The Infinite Weight of Mediocrity

Forgive the dramatics <333

I’m sitting here with my cat. It’s 1:16 p.m. here on the east coast and I can hear the bugs chirping outside. The sound pulses and fades. A minecraft video plays on my television. I have some coffee and some donuts and I’m thinking about something dramatic.

Errant Signal has a video that I think about quite often. It’s called the 10th Anniversary Spectacular of Introspective Narcissism. In it, he speaks about his place in the youtube video game essayist space and how, for his entire career, he’s been waiting for that Big Break. That moment that his channel takes off and he could quit his day job and do youtube full time.

He compares himself to other channels who have been around as long as he has, who have enough revenue to support several full-time careers. He compares who he was 10 years ago to who he is now. He says he’s felt, the entire 10 years, that everything he was doing was the “before time.” Before success. Before a critical mass or a viral video. And he comes to this conclusion:

“This is it. [...] There is no next part where content production ramps up and everything gets taken to the next level. There is no job or community or validation waiting for me on the other side of some hypothetical horizon. [...] That realization makes it hard not to feel like I failed.”

The video is an honest and optimistic look at personal goals, failing to reach those, and what that means as a creator. Errant Signal compares this to an older video of his that he now disagrees with and says that he’s grown and changed and maybe, perhaps, the goals of the channel should grow and change. He’s at a point in his life where “success” on youtube isn’t his primary goal. 

And I’ve been thinking about that for the last 3 years, since the video came out. Because I think I have the same introspective narcissistic problem of thinking that I’m waiting for my career to begin. Even though this has been my career for almost five years.

In my head, I’ve been trying to save up time in order to make a Big Book that “does numbers.” Thinking that, if only I could have a little more time, buy a little more art, that I’d break through whatever wall I imagine surrounds me.

I’ve been around 3k twitter followers for the last two years. Around 2k on my mailing list and youtube for the last two. Those were numbers I feel I built up evenly over the course of my career, even before I went “full time.”

When I get in my more melancholic moods it’s hard to ignore this idea that I’m somehow failing by not growing *more*. Faster. Bigger. Watching others who came up at the same time as me who are able to have that career I dreamed for myself when I first started. Which, I think any of us can agree, is rather toxic of me. Demoralizing at the least. My cat would be very disappointed if he weren’t snoozing.

But I think about failure a lot. I think about myself as a failure in my darker moments. If you set personal goals for yourself, projects that you want to make, and fail to do that, what does it mean? If you set financial goals and are unable to reach them, what does that mean? To what degree can you judge yourself? To what degree do others judge you?

These are the demons of self doubt. The knife of imposter syndrome. The fear of failure. I’d like to believe these are normal thoughts all creatives have. That they are siblings to the desire and the strive to create. That, perhaps, you can all relate to this.

I think about Exit Through the Gift Shop a lot. It’s a film about street-arts proliferation into the gallery-art world, told by the street artists entering and succeeding in the gallery art world. One of them just happens to embody everything the others hate about art. By the end, Banksy comes to the conclusion that art is maybe a joke.

You can feel any way you want about Terry in the film, the man made millions of dollars off his schlock, but the film comes down firmly on the side of him being a fraud. There are good points made about artists taking time to grow and how artists usually struggle to find their voice for a long while before getting an art gallery show. But I find myself conflicted.

For those who haven't seen it, the film follows Terry as he becomes obsessed with filming everything in his life, which leads him to filming his cousin who does street art. This introduces him to more and more artists and eventually Banksy, who ends up turning the thousands of unsorted tapes of Terry's into the documentary we’re watching. It ends with Terry becoming a street artist himself, encouraged and supported by Banksy's team and others he met along the way. He does what is now considered rather generic street art with the aid of his own team, paid for by refinancing his house, and turns it into a gallery show that makes him over a million dollars.

Throughout the film, people look at the camera in a talking-head interview and call Terry mentally unwell, handicapped, and even the r-slur, all while comedic backing tracks play to highlight just how funny all of this is supposed to be. Point and laugh at the loser who turned art into a mockery, who isn’t a native english speaker, who lost his mom at a young age, and became obsessed with collecting footage for memory’s sake as a resonse.

There’s a point in the film that’s supposed to be dark. This low point. Where you find out that despite the hundreds of hours Terry has filmed, he isn’t actually making a documentary out of it. He’s just storing the tapes. And I get it, he’s lied to all these street artists that he’s making a documentary about street art and such. But Terry has a passion and his passion has meaning. Banksy and his money is able to translate that into a film easily. What Terry was doing is shown to be a lie, but something beautiful still comes from it. 

A little later in the film, Banksy and Terry go to Disney Land and Banksy does one of his art pieces by locking a guantanamo-bay-looking manakin inside the bounds of a ride. Security descends on the area after a while and Terry is caught and questioned for hours. Banksy says that this was the moment that they became friends and when Banksy trusted Terry with everything. 

To Banksy’s credit, he tries really hard to not disparage Terry during his interviews. But he still does. He, like everyone else, can’t help it. The final bit of the film is Banksy saying how he always pushed the people in his life to create art. That anyone could do it and that everyone should do it. But now, after Terry, he doesn’t do that anymore.

The conclusion of the film, therefore, is: some people shouldn’t create art.

I have a lot of emotions about that movie. Like, I get it. Terry was an asshole to his crew. He was given way too much money for shit that he shouldn’t have been given the money for. But I hate what the film says. I hate the words it says to me. 

