I feel like a lot of Gen Z don't know that the ACA/Obamacare was the compromise.
The Democrats wanted Medicare for All. The Republicans wanted Free Market Healthcare (aka poor people die). Obama took a plan initially conceived by the Heritage Foundation (those project 2025 fuckers) and implemented by Romney for Massachusetts to say "hey, you can have a little free market, but we gotta cover other people too".
It was already a compromise. And the Republicans lost their shit and have proceeded to spend fifteen years crying about their own plan being rampant socialism and repeatedly trying to repeal it despite never actually having a back-up plan for healthcare, simply because they never really wanted compromise to begin with. The moment Obama got elected, they got into a meeting and vowed to tear down everything he tried to build no matter how much it agreed with their so-called values. Because racism, let's be honest, but also because any compromise they put forward is just a show.
"Meet me in the middle, says the unjust man" isn't just a hypothetical. It's literally what happened when we tried to meet Republicans in the middle with healthcare.
evangelicals being like "god made men to do This and be like This and women to do That and be like That that's just how it is" and it's just a picture of a white man and woman following traditional gender norms makes me so insane like you boring fascist fucks. god made 2 million species of beetles. god made whales, ducks, humans, and 1500 other species capable of same sex behavior. god made fish and amphibians that change sexes. god made more than 30 different intersex variations in human beings. god, in his infinite curiosity. wake up!!! fuck!!
I’m reading that new memoir about working at Facebook,”Careless People,” and it’s just fucking insane.
At one point Facebook wanted to be an international hub for organ donation. The “Lean In” lady asked why she couldn’t go down to Mexico and buy a kidney if her four year old needs one. This is literally on p.57. What the fuck else is going to be in this book if that is on page 57
Facebook also had to have protocols for armed raids of its foreign offices because they violated so many laws or failed to pay taxes or comply with other official protocols!! How is this a company that still exists!!!
Though strangely nothing Mark Zuckerberg does is worse than Sheryl Sandburg, who comes across as an unhinged hypocrite who uses her uncontrollable anger issues to cultivate a reign of terror, I am just… baffled and appalled at how much Zuckerberg does not care about the world outside of Silicon Valley. There have already been two instances of him trying to wear a hoodie to state visits, and not in a Zelenskyy protest way. He just doesn’t like clothes that are not hoodies.
Another mind-boggling line: “I think the point at which you have to explain Nuremberg to the head of the team leading your China entry is probably a red flag.”
This book has gotten so insane I can’t even summarize anymore. I can only post photos of this moment where Sheryl Sandberg wears her pajamas on a private jet and tries to make her heavily pregnant employee cuddle in bed with her on a flight back to California from Davos, Switzerland.
Following this, we discover that Sheryl says, “you should have gotten in the bed,” and ices out the narrator. Sheryl also has her assistant Sadie buy $10k of lingerie for her, and $3k of lingerie for herself, after which Sadie has to go to her house to model the lingerie and stay overnight. What the actual fuck.
Woooow FB knew the whole time that Trump was using trolls and spreading disinformation before the 2016 election but because they were making so much money off of it, they were just fine with it. They completely ignored the author pointing out how Duterte had done the same thing.
A lot of this later stuff about Facebook’s attempts to get into China are going a little over my head but I can see why Meta was trying to discredit the book and shut down reviews. She’s whistleblowing violations of US AND international laws. I doubt they’ll see consequences under Trump but YIKES
I don’t even know how to summarize the particularly heinous things that happened with Facebook in Myanmar and I’d have to take photos of the whole chapter to select bits but BASICALLY
-thanks to a telecoms deal Facebook came preloaded on a lot of mobile phones and often time on FB didn’t count towards your minutes so to many in Myanmar Facebook WAS the internet
-nonetheless FB was not optimized for Burmese, Myanmar was not renders on Unicode, and the terms of service were translated extremely late and passed out on paper flyers instead of posted anywhere. FB in Myanmar had little to no oversight and there was only one contractor in Dublin monitoring hate speech in Burmese even when there were LITERAL RIOTS caused by misinformation posted on Burmese FB
-Myanmar was not a priority for FB leadership so after LITERAL RIOTS they only hired one other contractor who seemed to remove posts from peace activists rather than hate speech or posts calling for violence
-due to what seems like internal politicking against the author, the person she tries to hire to be in charge of Myanmar in the right time zonenever gets hired
-FB higher ups were warned in advance of huge misinformation efforts like troll accounts and takeovers of fan accounts for pop stars but did nothing, leading pretty much directly to what the UN calls genocide and crimes against humanity
Why did it all happen? The author’s conclusion: higher ups “didn’t give a fuck.”
