The Answer To Life Is Not 42, It Is In the Pixels
Tim Urban once wrote that “Life is a Picture, But You Live in a Pixel”, which I find to be quite poetic. By this thought experiment, the emotion attached each action and each day is but an inkling in a rich picture depicting an epic story of humanity (image from Tim’s original article).
At the macro level, a life well lived might contain broad strokes of green and yellow and purple. An unhappy life may end up strewn with brown and red and black splotches.
At the micro level, aka the present, the broad strokes of life (the decades, years, weeks, days, and hours) are unpacked into tiny pixels of emotion constantly dotting the canvas. Here’s how Tim depicts the present:
I find this concept of pixellating life fascinating and wholly optimistic. What are a few deeply dark moments in the context of an existence filled with brightness? While terrible to go through, those dark patches are likely to provide a stark contrast to the viewer, making the brightness even more vivid and precious and beautiful.
Ok, Kram, Let’s Start Getting to the Point
What Urban has created is the “Pixel Equation”:
If Picture = Life
And Pixels = Emotions
Emotions x Seconds* = Life
(*seconds are each slices of the present, with each passing second representing a previous present)
The Pixel Equation is a concept allowing humans to break down their “me”-ness into small, bite-sized portions. In the context of a whole-life, it is easiest, according to Urban, to dot the canvas with the vivid saturation of emotion.
This is awesome, but also limiting. Life and overall “me”-ness is not just the emotions we feel. It is also the people we hang out with (see: you are the average of your five closest friends rule), the things we decide to ingest (see: you are what you eat), and, of course, what we do when nobody is watching (see: golden rule).
By this perspective, the “Pixel Equation” can be extrapolated into almost an endless subset of categories, wherein in a bunch of small things end up making a whole.
Which is where pop culture can come in.
Let’s Pixelate Personal Pop Culture
Last blog, we came to the conclusion that “pop culture is all about niches” — meaning that pop culture has turned away from a monolithic piece of machinery dependent on a few large media organizations and has transformed into an ever changing polylith churning with vitriol and whimsy to keep apace with the passions of the internet era.
To summarize, pop culture is (a somewhat obscure) conglomerate of exactly what the internet is interested in at this very moment.
Thankfully, this definition works at two levels (if it didn’t, then it would be a shitty definition):
it works as general definition for pop culture as “this is what pop culture is for everyone in existence.”
it is also works the definition of pop culture at the level of “I am an individual and I have different interests that change by the day and the snapshot of my niches is how I experience pop culture”
It is this second portion that we are interested in today, as we now know that we can utilize the Pixel Equation to break something big into something smaller.
In essence, through the Pixel Equation, I think Pop Culture at the personal level can be broken down into a canvas of color. The idea is that each piece of content you identify with at the pop cultural level most likely carries with it an emotional vibe. For example, if your favorite artist is Greenday, that has an angsty vibe, which, on the pixellation scale would come out as red. On the other hand, if your favorite niche interest is walking grandmas across the street, that would come off on the pixellation scale as green.
The overall emotional vibe of your pop culture intake is, therefore, your current snapshot of pop-culture — meaning if you are post break-up, your pop culture intake will probably be dark reddish and if you are post-raise, your pop culture intake will probably be a bright greenish.
Here’s what it a pixellated pop culture thingy would look like in the context of Kram:
Conclusion
Have I written enough for a conclusion here? Probably not. This is a bit of a stretch of logic, to go from Tim Urban to the Pixel Equation to Pop Culture to Emotionalizing the Vibes of Pop Culture. Lots of premises and not enough set up, I know — but it was fun to write and that’s all that matters.
Anyways, I’m done writing for the day.
I’m not re-reading this or editing, so let’s just all pretend that all logical fallacies and typos are entirely on purpose and have a hidden meaning.
- Kram
P.S — if you want to mess around with your own pop culture pixels, here’s the doc: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/12v0dR6Ul08ZdtzjQs7qRsroR1isSGhOo7nbQIiQSoKQ/edit?usp=sharing