I don’t think the focus here should be only on suffering. Sometimes, I seek out art/media that depicts human flourishing, out of a desire to increase my altruistic motivation by reminding myself just what it is that we’re working to protect + create.
Obviously a ton of art/media contains “people being happy,” but when I’m looking for this, I look specifically for depictions of people who are very different from each other and from me, that show these people as being unique and weird and not at all how you thought they would be. Good examples are the tv show High Maintenance and the documentary In Jackson Heights. It’s a certain aesthetic that increases my altruistic motivation because it reminds me, by showing me more of it than I normally see, of what a vast expanse human experience really is.
(For animals, it’s more socially acceptable to just watch them intently for long periods of time.)
The novel “A Thousand Splendid Suns” was an example of this for me—depicting how people could have meaningful lives and happiness despite terrible circumstances, which I found really unintuitive beforehand. (I’m wary of generalizing from fictional evidence but it seems not totally crazy to treat this as a window on what other people can at least imagine experiencing.)
I don’t think the focus here should be only on suffering. Sometimes, I seek out art/media that depicts human flourishing, out of a desire to increase my altruistic motivation by reminding myself just what it is that we’re working to protect + create.
Obviously a ton of art/media contains “people being happy,” but when I’m looking for this, I look specifically for depictions of people who are very different from each other and from me, that show these people as being unique and weird and not at all how you thought they would be. Good examples are the tv show High Maintenance and the documentary In Jackson Heights. It’s a certain aesthetic that increases my altruistic motivation because it reminds me, by showing me more of it than I normally see, of what a vast expanse human experience really is.
(For animals, it’s more socially acceptable to just watch them intently for long periods of time.)
The novel “A Thousand Splendid Suns” was an example of this for me—depicting how people could have meaningful lives and happiness despite terrible circumstances, which I found really unintuitive beforehand. (I’m wary of generalizing from fictional evidence but it seems not totally crazy to treat this as a window on what other people can at least imagine experiencing.)