Holy shit was this a harrowing read. These insanely rich people have so much money they are insulated from the consequences of any and all actions and don’t care what countries they smash as long as they can pull money from the wreckage
Everything Is Awful and I’m Not Okay: questions to ask before giving up
Are you hydrated? If not, have a glass of water.
Have you eaten in the past three hours? If not, get some food — something with protein, not just simple carbs. Perhaps some nuts or hummus?
Have you showered in the past day? If not, take a shower right now.
If daytime: are you dressed? If not, put on clean clothes that aren’t pajamas. Give yourself permission to wear something special, whether it’s a funny t-shirt or a pretty dress.
If nighttime: are you sleepy and fatigued but resisting going to sleep? Put on pajamas, make yourself cozy in bed with a teddy bear and the sound of falling rain, and close your eyes for fifteen minutes — no electronic screens allowed. If you’re still awake after that, you can get up again; no pressure.
Have you stretched your legs in the past day? If not, do so right now. If you don’t have the spoons for a run or trip to the gym, just walk around the block, then keep walking as long as you please. If the weather’s crap, drive to a big box store (e.g. Target) and go on a brisk walk through the aisles you normally skip.
Have you said something nice to someone in the past day? Do so, whether online or in person. Make it genuine; wait until you see something really wonderful about someone, and tell them about it.
Have you moved your body to music in the past day? If not, do so — jog for the length of an EDM song at your favorite BPM, or just dance around the room for the length of an upbeat song.
Have you cuddled a living being in the past two days? If not, do so. Don’t be afraid to ask for hugs from friends or friends’ pets. Most of them will enjoy the cuddles too; you’re not imposing on them.
Do you feel ineffective? Pause right now and get something small completed, whether it’s responding to an e-mail, loading up the dishwasher, or packing your gym bag for your next trip. Good job!
Do you feel unattractive? Take a goddamn selfie. Your friends will remind you how great you look, and you’ll fight society’s restrictions on what beauty can look like.
Do you feel paralyzed by indecision? Give yourself ten minutes to sit back and figure out a game plan for the day. If a particular decision or problem is still being a roadblock, simply set it aside for now, and pick something else that seems doable. Right now, the important part is to break through that stasis, even if it means doing something trivial.
Have you seen a therapist in the past few days? If not, hang on until your next therapy visit and talk through things then.
Have you been over-exerting yourself lately — physically, emotionally, socially, or intellectually? That can take a toll that lingers for days. Give yourself a break in that area, whether it’s physical rest, taking time alone, or relaxing with some silly entertainment.
Have you changed any of your medications in the past couple of weeks, including skipped doses or a change in generic prescription brand? That may be screwing with your head. Give things a few days, then talk to your doctor if it doesn’t settle down.
Have you waited a week? Sometimes our perception of life is skewed, and we can’t even tell that we’re not thinking clearly, and there’s no obvious external cause. It happens. Keep yourself going for a full week, whatever it takes, and see if you still feel the same way then.
You’ve made it this far, and you will make it through. You are stronger than you think.
This post is available as a downloadable one-page PDF here.
Some people have asked about making this into a poster or redistributing it. This post is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License: alteration and redistribution are welcome as long as you attribute my tumblr. For some background and FAQ about the post, see my follow-up post.
It is interesting that I haven't seen any other Senate Dems (besides Fetterman) back Schumer up. I'm wondering if he expected the handful who hadn't made their opinions known yet to back him up and they saw the swift and severe backlash and that's why they're quiet right now. And you even had a few that hadn't posted anything yet made it clear they were voting no.
