the popularity seeking complex
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Who’s in the Box?
People and systems put us in boxes. Too often it’s convenient and in their interests, making their lives easier and allowing systems to operate with less friction. After all, it’s cognitively tiring to re-evaluate people and our own biased judgements time and time again. But people are complex, diverse, and transcend the simplistic categorisations we…
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Aphorism 29
It’s easy to have strong opinions and loose principles, but the aim is to achieve the opposite. The Thoughts of Others “I don’t have to believe everything I think. I don’t have to internalise every emotion I feel. When I start to form an opinion, that’s just a hypothesis. Let me go out into the world,…
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No Contradictions
No contradictions. What an absurd expectation to place upon a person or oneself. The desire to show up in the world free of contradiction can be paralysing, and it shelters us from mistakes and failures that may enlighten. It’s up to an artist to take stances, and then, if we’re open-minded enough, people and experiences…
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Hoarding Culture
Hoarding strikes me as being related to indecisiveness. Or, the very least, it’s tied up with an unwillingness and, in some cases, a chronic inability to decide. To avoid deciding now, I’ll take all I can and decide later. But, of course, it’s the negative side effects that make what seems like a good idea…
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Pulled into the Wrong Orbit
For a lot of artists when we start out, the gravitational pull is often getting better at the craft itself. We work to write a better class of song, draw a better painting, tell a more compelling story, and take a photograph that has emotional resonance But as we take our work to the world…