As predicted, learning about psychology has proved insightful. It just in ways I anticipated, some of it just knowing what people appreciate hearing. eg. Saying someone earned their reward through hard work rather than natural talent helps boost esteem and long term mental health. Able to raise others' spirits is a crucial leadership skill, and I feel I've taken steps closer to the person I want to be. Even as I've given up the mantle of 'artist' I've gotten a newer understanding of what my problem has been for so long...
I have an understanding of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Extrinsic is your base carrot and sticks, you give people something they want to work towards, or threaten them with the consequences. It is the weakest form of motivation, intrinsic comes from the inside. It is something you want to do because you have that inner core of self-motivation. Often it comes from having an idea for self-realisation, you have a vision of yourself you want to achieve. For the longest time I thought I wanted to be an artist, but as the years went on and controversies in the industry mounted I just lost the passion, especially seeing many people exploited and agreeing to work long, hard hours for little recompense because it was their dream job. Some were targeted by predators. Others driven from the field by the collective audience of the internet.
Innuendo Studio's video "Phil Fish" available here was a watershed moment in how I thought about the internet and what it means to be a creator, and what turned me off from how many content pushed during the era was hyperbolic snark. Every review had to be entertainingly negative.
The attention didn't even need to be that bad for me. It was only through asking the right questions did I figure out what the fundamental issue is, and why I don't draw as much as my peers. It had nothing to do with executive dysfunction, compared to the average, I'm good on that front.
What art have I been making? I have two sides.
- Niche Porn of Incredibly Weird Fetishes.
- Idiosyncratic Art that's symbolism is really only known by me.
So what's the problem? No one likes the former, no one understand the latter.
- I am not into the former, and only did it to avoid being pigeonholed as an artist. You draw something once, congrats you're now the sick sad fetish artist that people talk about as if you were a household commodity.
- I don't like the latter, because I've taken to value my own privacy and want to close ranks on means to socialize with me. I don't want to open myself up to complete strangers who have never heard what the word 'parasocial' is, and I wind up in a situation where I'm twenty different people's best, if only, friend.
Now I have no external motivation to do art, and some quirk of personality makes me externally motivated. I just love chasing carrots, and deftly avoiding the stick, but the game has changed from when I was young. As I come to know more people, I get more negative feedback, and people use it as an excuse to embarass me. I'm more perceptive of how I'm seen in the fandom, and I don't like my image. When I changed myself, I just found the jackrabbit yet another straitjacket. I've gone from masochist to dominant, and that brings fresh baggage for people to stereotype and paint me into a corner.
Why draw anything at all, if I know its just going to lead to further humiliation and resentment? I have lost a lot of friends over the years because of that fetish I have about being bound to a punching bag because it upset them to see their friend in such a position, a lot of the artists I commissioned took my money out of desperation when there was little other clients. Sure, its their right as an artist to take on the work they wanted, but when I realized their relunctance and how every stream session it was a contest of endurance, I had to be there to the very end to nab that final slot, it finally got to me. Other people are more shameless about their fetishes and I envy them but I also don't want it to be my entire gallery and that I am more than that singular interest. That ironically given the subject matter, now brings me a lot more pain that pleasure.
The path forward isn't any clearer, but I now have an idea of how to get ahead, and that's to draw what I really want to draw. Not catering to an audience, or what I think will help make me popular or get me money. But something from the inside that I want to see out in the world.
No idea what that is going to be. Self-therapy is on-going.