What I love about art: music, movies, literature, all of that stuff. Music is the art form that appeals to me the most, the highest fidelity to human emotion. This page has my thoughts on art as well as my music.
The 20%
I want my life to be 20% about personal fulfillment and 80% about helping the world. I'm someone who feels happy very easily. My average happiness is almost always a 9 or a 10, as long as I feel socially fulfilled and have friends around me. Without that, it drops pretty quick. So I don't need to spend all of my time on my personal fulfillment, and what do I do with the extra time? Help the world. That's what brings me to the 80-20 principle for my life.
Exploring the different parts of consciousness is very important to me. That does not mean having every experience. If you have a guitar, the goal is not to learn how to play every single song in the world. That's impossible, and it will make you miserable. The goal is to play all six strings, and the greatest chords, a few times. It's the same with life.
There's a short film called The Butterfly Circus, about a man with no arms and no legs. Whole areas of experience are simply closed to him, and he could spend his whole life miserable about the ones he will never have. But the best thing he can do is go as wide as he can inside everything that is open to him, and that is the most fulfilling life there is. The purpose is to live the most enriching life you can within the constraints you were born into.
Some things I really like to do:
Music
You can listen to music for the beats and the melodies, just feeling the vibe, or you can listen to the lyrics and deeply feel them. Everyone does some of both. I do much more of the second. And my favourite songs are usually associated with people: people I deeply care about, memories, parts of my life, emotions I felt for different people. I think that's very beautiful.
Listening to lyrics will open up a world of possibilities. The best songwriters compress a whole life into a few lines. Some songs show you a part of consciousness you would never have seen otherwise. Guilty as Sin? by Taylor Swift, for example, is about the feeling of being in a relationship yet thinking about someone else, feeling guilty about it, being in denial, and doing it anyway. Inside your own head you're telling yourself it doesn't mean anything, since you're not taking any real actions. That's awesome. You get to feel something you may never live.
Some of my favourite artists:
Taylor Swift has taught me a lot of what good songwriting is: how to use metaphors, how to speak in concrete terms, how to say things without saying the thing. Often that's what the art of good taste is. cardigan, Guilty as Sin?, right where you left me.
Bleachers I love because instead of writing about breakups, they write about what makes relationships beautiful, and in a way that isn't selfish, it's giving. Ordinary Heaven is about how it's ordinary, and it's one of the most beautiful experiences in life, just wanting to witness your partner. There's a song where a man is repeatedly getting punched in the face, drenched in the rain, about to get hit by a car, but at the end of the day his partner is there for him back home. And the saxophone in Bleachers songs has so much texture, it makes them sound like nothing else. Me Before You, you and forever.
The 1975 are angsty. It's not the way I see the world, but you get to be really angsty and understand how Matty's brain operates. And it's sonically so beautiful, it just sounds so good. Love It If We Made It is one of my favourites, and About You.
John Mayer brought back my passion for the electric guitar, and his was the first concert that brought tears to my eyes. Slow Dancing in a Burning Room, Gravity, Edge of Desire.
I make some music myself, covers and originals, down below.
Movies
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind beautifully dives into the feelings. It lets you sit in them and see all the memories. It is deeply emotional, really.
Interstellar is the first movie that made me cry. It's not only scientifically accurate and makes sense, but the relationship between the father and his daughter is so human, and the stakes are so high.
Ram-Leela is just a beautiful telling of Shakespeare. You feel so steeped in the culture of India, and it's so visually beautiful, it's just incredible. It's a movie where you can see the romantic tension very clearly, and it's really nice.
My Octopus Teacher is about a man who goes scuba diving and meets an octopus. Octopuses are typically very elusive, but they become close, and you can see the octopus trust him. Then you see the octopus's whole life cycle: the emotions it goes through, how it acts when predators attack it, and finally when it reproduces and dies in a programmed way. It really showed me a picture of the nature of what humans are, and how we're not too different from an octopus or any other animal.
On taste
Everything I've learned about how to have incredible taste comes down to this: you have to be very concrete. Never say things in a way that sounds generic, in a way where people see it and go "oh, I already knew this." It has to be concrete, and the conclusions should always be inferred, never stated. Being concrete evokes very vivid imagery, and that vivid imagery is what makes people so much more invested.
And taste is not about ability, it's about proclivity. Once you feel an affinity towards artistic things, you start paying more attention, you get more exposed, and you develop great taste. So pay attention to the writing that makes you feel deeply. Think more deeply about other people's emotions. Notice the art you love, and ask yourself why you love it. And embody it. Dress better. Make the things around you beautiful. Taste builds much faster when you live it, not just admire it.
I also do music!
Here's my youtube channel, around 20,000 subscribers with millions of views. I post covers and original music there.
Listen to my tracks and all the ones I'm featured in on Spotify.