If someone’s ego isn’t causing their problems it’s their naivety.
Nothing brings a bigger cost than trust, yet people just give theirs away to the dumbest shit. Likes are a quarter, retweets a dollar but follows will require anal sex with your significant other. The burdens and blame stemming directly from what you believe in always fall on those not sharing in the subservience. Like, it’s not our government causing our suffering regardless of who fills the seats, but the foreigners or minorities or deviants lacking its power and wealth. Personal responsibility is never the matter of making demands of others, outside the American dream. It’s obscenely common for people to think of themselves, I don’t actually need harmless fun more than your niece needs that surgery, but I work hard for the egoists so the least I deserve is to give back to egoists what egoists permit me in spare change and free time.
The tastes great vs less filling drama within the house of representatives is bread and circus, smoke and mirrors to distract from matters like this government’s military having more bases than all the bases of all other nations combined and multiplied. The costliest military in world history serves the private interests profiteering the government further in debt than any government in world history, but that bitch said what!? Netanyahu: redoing elections 5x til my angel investors dig the results. McCarthy: hold my jar of piss. The dull freedom caucus is a lynch mob comprised of millionaires. All that any of them have done in office is trash-talk and fund-raise, and of all the current members of the GOP they are the ones most reticent towards any accountability for themselves, representing only flighty egos. The most amazing thing is how the rest of the world is intimidated by the USA.
We only hero-worship the most self-serving cartoons. There’s not a sitting politician in the country I’d let inside my home under any circumstances. I piss outside whenever I can because this whole country deserves it.
Whenever and wherever you sacrifice for persons with more resource and opportunity than yourself, you help to guarantee others have less. Time and space, attentions or esteem or plain old monies, why give anything to people, places and things that’d endure without you. There’s no greater un-American sentiment than refusing to buy into the lunacy of anyone anywhere deserving less resources/opportunities than myself, encompassing life itself. Alphabet agencies would read that and find a threat in my not seeing exceptions to all life having value. Failure to claim a dominance unto itself makes no grouping marginalized. The inability to bar the civil or basic human rights of others to self-determination is not an obstruction of any actual right. No matter how big the dick to your imaginary friend.
A self or an institution determined by the sacrifices of others is without merit or mettle of its own. Aside from sex workers, entertainers never understand this, while universally do artists argue against the nature of its cause and effect. No matter how much it stings the ego, survival and dreams coming true are rarely synonymous. The difference being survival met by the sacrifices of others means a weak link to the human chain sorted, while dreams met by the sacrifices of others is the stuff of villains.
By creating, most artists reveal how little of the universe they’ve experienced and how few creative works prior they’ve sampled, in presuming that what they think or feel they want or need is lacked. Predominately will they transfer the bias, presuming audiences and consumers have experienced little of the universe or sampled few if any creative works prior, to justify recreating or rewording what likely already exists. To be fair, generations younger than me accept marketing that for-profit art is any proponent for personal identity, as though their own ignorance of Robert Johnson means his crossroads accomplished nothing of significance. Leapfrogging isn’t a thing in cultural development. A demand that is manufactured for pre-ordained supply whether from corporate powers that be or from a singular self-serving egoist, limits choices as much as it limits any values for self-expression. James Gunn could shutter DC’s film and TV divisions, after all they’ve already established more hours of entertainment than most lives will ever be able to fully peruse. Anything new is a cover song. But swathes of fandom are so sold on advertising they’d kill themselves. Name me an artist cool not only with providing art for free, but staying anonymized in the process. Whatever their purported justifications for creating it’s always about their ego as emphasis in the end, not meeting existing demand or filling any existing void.
You and me, we’re more than welcome to waste the days of our own lives, but we cannot make demands for others to stop and heed our fantasy football. The people who deserve your praise are too busy with reality to ask for it, much less do they require it. What if every rationale for entertainment aside from it being a luxury were simply more marketing, to not develop the tools for communicating with the world at large but to be deflected by the drivel of its most self-serving? What inspired the people who actually created everything of consequence in human history wasn’t pomp and artificiality, but authentic mystery. Every trend is demeaning to that reality. And when pop finishes eating itself, the dessert tray will be potluck.