Yeah, I just don't have any sympathy for these sorts of people. In this society, mastery (hyper-specialization) means that someone is picking up the slack for you in other areas of your life. This can be material need, psychological support, social connection, education access, and more. If you're deemed unworthy of that, you have to handle it yourself; the door to mastery gets closed, because you're occupied with keeping yourself fed, or covering for mental health needs, or dealing with loneliness, or trying to learn everything on your own.
And when you fail, or are slow to progress, and particularly when you can't acquire the requisite skill required for, and deal with external factors related to, monetizing your craft, people say, "Oh, you just didn't try hard enough. You weren't smart enough. You weren't passionate enough."
If the primary thing you got out of your craft was that sense of being better because you could do what others couldn't, that's just pride, and it's one built in a misunderstanding of the circumstances that led to you being capable and others not being so. And now that those people are finally meeting their bigger fish, I just don't feel anything but schadenfreude.
Well, and maybe a little hope that, when all ambition is rendered objectively meaningless, we can turn away from hubris and back towards some common sense of accomplishment and progress. But mostly the schadenfreude.
Do what you want to. Help others. Don't manufacture hierarchies.
And when you fail, or are slow to progress, and particularly when you can't acquire the requisite skill required for, and deal with external factors related to, monetizing your craft, people say, "Oh, you just didn't try hard enough. You weren't smart enough. You weren't passionate enough."
If the primary thing you got out of your craft was that sense of being better because you could do what others couldn't, that's just pride, and it's one built in a misunderstanding of the circumstances that led to you being capable and others not being so. And now that those people are finally meeting their bigger fish, I just don't feel anything but schadenfreude.
Well, and maybe a little hope that, when all ambition is rendered objectively meaningless, we can turn away from hubris and back towards some common sense of accomplishment and progress. But mostly the schadenfreude.
Do what you want to. Help others. Don't manufacture hierarchies.