My intro to aesthetics

I was trying to respond to a question about what I thought has made real world impact. I realized that this was entirely dependent on my definition of impact, it required me to value/assign impact to all of the things in my life & the world.

I thought about how things happen and searched for the origin of different ideas & actions. I thought about political movements, objects I've purchased, and things I do for leisure. I thought about how music has a huge role in regulating my energy across days. Is music important? I realized that what I meant by impact was basically anything that affected how you lived. The question of how are we supposed to live has been stuck in my head for a while now, and so coming back to that point was interesting. I looked up the definition of aesthetics which was concerned with beauty or the appreciation of beauty. I realized that defining aesthetics & making them livable was the challenge of our time.

Beauty standards govern us all

The question of "good" & "bad" is really just about relation to beauty, wherever its consensus stands. Anything that has an affect on humanity's interpretation of beauty is something worth considering when debating measures of "impact."

In measuring impact, I realized that simply having the idea for beauty does not mean anyone will feel it, let alone have a chance to live by it. That helped me think about the different ways people create change:

There are 2 special roles that appear in this breakdown, The Designer, & the Distributor. The Designer is powerful because they "touch everything" across visual & descriptive mediums. The Distributor is special because of the role they play in defining access.

What are things that caused impact?

Iphone, Chat GPT, Amazon, Virgil, Covid, Trump, Fortnite, TikTok, Speed, Venture capital, Elon, K-pop

The act of defining is sometimes all thats needed to make something livable. The net-new awareness unlocks behavior. Other times, more effort is needed to make the concept tangible + interactive. For example:

[*] song lyrics like llainwire "you met shorty on hinge" → I don't use dating apps

[*] apple ad from mars talk → demonstrating a new lifestyle

[*] Karl Marx theory → Lenin putting into practice

[*] ai research → chat gpt company + interface

What do you value?

"Value" is determined by some subjective measure of things such as lifespan, # of ppl impacted, magnitude of impact, direction of impact