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Carl Jung speaks of the “daimon” of creatives, and the difficulty of balancing intense energies.
The daimon is not necessarily a demon, but a muse that compels. Ignored or frustrated the pent-up energy builds as anxiety and is often countered with self medicating in an attempt to feel normal.
Like any cybernetic system, positive energies must be regulated (released regularly) lest a tragic explosion occur.
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Creativity generates positive energy.
You will be tempted to be creatively productive, to make something with utility, but don’t succumb to that instinct: Make something pointless that makes you laugh.
Play is the ultimate cure for burnout.
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Consider that aesthetics is a distancing from enjoyment to analyze or judge.
True belief has no distance, while aesthetic belief is a complex game played for enjoyment.
The difficulty is when your aestheticized emotions are confused (or bleed into) your identity as true belief: at this point, everything is the game.
Even anger and fear, which appear natural, are enacted a satisfy a role: they produce an effect that affects others, providing the aesthete with pleasure in their manipulations. Once beliefs become aesthetic and sincerity is deserted for the joy of the game, there is a deeper problem: When escalating artificiality is the reward, it may be pleasurable to invoke horror and watch the world burn.
(ideas from Charles Blattberg)
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Evolution plays a numbers game in which survival is based on vast losses.
Applied to politics, one strategy is population growth equating to value proliferation, another is infection for utilization, and a third is hivemind colonization.
Survival requires confrontation (genocide), adaptation (symbiosis), or resources applied to stagnation (equilibrium).
Nature is agnostic to your moral conceits but as tactics for consensus amplification, they are tremendous survival protocols.
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Our attempt for surety (or fixity) is a draw to stable descriptors of the world by which we may navigate.
We may push off from these mythologies and extend ourselves further.
This leap is the creative impulse: to rebel directly against the foundation on which we stand.
To cling desperately to the foundation without jumping is not life. Adhering to tradition as salvation is death.
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We went from a loving Father to the Protestants’ God from whom we could not earn salvation (we were all sinners reliant on his grace). As anxious souls unable to control our destiny, we channel insecurity into work: visible virtue.
Excessive work accumulates wealth, so we flipped the signified and signifier to claim “wealth” as God’s favor and our status through materialism (not spiritualism or kindness).
Our insecurity drove us into the arms of a more capricious, uncaring, and taxing God: Money. The comfort of the trade is the objective measure of our salvation, which proves most of us unworthy once again.
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The idea of being useless is somehow worse than the idea of death: to be useless scuttles social standing and personal ambition.
Being useless is to be alone and irrelevant in our society, which reveals our primary dysfunction.
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Fate must call you to become a hero, and you must draw forth your unique (separate and special) individuality to complete your journey.
The question is: how do you motivate a mass of people (community or society) without falling into individualism, where every person believes they need to be the hero?Source: Acid Horizon podcast on Magical Realism
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You follow your passion into the art world, where your curiosity and ambition drive you to learn and grow. Soon every problem’s solution is more thoughtful art.
Like religion or capitalism, every crisis is an opportunity to have more faith: enact more rituals, dig deeper, try harder.
Your passion has trapped you. You have traded love for myopic fanaticism.
