- 25 Oct 2018 16:46
#14956872
When I was young (and for some time after that) I won several writing and a few other kinds of artistic contests. I seriously considered trying to become a professional artist more than once. However, I would routinely come up against a certain kind of problem. Namely, I realized that I was doing art because I wished that certain things were real and to merely depict those things instead of making them real was not going to satisfy me in the long run.
So, it wasn't ultimately satisfying for me to write stories where a man goes to strange dimensions, has sex with green women and sword fights with some giant ugly dude. Instead I ended up going to China and doing fencing. I guess this was as close as I could get.
When we look at celebrities and professional artists, it's shocking how many of them seem to be severely depressed, or how they get into drugs or other unfortunate things. I was wondering tonight if perhaps they aren't experiencing something similar to what I've experienced, only they went down the path I didn't go down. When someone acts in a movie and pretends to be a fighter pilot or the president, they are doing that because those things have value; you almost never seen movies where actors are pretending to be actors and when you do, it appears to be some kind of commentary or artistic experiment and not a literal depiction of those people's lives.
So here is what I found myself wondering. When an actor, a writer or an artist portrays a fighter pilot or a president, somewhere deep inside of himself, did he want that kind of person to exist in reality or perhaps even, did he want to literally be a fighter pilot or the president? So many of those artists seem to be insane. They put on so many hats, pretend to be so many things and yet beneath it all is the knowledge that they are none of those things. It begins to seem clear to me why so many of them get depressed. If someone can be truly happy being an artist then I think, do it but I think that there are people out there who conflate fantasy with reality and go down the wrong road.
If I were to attempt to talk about metaphysical ideas, maybe we all come here thinking that we want something to be real and not just the dreaming of some God. When we move towards making that thing real we are happy and when we fail, we are unhappy and if we create nothing but an illusion inside of a bubble, it merely postpones our unhappiness.
So, it wasn't ultimately satisfying for me to write stories where a man goes to strange dimensions, has sex with green women and sword fights with some giant ugly dude. Instead I ended up going to China and doing fencing. I guess this was as close as I could get.
When we look at celebrities and professional artists, it's shocking how many of them seem to be severely depressed, or how they get into drugs or other unfortunate things. I was wondering tonight if perhaps they aren't experiencing something similar to what I've experienced, only they went down the path I didn't go down. When someone acts in a movie and pretends to be a fighter pilot or the president, they are doing that because those things have value; you almost never seen movies where actors are pretending to be actors and when you do, it appears to be some kind of commentary or artistic experiment and not a literal depiction of those people's lives.
So here is what I found myself wondering. When an actor, a writer or an artist portrays a fighter pilot or a president, somewhere deep inside of himself, did he want that kind of person to exist in reality or perhaps even, did he want to literally be a fighter pilot or the president? So many of those artists seem to be insane. They put on so many hats, pretend to be so many things and yet beneath it all is the knowledge that they are none of those things. It begins to seem clear to me why so many of them get depressed. If someone can be truly happy being an artist then I think, do it but I think that there are people out there who conflate fantasy with reality and go down the wrong road.
If I were to attempt to talk about metaphysical ideas, maybe we all come here thinking that we want something to be real and not just the dreaming of some God. When we move towards making that thing real we are happy and when we fail, we are unhappy and if we create nothing but an illusion inside of a bubble, it merely postpones our unhappiness.
Orb Team Re-Assemble!