Integrity and you vs. everyone else

When you imagine yourself doing what you love to do, and getting paid for it, there's a fundamental contradiction.

Someone who is expressing themselves in a genuine way doesn't change what they want to say based on what someone else wants. But because everyone wants different things than you do, to make money, you must change what you say to satisfy them. There's a difference between what you want to say, and what others want to hear.

A good example of this is music. You may want to express complexities like Joni Mitchell does. But your fans may prefer you express yourself in a more controversial way, like Madonna, and prefer simpler, catchier songs. This shows how success can compromise artistic judgment.

Nevertheless, there can be some artists who weave a way through those obstacles, while maintaining their artistic integrity. Doing so and achieving success can be a difficult process. Maintaining integrity, however, is easy — it just requires saying no to any potential compromise, and eschewing any attachment to the outcome. Authenticity only takes place in the moment.

These days with the Internet, the music industry has been democratized, so that anyone can garner attention for their music. But this democratization has also lead to commodification — drastically lowering the wealth that people can earn from an audience that isn't massive.

So here is another conflict between the Flower and the Pyramid. What you would want to say and what others want to hear are in almost inevitable conflict. Some can manage to navigate that conflict, but it is rare. Those who can manage it are left with a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, because, authenticity itself is valuable, and people crave it. But that pot comes with strings attached, like fame, that can be ruinous of one's long-term well-being. So even aiming towards financial success can undermine one's self-expression. This is because the values of the Pyramid and the values of the Flower, are different, and they can undermine each other.

I'm of the opinion that whenever you try to combine your pursuit of the values of the Flower with the values of the Pyramid, that the Pyramid becomes dominant, overriding and overtaking the other values. It's like the musician who commits suicide after achieving all they ever dreamed of, because they can't go outside or have a normal life anymore.

True authenticity doesn't aim at financial success. Your self-expression cannot be exploited — only obliterated, by the requirements and constraints you place upon it in service to others. But in keeping those things separate, one must have a different way of supporting oneself, to have the capacity for that self-expression to flourish.