The vast majority of them seemed to be already committed to a no. But they only need 7 to cave, and we know for a fact now that Fetterman and Schumer will. I hope the others are watching Schumer be torn apart on social media - including by House Democrats of all varieties (from Blue Dogs to Squad members; those House Dems from red districts are especially livid) - and fear their voters more than they fear a shutdown.
I'm a federal employee and I want a fucking shutdown and if my Senators from Virginia who represent over 100,000 federal employees and hundreds of thousands more contractors and active military don't fucking shut it down I will work so fucking hard to unseat them because they're not standing up for me and my colleagues and they're just blowing smoke
I know Kaine was just reelected but if he even thinks about running again I will make it my personal mission to end his whole goddamn career
Both Warner and Kaine have come out on Twitter saying they will vote no. It would still do well to leave them some voicemails and stress you want them to keep that no vote, and also pass on your opinions about Schumer because he's not accepting voicemails.
YOU'RE RIGHT. I missed the news. I'm gonna call them and thank them and tell them Fuck Chuck (Schumer). Thank you. They have been spared my wrath... For now
This begs the question, if Schumer can't get the most boring moderate white guys in the Senate to vote for this CR, where tf the other seven votes coming from?!
(In my defense, I've been working all day, literally just got home an hour ago, actively avoid the news unless someone (my colleagues tonight) tell me, and I'm not on any other social media but Tumblr...)
seeing straight men be disgusted by booktok smut recommenders has actually radicalized me to the side of booktok smut recommenders. girls your taste may be atrocious but i will never disparage you for exposing mainstream discourse to the concept of soaking through your underwear. spent my whole life listening to men talk about penises it’s about time they get jumpscared by women talking about pussy in crude detail on social media. go forth and goon my warriors
I work at a bookstore and hearing one of my male coworkers call smutty romantasy "the downfall of society" because it's "literally just porn" radicalized me
Men have an entire industry. Entire industries dedicated to their sexualities. Let women have fantasy sex. there's not even a camera crew involved.
You ever have that "hungry but nauseous" feeling about activities? Like you really really want to do something and you've got plenty of fun hobbies and things you could pick from but all of the options turn your stomach so you're just laying there bored and angry about it.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Of course you should do everything you can to prevent fires – and also, you should build fire exits, because no matter how hard to you try, stuff burns. That includes social media sites.
Social media has its own special form of lock-in: we use social media sites to connect with friends, family members, community members, audiences, comrades, customers…people we love, depend on, and care for. Gathering people together is a profoundly powerful activity, because once people are in one place, they can do things: plan demonstrations, raise funds, organize outings, start movements. Social media systems that attract people then attract more people – the more people there are on a service, the more reasons there are to join that service, and once you join the service, you become a reason for other people to join.
Economists call this the "network effect." Services that increase in value as more people use them are said to enjoy "network effects." But network effects are a trap, because services that grow by connecting people get harder and harder to escape.
That's thanks to something called the "collective action problem." You experience the collective action problems all the time, whenever you try and get your friends together to do something. I mean, you love your friends but goddamn are they a pain in the ass: whether it's deciding what board game to play, what movie to see, or where to go for a drink afterwards, hell is truly other people. Specifically, people that you love but who stubbornly insist on not agreeing to do what you want to do.
You join a social media site because of network effects. You stay because of the collective action problem. And if you leave anyway, you will experience "switching costs." Switching costs are all the things you give up when you leave one product or service and join another. If you leave a social media service, you lose contact with all the people you rely on there.
Social media bosses know all this. They play a game where they try to enshittify things right up to the point where the costs they're imposing on you (with ads, boosted content, undermoderation, overmoderation, AI slop, etc) is just a little less than the switching costs you'd have to bear if you left. That's the revenue maximization strategy of social media: make things shittier for you to make things better for the company, but not so shitty that you go.
The more you love and need the people on the site, the harder it is for you to leave, and the shittier the service can make things for you.
