This kinda speaks to me, especially about the artists. I've probably told this story before but I escaped a long bout of self-esteem-focused depression when I changed my focus on a few things. One was that I knew a lot of artists on social media, who were promoting their stuff and each other and seeming to have a lot of camaraderie and mutual appreciation. I wanted to be like them! I wanted to be one of them! I kept trying to draw and producing nothing I liked at all, much less anything I could show off on the internet so I could "be like them." It turns out that that's a terrible thing to focus on when you're trying to do art. I gave up on that and on a lot of other ego-related things and I was much happier. Also decided never to draw anything I wasn't enjoying drawing. Turns out when you do that, you make better art. I even posted some of that art and it was appreciated by some of those artists. I got a little of what I wanted, only when I stopped wanting it.

I have a hard time describing this turn because it's a bunch of things that are part of the same thing in my mind but when I try to write them down they don't seem as clearly connected.

But the relevance to influencer-ization is... I was looking not at the art, but at the halo of social media presence and self-presentation around it. And that's not the important part, the important part is the art. But it's not the most salient thing when you're flipping through social media; it's the self-presentation and cross-presentation. And that's just a show. There are people behind there doing art and appreciating art and having friendships and stuff, but thinking the stuff you see *is* that is a Plato's Cave thing. It's just shadows.

(Probably 18 or so times that I've tried to write about this change that got me out of a self-esteem trap, and I've done it differently every time and never coherently described it, I don't think.)