Beyond personal ego, itās also a matter of structural incentives and identity.
Imagine this: your job is to be a ācensorā - whether thatās an actual agent of state censorship or a āstakeholderā or a producer or a middle manager. Doesnāt matter. Your job is to be someone who makes Appropriate Changesā¢ to creative work as a part of the creative process.
Now letās say you work with artists who produce entirely inoffensive output that really doesnāt need any changes from you. Work which is entirely acceptable as it is, and which nobody would bat an eyelash at if it got published. Nobody would have a problem with it. Nobody would say āoh the censor failed to catch that one.ā
If you just give the go-ahead to everything that comes across your desk, you are, objectively speaking, being unproductive. The product you are supposed to produce, the service you are supposed to provide, the function of your labor, is to make Appropriate Changesā¢ to things. If you are not making Appropriate Changesā¢, you are failing to do your job. You are being lazy, you are being ineffective, you are failing to do the work you were hired to do.
You donāt want to feel that way, and you donāt want to feel useless, soā¦
And this isnāt always even straight up malicious or egotistical, so much as it is a case of āwhen all you have is a hammer.ā Even if there are no Appropriate Changes to make, you are conscious that your job is to make Appropriate Changes, and the entire lens through which you view the creative work that comes across your desk is āI must find Appropriate Changes to make to this, or else I am useless!ā
Thatās why the distraction gambit works so well here - if you give people something they can make Appropriate Changesā¢ to, then you satisfy their need to Do Their Job, and once THAT is out of the way, they wonāt apply that same level of needful, box-ticking scrutiny to the rest of it.
The nature of the job itself incentivizes interfering with work that doesnāt need changes - in fact it often requires you to do so, lest your numbers look bad on your next performance review.
Even the nicest, most collaborative and creative soul can become a meddling busy-body if you put them in a job where their metric of success is measured in how much they meddle and interfere with the work of other people.
Of course, itās also a kind of job which rewards people for being egotistical meddling busy-bodies by nature, and it is a job in which egotistical meddling busy-bodies have a natural advantage for flourishing, but itās important to understand that itās not JUST about individuals personally being egotistical assholes, thereās a structure which is shaping the behaviour as well.
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