How cursed is that?
But digital technology has an answer. Because computers are so marvelously, miraculously flexible, we can create emergency exits between services so when they turn into raging dumpster fires, you can hit the crash-bar and escape to a better service.
For example, in 2006, when Facebook decided to open its doors to the public – not just college kids with .edu addresses – they understood that most people interested in social media already had accounts on Myspace, a service that had sold to master enshittifier Rupert Murdoch the year before. Myspace users were champing at the bit to leave, but they were holding each other hostage.
To resolve this hostage situation, Facebook gave prospective Myspace users a bot that would take their Myspace login and password and impersonate them on Myspace, scraping all the messages their stay-behind friends had posted for them. These would show up in your Facebook inbox, and when you replied to them, the bot would log back into Myspace as you and autopilot those messages into your outbox, so they'd be delivered to your friends there.
No switching costs, in other words: you could use Facebook and still talk to your Myspace friends, without using Myspace. Without switching costs, there was no collective action problem, because you didn't all have to leave at once. You could trickle from Myspace to Facebook in ones and twos, and stay connected to each other.
Of course, that trickle quickly became a flood. Network effects are a double-edged sword: if you're only stuck to a service because of the people there, then if those people go, there's no reason for you to stick around. The anthropologist danah boyd was able to watch this from the inside, watching Myspace's back-end as whole groups departed en masse:
When I started seeing the disappearance of emotionally sticky nodes, I reached out to members of the MySpace team to share my concerns and they told me that their numbers looked fine. Active uniques were high, the amount of time people spent on the site was continuing to grow, and new accounts were being created at a rate faster than accounts were being closed. I shook my head; I didn’t think that was enough. A few months later, the site started to unravel.
Social media bosses hate the idea of fire exits. For social media enshittifiers, the dumpster fire is a feature, not a bug. If users can escape the minute you turn up the heat, how will you cook them alive?
Facebook nonconsensually hacked fire exits into Myspace and freed all of Rupert Murdoch's hostages. Fire exits represents a huge opportunity for competitors – or at least they did, until the motley collection of rules we call "IP" was cultivated into a thicket that made doing unto Facebook as Facebook did unto Myspace became a felony:
https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/
When Elon Musk set fire to Twitter, people bolted for the exits. The safe harbor they sought out at first was Mastodon, and a wide variety of third party friend-finder services popped up to help Twitter refugees reassemble their networks on Mastodon. All departing Twitter users had to do was put their Mastodon usernames in their bios. The friend-finder services would use the Twitter API to pull the bios of everyone you followed and then automatically follow their Mastodon handles for you. For a couple weeks there, I re-ran a friend-finder service every couple days, discovering dozens and sometimes hundreds of friends in the Fediverse.
Then, Elon Musk shut down the API – bricking up the fire exit. For a time there, Musk even suspended the accounts of Twitter users who mentioned the existence of their Mastodon handles on the platform – the "free speech absolutist" banned millions of his hostages from shouting "fire exit" in a burning theater:
Mastodon is a nonprofit, federated service built on a open standards. Anyone can run a Mastodon server, and the servers all talk to each other. This is like email – you can use your Gmail account to communicate with friends who have Outlook accounts. But when you change email servers, you have to manually email everyone in your contact list to get them to switch over, while Mastodon has an automatic forwarding service that switches everyone you follow, and everyone who follows you, onto a new server. This is more like cellular number-porting, where you can switch from Verizon to T-Mobile and keep your phone number, so your friends don't have to care about which network your phone is on, they just call you and reach you.
This federation with automatic portability is the fire exit of all fire exits. It means that when your server turns into a dumpster fire, you can quit it and go somewhere else and lose none of your social connections – just a couple clicks gets you set up on a server run by someone you trust more or like better than the boss on your old server. And just as with real-world fire exits, you can use this fire exit in non-emergency ways, too – like maybe you just want to hang out on a server that runs faster, or whose users you like more, or that has a cooler name. Click-click-click, and you're in the new place. Change your mind? No problem – click-click-click, and you're back where you started.
