perfectionism is a form of shame
This certainly feels true, as I've noticed that over 40 years of creating stuff, completing a thing does not make starting the next thing easier.
I have grown to realize that shame is insatiable, a gnawing hunger that doesn't dissipate with achievement. No, It sharpens.
Each success resets this imaginary bar even higher, further tightening the rules and suffocatingly sharpening the inner critic. It will not reward you with peace.
What once was a once-a-year pilgrimage (badges, panels, swag bags) has metastasized into the way every institution communicates. Tech companies don’t just ship updates, they host “cons.” Even the most banal update needs a stage, a trailer, a fandom.
The world is something that we make
Starts with an anecdote about bread, pivots to Spotify, then goes somewhere:
This consistent misread is that no positive change is worth making unless you make it in a pristine, completely consistent, platonic final form. No. Not only is this characteristic of the main problem of progressivism today, this is also fundamentally untrue. No change is made in a vacuum, and no step forward in history comes perfectly. Believing it is true extricates you from your own responsibility and your own autonomy. It reduces your individual volition and humanity to a tool of large business. It is obedience in advance. It is an obscene mode of infantilism and not an honest position. And it reminds me of the total truism, the necessity of accepting that you won't be perfect, and that's fine: "And now that you do not have to be perfect, you can be good."
You Are Insignificant. That's a Good Thing.
I've read a bunch of essays that all take the position that none of this (gestures at everything) matters, and here's another one.
I think we'd be happier if we could internalize this. Not in a nihilistic way, where nothing matters so why bother, but in a liberating way, where things matter in proportion to their actual impact on actual people, not in proportion to how much astral significance we imagine them having. You can care deeply about your life and work and relationships without needing them to echo through eternity.
A delightful story of how fantasy artist Michael Whelan came to create the cover art for the Jackson's post-Thriller era reunion album Victory.
Columbia Records called me out of the blue. Michael Jackson had seen my cover art for Foundation’s Edge—I don’t know where, maybe on a book rack?—and was drawn to the spiral galaxy glimpsed beyond Trantor. The label told me that he wanted the artist who did that painting to submit his portfolio.
At first I thought someone was playing a prank.
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