Games

A less dramatic version of this happened to me and I haven't recovered. I don't know if I will or if I even want to and deep down I still can't kill the part of me that considers it a moral failing on my part that I'm not participating anymore.

I’ve been in this place almost exactly… twice. The first time was almost twenty years ago. The betrayal sent me into the darkest place I’ve ever been. I became a machine that left a wake of destruction in its path for years.

After almost a decade i had gotten my shit together and I was finally ready to be creative again. Started a project with a group of people I thought were my friends and I naively assumed we were on the same page and… well, it happened again. Only this time I saw it happening and made arrangements to leave on my own volition. It took me almost two years to serve the project in the way it deserved and to get out mostly unscathed.

The now sole proprietor of this entity has been very successful. They’ve amassed many hundreds of thousands of followers, eight figures of annual revenue a year (maybe more at this point), and I see photos of them with various Important People (politicians and b/c-list celebrities). It feels good to know that my vision and my ideas resonated with so many people — hell, many of their most successful products to this day are my creations. They reach out to me still to this day for ideas and creative direction, and you wanna know what? I give it to them. For free. It’s a product space where “open source” doesn’t really work, and it’s better that they profit off my free labor than they further exploit any of their employees who, burdened by the oppressive weight of being an employee under capitalism, likely don’t have a creative bone left in their bodies.

Point is: It feels good to haven gotten out with Clean Hands, because where that project went under new direction is detestable to me, but is the direction it HAD to go under capitalism.

See, here’s where you’re wrong about your moral character: if you are successful under capitalism, you are inherently an immoral person. Being the creative (or one of the creatives) who conceived of and made The Thing is the only morally good part of the whole thing. Everything after that is bad news because Capital is bad news.

I don’t know your story, but what happened in my story and Disco Elysium was not a moral failing, it was an eventuality. It is what MUST happen under capitalism. The trauma of that alone is enough to kill a person.

Don’t stop being creative. Don’t let them take that from you. Be playful. Be joyful. Give it away.