This doesn't just protect you from dumpster fires, it's also a flame-retardant, reducing the likelihood of conflagration. A server admin who is going through some kind of enraging event (whomst amongst us etc etc) knows that if they do something stupid and gross to their users, the users can bolt for the exits. That knowledge increases the volume on the quiet voice of sober second thought that keeps us from flying off the handle. And if the admin doesn't listen to that voice? No problem: the fire exit works as an exit – not just as a admin-pacifying measure.
Any public facility should be built with fire exits. Long before fire exits were a legal duty, they were still a widely recognized good idea, and lots of people installed them voluntarily. But after horrorshows like the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire, fire exits became a legal obligation. Today, the EU's Digital Markets Act imposes a requirement on large platforms to stand up interoperable APIs so that users can quit their services and go to a rival without losing contact with the people they leave behind – it's the world's first fire exit regulation for online platforms.
It won't be the last. Existing data protection laws like California's CCPA, which give users a right to demand copies of their data, arguably impose a duty on Mastodon server hosts to give users the data-files they need to hop from one server to the next. This doesn't just apply to the giant companies that are captured by the EU's DMA (which calls them "very large online platforms," or "VLOPS" – hands-down my favorite weird EU bureaucratic coinage of all time). CCPA would capture pretty much any server hosted in California and possibly and server with Californian users.
Which is OK! It's fine to tell small coffee-shops and offices with three desks that they need a fire exit, provided that installing that fire exit doesn't cost so much to install and maintain that it makes it impossible to run a small business or nonprofit or hobby. A duty to hand over your users' data files isn't a crushing compliance burden – after all, the facility for exporting that file comes built into Mastodon, so all a Mastodon server owner has to do to comply is not turn that facility off. What's more, if there's a dispute about whether a Mastodon server operator has provided a user with the file, we can resolve it by simply asking the server operator to send another copy of the file, or, in extreme cases, to provide a regulator with the file so that they can hand it to the user.
This is a great fire exit design. Fire exits aren't a substitute for making buildings less flammable, but they're a necessity, no matter how diligent the building's owner is about fire suppression. People are right to be pissed off about platform content moderation and content moderation at scale is effectively impossible:
The pain of bad content moderation is not evenly distributed. Typically, the people who get it worst are disfavored minorities with little social power and large cadres of organized bad actors who engage in coordinated harassment campaigns. Ironically, these people also rely more on one another for support (because they are disfavored, disadvantaged, and targeted) than the median user, which means they pay higher switching costs when they leave a platform and lose one another. That means that the people who suffer the worst from content moderation failures are also the people whom a platform can afford to fail most egregiously without losing their business.
It's the "Fiddler on the Roof" problem: sure, the villagers of Anatevka get six kinds of shit kicked out of them by cossacks every 15 minutes, but if they leave the shtetl, they'll lose everything they have. Their wealth isn't material. Anatekvans are peasants with little more than the clothes on their back and a storehouse of banging musical numbers. The wealth of Anatevka is social, it's one another. The only thing worse than living in Anatevka is leaving Anatevka, because the collective action problem dictates that once you leave Anatevka, you lose everyone you love:
Twitter's exodus remains a trickle, albeit one punctuated by the occasional surge when Musk does something particularly odious and the costs of staying come into sharp relief, pushing users to depart. These days, most of these departures are for Bluesky, not Mastodon.
Bluesky, like Mastodon, was conceived of as a federated social service with easy portability between servers that would let users hop from one server to another. The Bluesky codebase and architecture frames out a really ambitious fire-suppression program, with composable, stackable moderation tools and group follow/block lists that make it harder for dumpster fires to break out. I love this stuff: it's innovative in the good sense of "something that makes life better for technology users" (as opposed to the colloquial meaning of "innovative," which is "something that torments locked-in users to make shareholders richer).
But as I said when I opened this essay, "you should do everything you can to prevent fires – and also, you should build fire exits, because no matter how hard to you try, stuff burns."
