How can the experience of beauty change you for the better?
It seems like to me that one of the single biggest life changing emotions one can feel is the feeling of witnessing something beautiful. It doesn’t matter as much what is beautiful, and for the sake of the discussion we will say beauty is subjective, but that intense forms of subjective beauty all bring the same emotions to humans. To stress this, humans are all interconnected by these same emotions towards beauty even if it means different things cause those emotions. The journey and the destination could both have different amount of beauty attributed to them by different people, so it’s tough to say one over the other has more significance.
It is worth taking into account that these shared emotions about beauty isn’t just subjected to, say, just your friends or families. These emotions transcend borders, and what you feel about a love letter from a significant other could be the same feeling someone twenty years older than you is feeling on the other side of the world. I think humanity could be seen in humans more if this realization, which shouldn’t be much of a revelation, was put further in the front rows of the minds of everyone. It seems to me this would make a kinder world in general and the aspect of beauty could be at the forefront of this change.
This type of interconnectedness and sense of common grounds for humans could go very far, whether it be pushing someone out of their comfort zone or giving them motivation to weather the storm. Beauty could be the ultimate motivator and the positive feedback people could get from feeling emotions invoked by beautiful things. If you’re going to have a life full of uninspiring, miserable things, chances are you’re not going to feel good in any sense. This same concept could be applied to an opposite life inspired by beauty. If one’s focal point is to see experiences beautiful things and the emotions that come with them, perhaps even the worst situations could be overcome by a wave of good feelings associated with beauty. I am unsure if this could be introduced by some kind of ‘beauty classes’ in grade schools which help students hone into what they think is beautiful and allows them to healthily explore it. It seems like something like that would lead to a more happy population. Of course, it wouldn’t just have to be for the next generation; it would make sense anyone could go with the ‘pursuit of beauty’ mindset.
