Joseph Maynor

I agree. This is deep. But what you say writ large as conscious creators. Some people might recoil at this and think it's ego. There's a common feeling that any kind of doing is ego. It's Creation.

I've lost count how many times I've been given this advice over the years lol.

Birds are natural musicians. You know this. When I was learning how to play Jazz I would go to the forest and improvise with the birds. You can get them to respect form too, they'll get it. Like you start playing a twelve bar chorus over and over and they will join in and get the structure almost immediately. But also, I felt like I was imposing myself on their jam session which is ongoing by default.

I appreciate people who will debate with me more. You have debated with me many times over the years and I love that.

Breathless (1960). Saw in theater finally. One of my all time favorites.

That's the question. And IMO this is why getting clear on what friendship means is so crucial. When there's no friendship (or a false pretense of one on either side) -- exploitation can happen. Most of us have no idea what friendship means, and so we default to living alone and paranoid and unhappy with our current relationships.

The OP's question is how much socialization do I need?

I disagree with this. I think the ego ignores relationships due to selfishness and focuses on health and finances deficits being a result of lack of social support or social alignment, and then blames others for not having more social or relationship abundance. Anyway, we may disagree here and I'm fine with it. Good to have a contrary point of view to consider.

Relationships can come from friendship not power necessarily.

I guess I'm both types of person, since I do both.

Having more relationships naturally bring more opportunities to make money. This is often seen the opposite way oddly. We tend to think it's like this: Health, then Finances, then Relationships when it's really more like this: Relationships then Finances then Health.

I've been to Taiwan. Some of the best people I have ever met. Great food. Great scenery. It's called the Heart of Asia. It's western-leaning and they love the US. There's a Japanese and Chinese influence. I've been to China too; Taiwan is not really like China. It's a very unique place. Very independent. Has an island culture vibe which is cool.

This reminds me of vibe coding too. We're becoming more like music producers and managers instead of formerly technicians and engineers. But the downside is the delegation of trust and how that can limit a creator and the actual artwork produced. AI is a tool but no more than that.

This is where you and me might have different insights. Thanks for taking the time to explain this. I love it.

Why do you have a desire to win in the way you are suggesting here?

True. But Andy Warhol has an original aesthetic like Elmore James does that makes their artworks great. You don't need to be technically excellent at skill to create great art. You can have an original aesthetic that is amazing. This is why some overly-technical music sounds awful in a way because it's too many notes or some other balance is off.

What's sort of awful is the music that the masses like that is insanely popular for no good reason.

I was watching FX the other day on a rare occasion that I was sitting in front of a TV, and the show I was watching was so bad I was wishing for some fine art honestly. That said, I can't stand Picasso honestly. All fine art means to me is a heightened degree of skill due to technique and experience and also weighed or measured against other artworks in an artform. Picasso is to visual arts as John Cage is to music. It's provocative and needs a narrative to understand because it goes beyond aesthetics into the area of provocation or forcing questioning. You wouldn't say that Picasso's paintings are conventionally beautiful. They're taunting in the way Frank Zappa is taunting in Rock music. It's criticism, in a way, mixed with aesthetics. It's like Derrida doing philosophy. I prefer fine art that is conventionally beautiful even if it has seeds of ugliness or rough around the edges notes in it. It still has to be beautiful for me to want to experience it over and over.

I tend to use the word The Divine, but I think you're not appreciating The Absolute. It's pointing to something. Probably what you already mean by You. This is just different terminology getting in the way of the same pointing.

This sentence right here is the metaphysical project expressed nicely and succinctly: "physical reality is just a manifestation of what my model describes." I can state it more abstractly and provocatively as The Metaphysics Project. This will cause the philosophers' heads to swivel, naturally.

This is called a metaphysic in philosophy.

Thank you. Someone had to say this finally.