Slowcore HQ

Slowcore Quote of the Day

"Insofar as external recognition feels like a tailwind, it is to the same degree a straight-jacket. As soon as thinking aloud becomes dopaminergic, thinking aloud starts optimizing for dopamine. The mind can hardly do otherwise; it is an unconscious dynamic that is, to a certain degree, irreducible. Once thinking starts optimizing for dopamine, it starts optimizing for positive social feedback, which means it enters the gravity well of popular opinion, which guarantees a long-term endpoint other than objective truth... falling too far into this gravity well is nothing short of doom, for it takes away the only edge that honest and patient thinkers have ever enjoyed: that Truth is always unpopular and difficult, but therefore scarce and hard to fake."

~ Justin Murphy, "The Time to Withdraw"

Writer, senior editor, music nerd, GenX eldergoth, monastery-bootstrapper. https://paragraph.xyz/@danicaswanson https://tinyurl.com/Black-Stone-Wordsmith

Source:

https://web.archive.org/web/20221128015918/https://www.otherlife.co/the-time-to-withdraw/

I like that framing. It can be hard for writers/artists to resist the temptation to subtly (or not so subtly) shift their work to better align with the perceived meta, particularly if it brings recognition and praise. 

Rarely do I see discussions of how or why that's problematic for those creating art.

Recalling “the things you own own you” one could say “you end up following your followers.”