In particular, gaining a new form of beauty mostly makes my life feel nicer, whereas gaining a new form of disgust increases the unpleasantness
This resonates for me, and I sometimes end up with an ‘ignorance is bliss’ attitude toward the latter.
~~~
I gained some ability to see systemization as beautiful. My sense of hufflepuff beauty became more nuanced and caveated.
Can you say more about this? Did this aesthetic shift feel good/bad/neutral, either in the moment or upon reflection? I have such shifts occasionally, and it sometimes makes me feel...tired. Like I just get weary at the thought of permanently increasing the amount of nuance that I track. Rereading the excerpt, I feel like some part of me is insisting that adding nuance and caveats is costly and unsustainable.
Hmm, I mostly see the nuance as rich/positive. (there might be some sort of meta-aesthetic-preference here that could also be updated based on facts).
Anecdote: when I went to university studying Computer Animation, one of the things I studied was how to render images with realistic lighting. In the process of doing that, I came to be able to notice lots of things about lighting and surface-texture in my environment, which made them both more beautiful, and beautiful in a wider variety of ways.
There are some cases where I add nuance to something, and the nuance mostly comes in the form of “I need to grieve over a particular type of beauty I thought I had.” (For example, I think the sort of person who wants a hufflepuff aesthetic that doesn’t require them to have backbone and to have to watch out / protect themselves, will have to grieve over something precious being lost). But, in this case I think I mostly saw it as deepening my understanding of something, rather than giving something up.
This resonates for me, and I sometimes end up with an ‘ignorance is bliss’ attitude toward the latter.
~~~
Can you say more about this? Did this aesthetic shift feel good/bad/neutral, either in the moment or upon reflection? I have such shifts occasionally, and it sometimes makes me feel...tired. Like I just get weary at the thought of permanently increasing the amount of nuance that I track. Rereading the excerpt, I feel like some part of me is insisting that adding nuance and caveats is costly and unsustainable.
Hmm, I mostly see the nuance as rich/positive. (there might be some sort of meta-aesthetic-preference here that could also be updated based on facts).
Anecdote: when I went to university studying Computer Animation, one of the things I studied was how to render images with realistic lighting. In the process of doing that, I came to be able to notice lots of things about lighting and surface-texture in my environment, which made them both more beautiful, and beautiful in a wider variety of ways.
There are some cases where I add nuance to something, and the nuance mostly comes in the form of “I need to grieve over a particular type of beauty I thought I had.” (For example, I think the sort of person who wants a hufflepuff aesthetic that doesn’t require them to have backbone and to have to watch out / protect themselves, will have to grieve over something precious being lost). But, in this case I think I mostly saw it as deepening my understanding of something, rather than giving something up.