How a broken, screwed-up life can be beautiful (Kintsugi)
Imagine having a beautiful vase decorating your living room. And it’s not just a vase; it’s a genuine nineteenth-century, hand-painted piece of porcelain created in the Satsuma province in Japan. One day, your neighbor’s dog sneaks into your garden, walks into your living room, and pushes over the vase with a wild jump of enthusiasm, breaking it into pieces. You’re devastated, as the vase was one of your most valuable decorative objects. And now, it’s destroyed.
But your neighbor, who happens to be a Japanese elder, offers help. Using gold lacquer, she carefully mends the pieces of the vase. The result: the vase has been repaired, but the cracks still show. The golden lines highlight the event of being broken and fixed; it has become part of its beauty. The art of mending what’s broken using gold lacquer is what the Japanese call ‘Kintsugi.’
But Kintsugi isn’t just a technique or method to repair broken pottery; there’s a profound philosophy behind it. At the heart of its practice, Kintsugi is concerned with things like the appreciation of imperfection, the acceptance of transience, and the cherishing of things that have been broken and scarred. Through these underlying philosophical ideas, Kintsugi becomes a metaphor for how we approach our lives and makes us wonder how our attitudes toward life’s perceived flaws could change for the better.
After all, looking at this contemporary inclination toward self-enhancement and flawlessness, aren’t we living in a society obsessed with perfection? Moreover, isn’t our general response to what’s “broken” to throw it away instead of trying to fix it (let alone appreciate its brokenness)? Aren’t we preoccupied with hiding our scars instead of wearing them with dignity? But questioning our attitudes toward flaws, brokenness, and imperfection becomes even more interesting if we apply it to our lives.
Most of us carry the weight of the past, including scars (sometimes visible) we’ve obtained along the way. And even in the present day, the brokenness of our lives may be apparent, and our ‘screwed-upness,’ so to speak, weaved into the fabric of our being. The ravages of time leave an imprint: scars, cracks, and seams of continual damage and repair. And, more than often, we try to hide these imperfections. Kintsugi doesn’t hide the history of brokenness; it accentuates it, making it a feature of beauty rather than something to put out of sight.
This video explores the Japanese concept of Kintsugi and how a screwed-up, broken life can be beautiful, and I’ll give you a small tour of my hometown to illustrate the philosophy behind this concept. Kintsugi means “golden joinery” in Japanese. According to historians, the idea originated in the late 15th century as an alternative to repairing pottery using metal staples.
It’s commonly believed that when the shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa broke his favorite tea bowl, he was displeased by the inelegant repairs (using metal staples) and thus ordered the artisans to think of a better solution. And so they decided to use gold lacquer, an idea that gave birth to the practice of Kintsugi. The shift from using metal staples to gold lacquer was more than just a matter of aesthetics.
The approach caused a revolution regarding how we look at damage and repair. Instead of seeing something broken as useless and valueless, Kintsugi allows us to view the fractures as another chapter in the object’s life. The golden seams narrate its resilience and the object’s history, namely, that it has been broken. We could say that through this event, the object gained character: it endured hardship and now wears its scars proudly and beautifully.
Kintsugi also overlaps with other Japanese philosophical concepts, which we’ll explore later in this video. The art of Kintsugi has developed over time and spread outside of Japan, inspiring philosophers and artists all around the world. Kintsugi touches on several themes, like the appeal of brokenness and healing, respecting the past, and how flaws can actually increase value and beauty instead of destroying it. Hence, Kintsugi-styled pottery has become immensely popular over the years.
But… Enough with Kintsugi’s history already. It’s time to reflect on this concept as a philosophy and way of looking at the world, using a curious example close to my heart and exploring related philosophical ideas. The philosophy of Kintsugi revolves around embracing imperfections instead of disguising them. A world obsessed with flawlessness and perfection generally considers broken things less valuable than what’s whole and undamaged.
Defects are unwanted; damages are frowned upon as signs of deficiency. But Kintsugi teaches us that breaks, cracks, and scars aren’t marks of shame but a testimony of transformation, resilience, and life’s natural course. Here’s my hometown. A city of around 200,000 inhabitants in the Netherlands called Tilburg. The Dutch have generally considered this industrial city one of the country’s ugliest cities, mainly due to its many factories and the lack of an appealing historical center, which you’ll find in neighboring cities, Breda and Den Bosch.
