Aesthetic conservatism

making a style constraints list

Take 10 steps every time I say ‘constraints,’ and you’ll come thank me later, for I’d have helped you raise your step count significantly by the end of this piece.

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Have you played with clay pieces as a child? One that can beautifully adapt itself to moulds, form new colours by fusing two different ones, and turn into incredible art forms and sculptures, that served as the best source of entertainment, etched a sense of achievement in that child, and now spews a scent of nostalgia. Now, just close your eyes for a second and picture your personality be clay-ey - adaptable, cute, colourful, ever-changing, innovative and…. stiff. Yes, stiff.

Clay bodies must have a correct stiffness in order to optimize the forming process. Great effort is expended in the body mixing departments of factories to produce a product of standard stiffness and plasticity. [Source]

It’s funny how even a material known for its malleability also needs to carry stiffness and remember its original form underneath.

Constraints coated with insecurity

In an attempt to build that rigid base on top of which I can build my creative castle, I have time and again resorted to making constraints out of insecurity. I used to tell myself I didn’t like taking pictures for one. Somewhere beneath the facade that said ‘oh, I like to be in the present, you see, I’m just not the kind to take pictures,’ there also rested an insecurity that worried about how I didn’t look good. That self-doubt wouldn’t share face time with me as much as the ‘logical narrative’ would, and so my delusional self was operating normally until I asked myself a ‘why’ on a late night.

As someone who’s been a long-time member of this psychosis, I have considerable years of experience struggling with control and conservatism, where I restrict myself from doing something because I’ve profiled myself as a person who does not do that/ does things a certain way. This is all the more worrisome because, if you’re restricting yourself, it’s also likely that the self-set judgements extend to the people close by. By constraining yourself, you’re also limiting the people around you. Anything that’s to do with setting a discipline that constricts you more than enabling you, a job that gives you mental health issues more than paying your rent, a diet that leaves you unhappy more than healthy - needs to see out of the aesthetically conservative room.

Stylistic choices: a list

You wanna build stiffness, not a base out of an aluminium container that needs a foundry to melt itself every time you wanna change as a person. You don’t wanna fuse your moral, religious, and intellectual learnings in a set and call it your aesthetic constraints. It just needs to be easy.

It needs to be a skill.md for yourself that lists the smallest, most consistent nuances of yourself: your colors, shapes, decors, sounds, and habits, and anything that births from these. (forgive me for the AI metaphor)

It needs to represent you, your character, and all the things that you enjoy. It needs to enable you, reduce your decision fatigue, make your life easy, and genuinely be so malleable that you don’t bite yourself to change it. It should speak for your style, as Steph Ango puts it. It should be weird. Be you.

Here’s a constraint list I made for myself because I was bored at a work event, and I thought I could do magic with a pen and paper:

1/ I write my journals with a black Pentonix pen only, on an A5 factor notes notebook, 150 GSM or more.
2/ I write a foreword and an afterword on my articles to set a context and let go of it after.

3/ I wear the same clothes to all my races: A black top and shorts.
4/ When I’m wired in, and I’m reading, it’s always the rain sounds playing.
5/ I brainstorm with lists.
6/ My preferred way of talking, writing, and texting is always in points, and I number them in either of these ways: 1/ or 1-
7/ I voice my Substack articles (most of them)
8/ I’d like to use a lot of words where fewer words can be used.

9/ I write my 15-minute sprints on freewrite to vent.

10/ I store all my screenshots (work/personal) under a folder ‘pixels I’d like to see again.’

I spoke to a couple of my friends after I made this list, and the variety of aesthetic choices that people have genuinely amused me. They were about the choice of people, clothes, electronic devices, work ethics, fonts, perfumes, movie choices, and even their preferred choice of drink and cookie during a celebration.

These constraints are a transmutable set of choices that can manifest themselves across places, people, and regardless of your mood. Nobody’s gonna kill (let’s call this friend J) J if he’s gonna stop drinking beer with a mango-pineapple cookie on the side after his running PBs, but it would still be etched in history that he was an aesthetic weirdo.

Here are some aesthetic constraints I’ve found across the internet:

1/ Nikola Tesla was so obsessed with numbers 3, 6 and 9 that he only stayed in hotel rooms with room numbers divisible by 3.
2/ Murakami wakes up at 4 AM and writes for 5 to 6 hours and then runs 10k every day to charge his writing brain up.
3/ A Kalamkari textile print is washed exactly 20 times before the print is sundried.
4/ Warli painting, an Indian traditional tribal folk art, only has red and white colours in its paintings.
5/ Paithani sarees from Maharashtra enforce a motif constraint: the peacock must appear in the pallu: the trailing part of a sari.

6/ Serena Williams’s pre- serve ritual is to bounce the ball exactly 5 times.

This list is inspired by Steph Ango's own list of style constraints.

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Is it just me, or is it an amazing conversation to have with friends and just people in general to get to know them through their aesthetic constraints? The weirder the list gets, the more things you have to talk about. I think it’s a super fun experiment, I’m off to try it.

[Source]

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Alright, that’s my time now. I’ve wanted to write about this for a long while now. To be precise, from the 12th of February as says my draft. I’ve been trying to accommodate so many new things in life and that naturally coagulates with my old habits and thought processes. So, until I meet you in the upcoming (newer and far more interesting) episodes of our living fantasy — eat healthy, talk to your friends and mom, take cold showers, and don’t forget to make an aesthetic constraint list for yourself!

Bye

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