Bluesky's managers claim they've framed in everything they need to install the fire exits that would let you leave Bluesky and go to a rival server without losing the people you follow and the people who follow you. They've got personal data servers that let you move all your posts. They've got stable, user-controlled identifiers that could maintain connections across federated servers.
But, despite all this, there's no actual fire exits for Bluesky. No Bluesky user has severed all connections with the Bluesky business entity, renounced its terms of service and abandoned their accounts on Bluesky-managed servers without losing their personal connections to the people they left behind.
Those live, ongoing connections to people – not your old posts or your identifiers – impose the highest switching costs for any social media service. Myspace users who were reluctant to leave for the superior lands of Facebook (where, Mark Zuckerberg assured them, they would never face any surveillance – no, really!) were stuck on Rupert Murdoch's sinking ship by their love of one another, not by their old Myspace posts. Giving users who left Myspace the power to continue talking to the users who stayed was what broke the floodgates, leading to the "unraveling" that boyd observed.
Bluesky management has evinced an admirable and (I believe) sincere devotion to their users' wellbeing, and they've amply demonstrated that commitment with capital expenditures on content moderators and tools to allow users to control their own content moderation. They've invested heavily in fire suppression.
But there's still no fire exits on Bluesky. The exits are on the blueprints, they're roughed into the walls, but no one's installed them. Bluesky users' only defense against a dumpster fire is the ongoing goodwill and wisdom of Bluesky management. That's not enough. As I wrote earlier, every social media service where I'm currently locked in by my social connections was founded by someone I knew personally, respected, and liked and respected (and often still like and respect):
I would love to use Bluesky, not least because I am fast approaching the point where the costs of using Twitter will exceed the benefits. I'm pretty sure that an account on Bluesky would substitute well for the residual value that keeps me glued to Twitter. But the fact that Twitter is such a dumpster fire is why I'm not going to join Bluesky until they install those fire exits. I've learned my lesson: you should never, ever, ever join another service unless they've got working fire exits.
There has, obviously, been a LOT of discussion about this on Bluesky. This short thread points out that right now there’s tension between what the founders want to build - a federated protocol for people to build their own social networks on top of - and what the users are clamoring for - more safety features that lean toward centralization over federation.
Fascinating watching this website contort around the idea of reaching out to and converting far right leaning individuals as if the same 3-4 stances aren't having a do-si-do while all being able to coexist
Outreach to radicalized individuals needs to happen, because without it their numbers just grow
But also
Outreach is time consuming and difficult, not guaranteed to work, and put you or people around you in danger by putting you on a radicalized persons radar
But also
We know that compassionate, prolonged outreach is remarkably effective. We also know emotional appeals are astronomically more likely to change someone's mind than factual ones when it comes to core beliefs
But also
most deradicalization works when someone who is close to the individual puts in the work to shift their perspective.
But also
You do not need to do this yourself/no one is obligated to do this thing that is difficult and dangerous and there is a ton of organizing work and also outreach work in our own political circle that needs doing and you should utilize your resources how you see fit
But also
You do not need to be nice to or coddle people who have done material harm
But also
Outright hostility only serves to reinforce the us vs. them mentality and makes it harder to deprogram people
But also
focusing on trying to win over radicalized individuals can't come at the expense of work to help victims/our community/those marginalized/etc.
But also
People who are deradicalized need a community to reintegrate to or what's the point.
But also
You don't have to welcome someone who's done harm into your community.
But also
Sometimes your desire to not allow someone who has reformed reintegrate into a community has less to do with harm reduction and more to do with punishing them for previous wrongdoing
But also
You never owe forgiveness to anyone who has harmed you.
But also
Outreach to radicalized individuals needs to happen, because without it their numbers just grow.
Just ad infinitum. Just a never ending ouroboros of "You're an idiot for how you engage with this famously thorny issue".
Just pick one of the bullet points above and work at it, and if someone else wants to work at one of the other ones, we're all trying to make things better. Maybe be less snarky and self righteous.
You can quit. If you want to quit, if you explicitly want to quit, you can. You must never forget that. It is not a negative, it is not a penalty, it is not a failure. Your life is yours to live. The amount of time spending art is yours to choose.
