaustion isn’t identity.
Wonder is a skill. Like any skill, it gets rusty when you stop using it. But it doesn’t disappear. It’s waiting, patient, in the same place it always was — in the moment when something is so specific and so alive that you forget to be tired for a second.
Your kids find it everywhere, until we teach them not to. The dog finds it three times a day in the same patch of grass. The best artists, writers, chefs, and builders you’ve ever encountered never stopped finding it. They just kept tending it. Kept choosing specificity over safety. Kept painting the thing in the colour it actually was.
You can do that too. You can start anywhere.
Notice one thing today that has actual colour in it — not grey, not beige, not “versatile neutral.” Notice it properly. Let it be the thing it is.
Why I Built a World With Colour in It
A couple of years ago I started writing a fantasy novel. Not because I planned to become an author. Because I sat on the couch with my daughters generating D&D character art and something bigger started brewing.
Now make me a wizard. I want to ride a velociraptor. Make my bunny be alive.
And I thought — they deserve a world with colour in it. A world where the answer to darkness isn’t more darkness, it’s a wandering storyteller in patchwork robes made of every colour that ever mattered. Where a village sings while it works. Where an indigo drake considers vegetables a personal insult and is not wrong about this.
I built that world for them. But I think a lot of us need it.
The Patchwork Storyteller is bright epic fantasy — warm worlds with real stakes, found family, hope at the center, and yes, big teeth. It’s my answer to grey. My argument that wonder isn’t naive. That colour isn’t unsophisticated. That the world is richer than we’ve been letting ourselves believe.
If you’ve been looking for a story that puts colour back in — this one was written for you.