In his video essay “CTRL+ALT+DEL” H. Bomberguy says of the comic with the same name, “it turned out to be reflective of the cultural reality that produced it, and people are only angry at it this much because they don’t like what they saw in the mirror.” I think about that when I watch what happened in “Exit Through the Giftshop.” 

I think about that line in relation to me. 

I think a lot of these thoughts of failure revolve around the idea of legacy. There’s a very selfish part of me that wants to be known as a great writer. Even one of the best. It is one of my primary goals as an artist. To master my craft in a way that deserves recognition. I just want to be really good at something. And I fear all the time I’ve spent on trying to accomplish that goal hasn’t brought me closer. That maybe I’m a hack.

Lady Emily’s video “The Failure of Channel Awesome’s Demo Reel” dives into, well, the failure of Channel Awesome’s demo reel. In it, she makes a lot of good points about the arguably terrible output of Channel Awesome, and the failure of Doug Walker as a film maker, and they all essentially boil down to Walker being incompetent. He doesn’t do the camera good. He doesn’t do the writing good. He doesn’t do the acting good. He doesn’t know about why movies good or bad. He doesn’t know how to write jokes or anything else. He’s just not good. There is Good Art and there is poorly-made-art where incompetent people attempt things and fail. And Doug Walker is doing the poorly-made thing. It doesn’t matter if he wants it to be good or if he is trying hard, he simply has failed. Failure is possible. And not only is it possible, but you can fail badly.

And I get it. It’s is acceptable on the internet that Channel Awesome is, in fact, not awesome. That it is a failure. But god, if that doesn’t hit me in a way. The idea that someone can think they’re good but not be, that someone can create and it can be a failure despite everything they put in. That some people are good artists and others are not. It’s horrifying. Imposter Syndrome, to me, manifests in thoughts like this. That thinking I’m good at my craft is a ridiculous endeavor. That maybe my words aren’t good enough no matter how hard I try. That there is this cultural idea of what is Good Art and that, if you don’t fall inside of that, then perhaps you’re Not Good. Perhaps you’re incompetent. And perhaps it’s impossible to know where you fall.

It makes me think about the movie Amadeus. This is how my brain works btw haha. Youtube video about silly movie reviewer guy leads to critically acclaimed movie Amadeus.

For those who haven’t seen it, it’s about Salieri, a composer of some prominence during Motzart’s time. It’s a movie about these thoughts I’ve been sharing. It’s about Salieri being a jealous simp because Motzart is portrayed as simply better than him in every conceivable way. Salieri himself is in awe of Motzart’s methods. And I think anyone who isn’t completely in the weeds about classical music would agree that Motzart is obviously better because we remember him. A great Matthew Matosis quote goes, “Over time, the past gets more and more compressed until only the most important points remain. You can think of every classic as a peak on a mountain. The tide keeps rising, drowning out all the lower peaks. To the casual observer, Mozart’s contemporaries have drowned.”

He wrote that quote about the impossible task of playing every video game ever made. How there are so many games that have come out since the dawn of video games that there is not enough time in a single critics life to play them all. That certain games rise to the level of classics and that others fade into obscurity. That they “drown.”

I think the fear of failure is linked to the fear of obscurity. That if I have this personal goal of being a Great Writer, then what’s worse than simply being forgotten? Than fading into obscurity.

It seems that there are three destinations for artists: that of Doug Walker and Channel Awesome, where you are remembered for how incompetent you were, that of the Motzarts, where you are remembered as being the best, or, lastly, obscurity.

What a coin toss that is.

Existential dread is real and alive with the beat of personal failings.

I think about these things a lot because I can be a jealous simp. I can feel negative thoughts about the Writer’s place in the TTRPG field. It’s easy to blame everything else on why a project you make doesn’t live up to your expectations. It’s easy to blame the culture, or to say that people just “don’t get it.”

The other side of that is to blame yourself. To think the project wasn’t good enough. The writing wasn’t good enough. The art wasn’t good enough. Perhaps, like Doug Walker, the general consensus is that you are a creator who is incompetent.

I think both of these methods of thought are detrimental to the soul. I think they come out in darker times. And I don’t think I have anything greater to say about them. Primarily because I think they are natural. I think self-doubt is normal. I think disappointment is normal. I don’t think trying to solve those feelings is any more possible than solving sadness.

I do think it’s important to not use those thoughts as a basis for how you see yourself in the grand scheme.

I think, ultimately, this all circles back to the Errant Signal video. That maybe there’s an issue with thinking that all your work is building to something *more*. And that maybe there is not a “more.” There is only now.

I’ve made a concerted effort this year to make more projects of a smaller scale. Most of them released for free, but still. I’ve been trying to find a balance between work and life, which is something I sacrificed in search of that “big break.” That maybe the way my career is, trying to make these bigger books is a little fruitless and unsustainable. That maybe I should focus on smaller pieces of art.

I’ve been focusing on tiktok a bit. Trying to get back into youtube. Thinking about doing 1-small-rpg-a-month over on Patreon. Melancholy Island is the first smaller crowdfunder I’ve done and I think if the fulfillment goes well, that might be the pivot I continue.

I don’t know. I think I’ve written enough. I hope those creatives amongst you can relate and get something from this rambling. Even if it’s just youtube videos to watch.

I hope you know that I’m okay haha I get melancholy from time to time. That’s just depression. And I’ve been thinking about these things for several years now and am glad to finally get them out.

If you read all this, leave a comment! Tell your grandma to join my mailing list so we can get her into TTRPGs. Stream my music maybe. Do some writing today and share it with me. Let’s keep creating stuff. <3

Until next time,

Snow~