If you do not explicitly want to quit, you cannot. You can rest. You can rest as long as you like.
But unless you say, to your self, in a quiet moment, "I do not want to do this" then you keep going.
You can rest as long as you want.
Months. Years. Decades.
It doesn't matter. The art is there when you get back. It doesn't expire.
You're alive? It's still in you.
Skills can be relearned. All of them. New skills can be added.
You should rest.
It isn't a need, it is a demand. It is maintenance, it is itself part of the art because it is part of being alive and being alive is part of the art.
There is no penalty for slowness.
The benefits of speed are vastly outweighed by the hidden costs: wear and tear on machinery, your body, your mind. You think these are gossamar costs because they are out of sight, out of mind.
Until they are not.
There is no penalty for slowness, the benefits to speed are ephemeral and difficult to calculate, resting is not a need it is a requirement.
Your art is yours. Your life is yours. It can be big, it can be small, it can be both. It can be cheap, it can be expensive, it can range between the two.
The audience brings to the table their wants, their needs, their curiosity.
The audience does not dictate the art.
You do not dictate the audience.
This is a collaboration. Both sides are equal, artist and audience. This keeps your feet on the ground and your head in the clouds.
With fire, I recommend making art that you think should exist, but doesn't yet. That's the stuff, that's the best stuff.
Weigh the costs. Financial, social, physical, mental, spiritual, temporal. Constantly. Is this what you want? Are you following your heart? This is not a loaded question. It is spoken softly. I speak this to you as softly as I would a lover who has fallen asleep in an uncomfortable position.
If you can't make what you want, where can you reduce scope? Where can you increase time? Can you make it smaller, can you make it less elaborate? Take longer time to do it?
Can you make something else entirely?
Can you keep this idea in idea form while you work on something else?
Weigh the costs. An unrealized dream left to dust because it was too hard, too expensive, preventing you from making a realized dream, is worthless.
Make it small.
Make it simple.
Review the scope. You want to make a widget. I ask you softly, do you want to make this widget? Not something else?
Make it smaller than that.
Make it simpler than that.
Review the scope. You want to make a fidget. I ask you gently, if you pursue this path it will cost you much, would you be as satisfied if you made smaller things in greater quantity?
When you feel like quitting, ask yourself with the clarity of cold water on a hot day. Hot water on a cold day. Do you actually want to quit or do you need to rest? Are you not resting because the cost of resting feels like giving up?
There is no giving up.
Failure doesn't exist.
You either want to do this, and do.
You either want to do this, and do it simpler, smaller.
You either want to do this, and rest for awhile, so you can gather resources to do it later. Mental, physical, financial, social, spiritual.
You either want to do this, and plan alternatives, break it apart and do other things first, work up to the grand vision, rescope the grand vision, remix it, shift it around.
Or you don't.
And if you don't? If you truly don't? Then don't force it.
Live your life doing literally anything else. That's great too. Equally. The entire point of being alive is to fill up the well of your soul. There are infinite paths.
If you want to make the thing? Make the thing. Maybe it's great. Maybe it is objectively terrible. Most likely it is somewhere on that spectrum.
Did you enjoy it?
Then it was worth it.
That's literally all that matters.
Everything else is secondary.
Quality is secondary.
If you make things publicly? Quality is quaternary. Here is the order of priority. I'll spell it out. I believe this with my entire soul.
Your enjoyment
The enjoyment of your friends
The enjoyment of people who don't know who see it
The quality of the piece itself
Maybe it wins awards. Maybe it's in publications, maybe museums. I've had work win awards, be published in books, shown in museums. I have stuff you've seen if you've shopped in the grocery store in the United States sometime in the last 25 years or so. And far broader places.
That's great. Resources to keep going.
Secondary.
I love making art.
If you do, too, I hope you make art. If not, that you're resting. And if doing neither, I hope you rest until you it's art time again.
Cheers my fellows.
I hope we all make it.
Nobody Gets the Girl @briarrose44 - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
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