As a society, it seems that we’ve become obsessed with preservation. We venture out into the world with our digital cameras and video recorders and seek to capture precious moments to keep forever, like a civilization of lepidopterologists wielding nets and chasing butterflies to pin up in our cases back home. To be sure, even in motionless death, the fragility and brilliant coloration of some of those creatures is still quite beautiful. However, their true brilliance is only fully appreciated as they effortlessly waft along through the air against a backdrop of open flowers, seeking places to land and feed for a few moments before resuming their journeys.

Our dead butterflies, our pictures and videos, serve and should be viewed as merely imperfect reminders of the true beauty of a real experience, yet they’ve slowly supplanted reality in a flurry of brighter colors, sharper sounds, and manufactured aesthetics. The true essence of something beautiful is held in its spontaneity and fleeting nature. Take the sunset, for example. While a photograph of a brilliant sunset may be enough to take one’s breath away, that feeling pales in comparison to the experience of seeing those colors gradually stain the blue horizon, seeing them deepen and grow, and then watching as the whole scene fades to black. Knowing that you will only see something once, that your experience with it is limited and soon to end, is cause for a much deeper appreciation; a feeling of which many have all but lost track.

Holding onto that feeling of appreciation and nurturing the ability to not only accept, but also cherish, the temporary and ever changing nature of things is extremely important for understanding and fully embracing the essence of human nature. The human experience as a whole is a temporary flicker of beauty, with each new life added to the canvas of human history as a single, brief brushstroke. In a world where more and more things are preserved with increasing perfection, where the existence of pictures and video allow us to see people and places as they were rather than as they are, we fail to appreciate things as they happen and become increasingly obsessed with the past rather than the things that are happening right now. It’s always been human nature to sit around and discuss the glory days of years past and to pine for the loss of one’s youth, but now it’s almost as if those days aren’t truly gone.

Mass media recognized the trend long ago and began to profit heavily from the fact that people love seeing things from their childhood (i.e. anything on VH1 that starts with “I love the…”), and film and television are rife with biopics of recent celebrities as well as sequels to and remakes of old shows and movies (in an aside here, it’s interesting to note that the film industry is barely a century old and there’s already a frequent need to repeat itself in order to keep audiences interested). Music, as well, has hit a period of stagnancy. Though many argue that there are groups out there creating sounds that are both good and fresh, such music is not being heard by or broadcast to the mass market for the most part. Even if it was being put out there, there is a huge portion of the listening audience that prefers to hear the same songs and artists that have already been on the radio for many years. Of the list of the top 25 highest grossing tours of 2010, eleven of those acts have been performing for over twenty years (two more, the Dave Matthews Band and Tim McGraw, are also close to that mark, with the former having been formed in 1991 and the latter releasing his debut album in 1992). There are only four artists on the list who’ve debuted within the last three years: Lady Gaga coming in at number 4 on the list, Taylor Swift at 15th, Justin Bieber at 19th, and Miley Cyrus at 22nd. That said, those four are hardly groundbreaking artists musically, with the majority of their material derived from rehashing previously successful pop and country music. Even Lady Gaga’s performance art antics are all homages to other performers of years gone by.

What it comes down to is that people know they’re going to like something that they’ve heard or seen before and already liked; by extension, the film, television, and music industries play to that concept. Unless someone has already been extremely successful with a prior project, in order to push something new, a person or group needs to come out and demonstrate that they can generate their own buzz and following. Otherwise, producers and studio executives feel far more comfortable pushing a product already known to have appeal. In the music community especially, as a result of the combination of that attitude trickling down from the top and the transparent desires of the listening community as a whole, many new artists will move in a direction that will lead toward success as opposed to innovation (a.k.a.”selling out”). It takes something truly extraordinary, bold, and fortuitous at this point to break through that pressure barrier.

To return to the matter at the heart of this, people have come to take for granted that if they want to hear something again, they just click on the song and listen. In a sense, it’s related to the old adage that “absence makes the heart grow fonder”. When something’s not always around, you grow to appreciate it more while it’s there. Conversely, the more commonplace and accessible something is, the more you begin to take it for granted. Music, at this point, has become abstracted into an ever-present background to life, and there’s no need to experience anything new if you don’t desire to do so: each person is solely in charge of the music that they take in. Services like Pandora and Last.fm have made great strides in exposing people to new music that they never would have encountered otherwise, yet they still pander to that concept that people like what they’ve already heard, with each service carefully engineered to match the next song with the listener’s sensibilities. In a very real way, the wealth of music that’s available at all times is hurting the creative ebb and flow of music as an art form by not challenging the public to experience new sounds, as well as by cultivating a lack of appreciation for the actual beauty and intricacy of what is being heard. After all, a note on its own is much like that picture of a sunset: it can be beautiful to a certain extent, but its real beauty and power is derived from the context in which one finds it.

Setting aside the gradual tide of evolution, humanity never changes very much overall. At a basic level, the needs, wants, desires, fears, and emotions experienced today have been around as long as humans have, though as language and technology have grown and flourished, we’ve consistently come up with new ways to view and express ourselves and our perceptions of the human condition. As it stands, our technology has now evolved to the point that we have created an artificial memory bank; rather than sifting back through our thoughts to call up a hazy ball of sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and feelings associated with a past event, we can actually sit down and experience it again through our pictures and movies. While this is an incredible feat, it’s important to realize that they remain only memories. Life is still just as fluid and transient as it ever has been, and beauty will always be most profound in the spontaneous instants between when it comes into being and when it fades away into memory.

Honor the past, embrace the future, cherish the now.