Dutch cities that people consider beautiful have typical features like a city wall, canals, typical Dutch houses, and a cathedral as a landmark; this package (the more intact and preserved, the better) constitutes an appealing Dutch city. But Tilburg doesn’t have all that. It’s a city formed out of several villages, hence the lack of a historical center. It revolved around the textile industry, which collapsed in the eighties, leaving a trail of ugly, empty factory buildings and workers’ houses no one wanted to live in.
Aside from being a hub for the textile industry, Tilburg had a train maintenance yard covering a significant area behind the central station, which slowly turned into a mysterious, secluded ghost city as the operations declined. Hence, in the second decade of this millennium, Tilburg had another abandoned industrial area to deal with; this time, a very big one. So, what did they do? Instead of removing and replacing the decayed factory buildings with something entirely new, they decided to preserve and refurbish these old buildings and give them new functions.
This huge train hall became a building for festivities; this factory building became a food court; this old trainset became a restaurant; this train depot became a park, and this immense barn became a library and was even picked as the world’s best building by the World Architecture Festival in 2019. As biased as I am, being a born Tilburgian, I’m kind of proud of how my city, the ugly duckling, didn’t try to be the next Breda or Den Bosch but entirely owned its ugly sides and turned them into its greatest strength.
Instead of removing the shards of the past, it picked them up and glued them together. It never gave up its rawness, and the scars of the city’s industrial past, the decay, the abandonment, are still visible in which its beauty lies. The Tilburgian way of mending what’s damaged, old, and broken, turning it into something beautiful, is Kintsugi put into practice.
One of the underlying ideas of Kintsugi is the concept of wabi-sabi, casually explained as ‘perfect imperfection.’ Wabi-sabi entails the appreciation of the imperfection of things, touched by time and subject to the whims of nature. Old pottery, for example, tells us a story. There might be signs of wear and tear that indicate its history. When the method of Kintsugi is applied, the cracks accentuated by gold lacquer highlight the fact that it had been broken and repaired.
The same goes for my yellow suitcase, which was spotless when I bought it but now shows damage, which indicates that it has visited nine countries and boarded many airplanes. And isn’t the same true for people’s faces, whose wrinkles and scars speak to us as if they try to tell us many life stories, experiences, and pearls of wisdom that make them so remarkable? There’s something to what’s broken, decayed, imperfect.
The idea that it stood the test of time, endured the forces of nature, and was a quiet observer of an everchanging environment and that probably many people touched, used, and possibly even cherished it makes the thing in question ever so more captivating. In a previous video about wabi-sabi, I quoted the Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius, who described the beauty of decay in his meditations: “We should remember that even Nature’s inadvertence has its own charm, its own attractiveness. The way loaves of bread split open on top in the oven; the ridges are just by-products of the baking, and yet pleasing, somehow: they rouse our appetite without our knowing why. Or how ripe figs begin to burst. And olives on the point of falling: the shadow of decay gives them a peculiar beauty.”
Another Japanese concept that touches on the practice of Kintsugi is mono no aware. Mono no aware can be loosely translated as an “empathy for things,” specifically the transience of these things. “Hey, even the Mona Lisa is falling apart,” said Tyler Durden after the narrator lost a tooth. Such a simple statement is pretty profound, reminding us that even things we consider timeless and everlasting will eventually disappear. The art of Kintsugi, therefore, serves as another reminder of the impermanence of things; that pottery, like everything else, is subjected as much to the creative as the destructive forces of fate.
Things come and go. The tide never stops coming in. All that came to be will be destroyed. In the case of Kintsugi, pottery gets created and breaks, which serves as a metaphor for all things existing. A certain visceral beauty arises in things or situations when we realize they’ll eventually come to an end. The awareness of transience, the uniqueness of that very thing at that very moment, increases our appreciation for it. After all, it’s fleeting, and the time to be in its presence is short.
Aside from appreciating what’s fleeting, mono no aware indicates the gentle sadness evoked by the passing of things. I experienced this very lucidly years ago when I transitioned from one life phase to another, lying in the woods at the edge of the city on a late summer afternoon in September, imagining all the summers of festivities and drunken, merry nights in the town center, the many fleeting social connections and heartbreak; events dissolved mainly at the hands of time, but still echoing in the far distant sky above the trees.
