Status Anxiety
It is said our intuition is evolutionary made for linearities: especially, we thirst for continuous, sensational feed back(a strong argument for why video games are so addictive). And so, we require routine rewards , vindication, social approval,.
This comes easy as reality for the famous, as every tweet and photo is constantly flooded with “likes” and approval on your activity/thought.
At the very least, lets take stabilities, as it guarantees the routine cheques to confirm my work. please, i need my courage to continue..
The reality of the nonlinearity, uneven result and lumpy nature of things is too much to bear on our mentality..
but there are these wondrous people , as Nassim Taleb says, "despite the lack of peer recognition, despite looking like idiots to their peers, no confirmation comes to them, no Nobel, no fawning students..” they kept on going, for perhaps the lumpy ever that brings them grad vindication. They have all the fine qualities(peserverance, hard work, even talent..), but without status, this is deemed failure. and Failure, in the meritocratic modern world, is to be smeared upon--(loser).
But the grand vindication may never come . .
(heres that moment again where I see religion as an extremely relieving aid for this anxiety as all your actions are seemed and approved by Him and you shall no care about the approvals /of lack thereof from the peers..)
And of course then, we will usually not see their stories. As Taleb pointed out, the world celebrates the obvious heroes’ the same said by george Elliot’s Middlemarch )1872) it is our human tendency to admire only the most obvious exploits. The theatres are flooded with super hero movies, the people who are there to rescue the world when shits already went down—not the people who might have been there to prevented shits from going down—(so our superficiality as human race is causing us heavily.)
Junhan Shuttai! episode 7 narrated this ‘loser ’s sheds a light to the unnoticed, but dedicated manga assistant who worked day and night hubby for 20 years without ever had a chance to publish a work of his own, so the grand vindication never came. At his 40th birthday, he went back home to help run his rice wine store. However, it is not drawing manga that he gave up, but it is impress the world and finding understanding and rewards, or confirmation.
We do need art (Good ones..) Art sheds the light to those people who does hold the same virtuous qualities as Saint Theresa but seldom has a chance to express itself in the sort of external achievements that attract the world's vagabond attentions.’. Luckily, there is Good Arts. These good arts are "standing witness to hidden lives and may act as conceptual counterweights to dominant hierarchical realities “ (Allan de bottom). And today I am deeply touched by this good story that celebrated that hidden life.
