I found out that I don’t measure any cuteness in my head. That is to say I have never seen a baby thing and had a feeling inside me to coo at it. Nor have I ever seen something cute and fluffy and wanted to cuddle it because it was cute and fluffy.
Now I can look at these two pictures and see one is “cute” and the other is a tree.
It’s not rocket science to be able to work out what other people find cute and then just build a rule like,
Baby things fit into the category of cute. Caricatures and small versions of bigger things can sometimes be cute.
And voila – cuteness camouflage. Trouble is that nothing actually seems cute to me. No small humans, no small animals, no insects, no creatures or pictures at all. Nothing.
Also I guess I am really good at pretending I am normal because I am so good that I didn’t even realise! This isn’t the first time I have pointed out and shared fundamentally different human experiences.
Not thrilled by a lack of cuteness in the world?
If my ability to enjoy looking at baby animals is wrong, I don’t want to be right. – Erratio
Yeah I guess I don’t blame you.
how do you even make sense of half the internet if you don’t perceive cuteness? Tumblr must be a strange alien place. – Mindspillage
Don’t go to Japan the land of cuteness. – Tim
I always figured that Japan had this “Japan-ness” to it. And yes the internet never really made sense in that way.
If this is not a big deal for you I noticed another example a few weeks ago.
One can survive in this world without cuteness. One can also survive in this world without a register of attractiveness of human faces. But it’s a bit harder to not notice.
I looked at a few lists of the Most attractive faces. It’s great, the internet means there are tons of them! So I looked down the list and realised that I have no idea what the difference between these faces are, and none of them are attractive to me. They are just faces. One after the other. Human faces.
Apparently the normal human experience is to find these faces attractive or appealing or somehow positive in some way. All I get is a bit of symmetry and the occasional feature that stands out more than other features.
All the world is signalling but the signals of more or less attractive faces? I got nothing.
One day in the future when captachas need to be better than “spell this gibberish word” and they ask, “which of these faces is attractive” or “select the cute picture” I will be locked out of the internet and shunned for being a robot in meaty flesh. Until that day I need to keep preparing and building my models.
Meta: This took about 30mins to write. There are probably other human experiences I am missing that I will add to the list.
