It's hard to deliver bad news. Unless one suffers from pathological schadenfreude, nobody enjoys bearing terrible tidings. Telling someone that a family member died or that they lost their job is a heavy task that demands much emotional labour.

One may be tempted to sugar-coat it. One may be tempted to find the silver lining. One might be tempted to focus on the bright side. Yet, in my experience, nothing trumps honesty as long as it is imparted with care, tact and empathy.

“I know you’re scared, you’ve got every reason to be, and things might still get worse before they get better, but I’ve got your back, and we’re here to support each other” is much more comforting and reassuring than the predictable, overused and ultimately spurious “everything will be alright”.

Everything is not alright

Even the most specialised tasks benefit more from the right people than they do from the most proficient experts. When we find individuals who want the same thing and know that the most efficient way to get it is to work together, we have something magical in our hands.

Leading such a collective is always a breeze. One only needs to ensure the conditions are as conducive to greatness as possible, and the team will take it away. It’s so simple and yet so hard to come by. Just like the best human relationships.

Simple, rare magic

There is a lack of care for the established rules in artistic creation that originates from an innate rejection of order or a lazy approach to culture.

Those who survive this naive primaeval stage will enter the vast desert of learning how art is made. It turns out – big surprise, crazy plot twist – that rules turn us into better creatives. By studying what has been done before, we may tread more stimulating paths than we would have if having to come up with an entire history of the arts by ourselves. After all, we don’t isolate children so they can invent new languages – which undoubtedly they would – but teach them our languages so they can take them away and butcher them into their next mutations.

Reserved for the greatest is a legendary space, a mythological realm, a promised land. Only those who have mastered the rules can get there, but not all that have will. There live those who, upon understanding and thriving in the accepted and celebrated forms of artistic endeavour, choose to obliterate the norm and build whatever the hell they feel like building.

From the rules, beyond the rules

One useless approach to solving problems is to deny them. This “un-solution” is perplexing because it is as nonsensical as it is an easy sell. Telling someone that they don’t have the problem that afflicts them is a surprisingly convincing argument for them to stop carping.

Before we decide that we’re too clever to be vulnerable to such evident fallacies, let us reflect on the death of social classes. Remember them? At some point in the later part of the 20th century, most of us accepted they were no longer applicable. We were all part of this equal mass. Those at the top of the wealth pyramid had achieved their position through a combination of astuteness and hard work, not privilege or unfair advantages.

That fake death made most people feel good about their prospects. The rich could tell themselves the story that they deserved their status. The poor could believe that their status depended solely on how they chose to live their lives.

Fictions are useful. Stories drive us. We just need to get better are determining which ones are useful for whom and when.

Un-solutions and other useless fictions

Success is so immune to questioning or criticism that it soon replaces its inception: it no longer matters who was successful in doing what; all that we care about is the fact they were successful. Success breeds success. When mediocrity is successful or when success’s output is mediocre, mediocrity will advance undeterred.

Sadly, it is almost inevitable for success to become mediocre in its expression. Mass-appeal must be generic. We’d rather think that incredibly original and unique artists shape the mass, but, more often than not, it is the other way around: the mass shapes the artist.

I’ve always opposed judging art based on its success: pop could be good or bad despite itself. Perhaps this was yet another instance of my naivety, and one should always be guarded against success due to its natural inclination towards mediocrity.

Successful decay

Even if we keep fit, doing a new type of exercise will remind us of the many muscles we doom to idleness. The same logic must apply to our brain: even those who think for a living cannot expect to consider half the approaches available to us or dwell in a significant fraction of the myriad fields of human expertise.

Rather than despair, we can take the opportunity to remain open to foreign ideas, humble about our beliefs and, more than anything else, active in our listening.

Martian Thoughts

Everything is not alright

Simple, rare magic

From the rules, beyond the rules

Un-solutions and other useless fictions

Successful decay

Idle muscles