In Praise of the Artist

In Praise of the Artist - Nemo vir est qui mundum non reddat meliorem.

A buddy of mine just moved into his first house, and over beers he talked about all the little projects he'd been working on - assembling furniture, fixing bath fixtures, generally building or improving little things around his home. All those projects you got to help your father with as a kid, he gets to do on his own for the first time. We talked about how rewarding it feels to successfully to complete things like this - to acquire tools and materials, the resources around you - then to add the most important piece, your own labor. To stand back and look at the fruits of your efforts and say, before my work, my input, this creation didn't exist. And now, because of its existence, the world (that I've defined) is better than it used to be.

The latin quote for the title literally translates - A man is nobody, who does not give back a better world. You cant get all kinds of eloquent with the meaning, in Kingdom of Heaven (a hugely underrated movie) Orlando Bloom as Bailin of Ibelin says it's "What man is a man, who does not make the world a better place?" As we begin to enter a period of financial instability that my generation has never seen anything close to, the importance of this sentiment rings truer than ever if we don't want this sort of thing to happen again. As tons of college sophomores switch their majors from finance and econ to marketing and basket-weaving, we'll have to rethink a lot of our old assumptions. And so many more recent graduates will fall into this fallacy. I'm not advocating quitting every business job and reverting to some fuedal, hippie-style, greenpeace, screw technology, self-sustaining farmland nonsense existence. Rational self-interest is still the most important virtue or ideal you can pursue, but it has to create some sort of world utility that's bigger than yourself. Ask yourself if what you're doing is really the work you owe the world. If it's not, figure out what's wrong, understand why, and work to change it. It really is that simple.

Artists and engineers, they figured out all of this much more quickly than the rest of us. Da Vinci was a total badass. Throughout history, every positivie cultural, technological, or physical improvements have come from giving in to this innate calling. Nearly every technological innovation we now utilize and often take for granted came about because some entreprenuer acted in his own self-interest. The fact that society gained some utility from it and he got paid off is merely a nice and well-deserved corrollary. The desire to create and improve is innate - everyone feels it. The greatest tragedy, is going through your entire life having fully given into the Resistance, and never proffering the world whatever creativity you have inside. Do your work and add value to the world. Anything else you might want; family, fame, money, power, women, whatever, all that will follow accordingly.