Not sure if this title is the best way to summarize what I'm about to describe but I can't seem to think of a better alternative and saying "traditional vs modern" has implications that don't relate to the subject.

Does anyone else ever get the feeling that you would love to live in a new, revolutionary world? "New" meaning wildly different, changed, reformed in terms of human consciousness. For example, I sometimes get ideas of worlds where sentient beings have moved past the need of identifying with any form of gender. It's hard to describe but when I imagine this world, I imagine it in funky colors with almost a retro pixel art aesthetic. Obviously existence wouldn't ever actually look like this but I feel like the way my brain visualizes this reality reflects how I'd view it as a sort of evolution of human form, the mix of colors probably representing the heaps of possibilities I imagine this new world would offer society.

My weird self-pseudo-psychoanalysis aside, this vision of the world I sometimes get is contrasted with my love of old aesthetics. The best example I can think of is my love for the 4:3 aspect ratio. It is often used in film to specifically target some sort of sensor in your brain that relates to the past, even if you haven't even necessarily interacted with said past. I love retro video game aesthetics and old buildings made from stone in a very specific Mediterranean style. I have a fondness for history in general.

This leads me to my actual issue. How can these two schools of thought coexist inside me? They seem incompatible, at least to me. Can anyone relate to this? If yes, does it bother you or do you believe these concepts are contradictory? An ideal world should theoretically move forward while acknowledging the mistakes and lessons of the past, but I find myself often fetishising the old. It's not necessarily a bad thing but it's giving me trouble when deciding what kind of message I want to send through any art I decide to one day create.

IDK, just sounds like you picked up a lot of formative utopian ideas in approx the 1990s to early 2000s, from or concurrent with media that looked like that, so now you associate the two. Most people will have a similar association for now, it's not like there's a terrible lot of boldly optimistic new pop media flying around in 2023 to impress upon.

Nothing about stone construction or a 4:3 aspect ratio innately reflects a "mistake of the past" anyway. To the extent they're "old" it's because they're not the aesthetic of a couple of fad-driven industries whose marketing revolves around constantly churning out expensive novelties and pitching them as innately, even morally, superior. It's not like there's a cutoff line where in the Before-Time people made Mediterranean houses out of stone but Now they know to make them out of PTFE with a carbon-fiber-print decal. 16:9 isn't an objectively superior new breakthrough in image-proportion technology (really the further you get from square, or I guess properly circular, the worse off you are for optical quality, and if you're trying to replicate the human FOV it's way too narrow) it's just driven by manufacturers' efforts to streamline screen production to a single display style that can gracefully handle a bunch of wildly different film standards from the midcentury. I was originally inclined to dismiss the recent revival of pixel art as just millennials getting nostalgic for the crappy videogames of our childhood but OTOH try telling that to the billion 10-year-olds absolutely obsessed with Minecraft.

These things all were deliberately designed the way they were for specific practical or aesthetic reasons that generally still apply, not just because the primitives who made them didn't know any better, and a lot of any thoughtful new future world is still going to look a lot like them unless/until the assumptions underpinning them change. The future (the real future, not some Silicon Valley elevator pitch for total market dominance through Disruption) is an elaboration on the past, not a discrete and opposed place.