There’s something beautiful about events (both good and bad) turning into memories, slowly fading into the obscurity of our minds. Something like a song or smell evokes such memories, many of which are painful yet forming an irreplaceable part of one’s life symphony. These painful recollections, these bouts of nostalgia, these longings for what has been, are the a-minors, the polyrhythms, and the raw, unintended emotion of the vocalist’s voice.
So, when we think of it, what constitutes beauty? Is it the good or the bad? Or is it both? Isn’t tragedy what eventually creates genuine beauty? Just imagine being a broken vase that still has a life to live. How would you go about this? Would you spend the rest of your life trying to be ‘whole’ by disguising the cracks and bruises? Would you just lay there in pieces, waiting for someone to wipe you up and throw you in the bin?
Or would you embrace your cracks and other imperfections and wear them with dignity as they show an authentic you, telling a story not of someone perfect but of someone who has lived? After the terrorist attacks on 9/11, a significant debate regarding the future of ground zero occurred. Developer Larry Silverstein, who had a lease for the World Trade Center complex, emphasized rebuilding the destroyed commercial office space.
He even considered rebuilding the Twin Towers as exact replicas, which would restore the wound without scars as if nothing ever occurred. But over time, parties agreed that a memorial and rebuilding should be combined, resulting in the 9/11 Memorial and Museum along with new skyscrapers, including One World Trade Center, also known as the Freedom Tower. I traveled to New York City quite recently. After visiting the 9/11 Memorial, I realized that it quite echoes the philosophy of Kintsugi.
These shots I took show the voids left by the Twin Towers. They’re represented by two pools with water pouring into a seemingly bottomless pit. Around these voids, the names of every person who died in the attacks are inscribed. So, the scars weren’t erased but embraced and turned into a powerful landmark. This memorial, along with the One World Trade Center (which reaches even higher than the original towers), we can see as the gold lacquer that signals renewal and resilience while accentuating and even embellishing the scars.
Once a vibrant commercial center, the scars of its destruction became a site for remembrance, solidarity, strength, and the city’s enduring spirit. The site has a story to tell, a highly significant part of the nation’s history, an event that changed the world forever. Visiting this site caused me goosebumps. We can find beauty in scars. As Tyler Durden stated: “I don’t want to die without any scars. Only after disaster can we be resurrected.”
And, as Marcus Aurelius described, there’s attractiveness in nature’s carelessness, the way it lets her creations decay and be damaged by fate. The brokenness of our lives by the merciless whims of Fortune, the crushing of dreams, the many unexpected tragedies, and how it, as voiced by Schopenhauer, “promised so much and then performed so little” more than often disturbs us. Then we look back over the ravaged wastelands we call our personal histories, comparing them to the enthralling expectations of the future we had when we were still young before we stepped off the precipice into adulthood, and think: “Well, this isn’t how I imagined it to be.”
Having wrestled ourselves through the chaos of time left scars, which may be the wrinkles around the eyes, a weathered face, or perhaps a missing limp due to war. But often, these scars lie within us, in our physiology, in our addictions, in how we think, or hide from our fellow humans, and react emotionally. So, what do we do with all this brokenness? Do we discard the ruins of our past simply as a faulty, screwed-up, wasted life?
Do we consider a traumatic, tragic past as something hideous that should be forever obscure, covered by a thick layer of ‘as-it-should-be?’ Or do we dare to embrace it, and even see the beauty in it, and use it as a source of resilience and personal growth? And can we let our scars become our strengths, using them as pathways to healing, testaments of experience, challenges to overcome, and doors to empathy and compassion toward those with a similar fate or, as Schopenhauer called them, our “fellow sufferers?” Isn’t it the pinnacle of beauty to not only mend our own brokenness but also use it to uplift others?
So, can a screwed-up, broken life be beautiful? I think it can, although it may not be for everyone, and it probably depends on one’s personal situation. From the symbolic viewpoint of Kintsugi, it depends on how we treat the shards, whether or not we can and will make something beautiful out of them. Or perhaps… reparation isn’t even necessary for our cracks and scars to shine. Simply reflecting on life’s adversity, not as valueless but as setbacks and tears strung together by a golden thread, might be enough to see its allure.
But, I guess, at the end of the day, beauty lies in the eye of the beholder. So, what do you think? Do you resonate with the concept of finding beauty in brokenness? And do you have personal experiences that echo the underlying philosophical ideas of Kintsugi? Please let us know in the comment section. Thank you for watching.