Power ig (3)

Heyhey! I felt like posting a blog and I wrote this unedited mess so enjoy!
(it doesn't really have a title)

I find myself really motivated by emotions. I mean, everyone is, but I can’t help but feel trapped if I can’t express myself. It is this that makes me wonder if that is why power is so addictive to so many people. (I promise they’re related)

In a world where we humans are social creatures who agree to live in a large and now global society, power (in and of itself or) over resources can get you the means to artists and those who have cultivated the skills to express your worldview. For example, control of government can help you pass or not pass laws that let people live the way you want them to live more easily. You get to exert your will on the world no matter how skilled you are if the position you are in makes that your de facto ability. As artists (or athletes) will tell you, doing things yourself takes a lot of time to build the skills that you need to perform what you want, even if you have the idea behind it well planned. It’s always execution that takes a lot of time and effort to get right, and even then, it sometimes just fails anyway. The priviledge power gets you is the ability to not be good at something and still get your way. Once again, as an example, the government seems to prevail almost no matter what, and revolutions are, well, revolutionary, for a reason. The government needs much less skill to run and be widely accepted, though more importantly, accepted, than a grassroots organization or rebellion. Many rebellions fail to exert their idea—the idea that the current government should change hands or be abolished completely—because their leaders and participants are not skilled enough in how they go about rebelling. They are often not persuasive or transparent enough, or maybe they are only equally skilled as the government at effectively organizing. This is the lack of skill that kills those without default power at their fingertips. This is what I believe makes power so enticing and addicting to others. It’s a poison that strikes the heart of why many of us live—our ability to change the world, and our own agency to express ourselves even in the privacy of our own homes. When a powerful person has a desire, it is easy to express, whereas the skilled person puts in the labor and passion into it before it manifests, and the unskilled and powerless crumble and suffocate under the weight of their own dying desires.

Power of course gives access to larger recesses of the talent pool amongst the human population, but skills are needed to prop that notion up. Thus implied are artists. (I am very much going for visual artists, but performers, athletes, scientists, among many others are also (and have always been) implied here) Many artists struggle with mental health, and I wonder if this is also why. One thing many people in these professions or fostering these aspirations have such (sometimes quite powerful) desires to change the world (even if small). Once again, these desires require skill or power to manifest, which take years to develop. In the meantime, while the eventually-talented artists suffer at the hands of the burning desire they lack the skills to execute. This is what I suspect affects the poor mental health of many artists. The aspiration to create or to change the world around them with their ideas.