200 Beautiful Things

Is beauty universal? What does sharing 200 beautiful things do?

I’ve become obsessed with beauty lately. #200BeautifulThings started as an idle thought, then a social experiment: what does sharing 200 beautiful things do? I keep adding to this list over the years as I find things that I think merit inclusion.

I encounter so many stunning experiences in my travels and rarely attempt to share them. Then I offhandedly shared a poem with someone I met at work, and when I revisited it, I saw again what a work of staggering genius and beauty it was.

Even more interestingly, so did my new friend, who came from a life, social circle, and job role very ostensibly different from my own. I began to wonder if beauty was universal.

In Western life, beauty is so often co-opted as a marketing vector. We become inured to the idea that someone is trying to sell us something when they make works of art. We become cynical that our perception of beauty would ever be shared.

So I’m going to try something new. I’m going to share 200 beautiful things and see what happens. I’m really just curious.

Perceptions of beauty change the people who have them. Curating beauty implies a responsibility to properly represent neurodiversity. And the focus on beauty can lead us to create more intentionally, and with greater effect.

I did my best with this list to share sources of beauty that I’ve returned to many times over the years for solace. This is a private list of experiences, works of art, and profoundly moving things I’ve seen that reliably kept me going in the darkest nights of my life and seemed to retain their resonance every time I returned.

This list is an out-breath of genius. And a curious question into the world: what does beauty do?