fame, power and the money hungry

There has been an endless surge of reflection in the last couple of days and I started to reanalyze my entire life.  I am thankful for this Hawaii experience and these self-reflections are priceless to me.  All the money spent to get down here and live down here has all been worth it to me.  Here are excerpts to many of the ideas I am tossing in my head for my remaining 14 days and 19 hours here.

We often get ourselves and our minds caught onto the accomplishments of others. We feel intimidation and we tend to shy back into our start-up caves, shunning the shadows casted by the well-established. We look at our own treasures and think that somehow ours glistens less than others. Well for one thing we can't afford make-up artists and scantily-clad female sponsors. I never understood how female sponsors actually pertain to the product. Actually its just using sex as a means to sell their product, what genius! But we the consumer are duped. We are caught on the line, saliva dripping all over with our tongue hanging out just waiting for some more sex, willing to take any bait. Just remember, violence is the number one form of entertainment and sex is second. So if you aren't having Schwarzenegger/Stallone explosions to sell your product then its busty babes with missing bikini bottoms to seal the deal.

It seems to always be the big versus the little, the well-adapted-swimmer versus the just-got-wet.  I think the only way to get accustomed to the water is with time and patience. A lot of people out there don't have the patience and just want to dive into the deep end. They forget the joys of learning how to paddle and immediately want to swim. They pass life by because they just wanted to make a buck in the deep end.

"Get some hot sponsors, get into a club, have hundreds if not thousands of people wear your shit and you'll be huge!"

Its just not for me.  An author once said "a writer writes books, success is a consequence."  But a lot of times these days its the opposite.  People just want to get big without putting any effort or blood or time or sweat into it.  It's never as easy like it is on TV or movies.  People can't afford to be writers, they can't afford to be the starving artist anymore.  They pack up their bags and are eager to enter the working world and give up the dream.  No one is hungry anymore.  Everyone puts their dreams on the shelf and hopes to remember to come back to it later someday.  We'll waste our time on silly things like the lottery, hoping that we can win millions by doing nothing.  The lottery is a perfect example of how we all wish for free money on the daily.  Free money wouldn't build any character though, and you would lose all your friends.

As a graphics designer growing up there's not much room for meaning, its usually just visual stimulation, whatevers hot. It was grunge for awhile, then it kept staying grunge for a long time and people would just use these gimmicks to try to cop a few looks.   I hated how my designs used to be so superficial and stale, an array of gimmicks trying to get some attention.  Trust me there are gimmicks in everything around us. In dance competitions, anything.  There will always be people out there with false motives because they aren't in it for the art, they are using art as a vessel for money. Instead, us designers/artists should be using money as a vessel for art.

Its whatever it takes to get a second-look.  It's not about what you like to wear, it's about what you think people will think about you when they see you wearing it, because fitting in becomes more important than developing a personal style.  We spend all of junior high and high school trying to fit in, only to realize that after high school all we want to do is stray from the norm, be someone unique and different and special.  We hate being the outcast though, the minority.  Thats why we love belonging to things, so we belong to brands we like to associate ourselves with.  We become loyal to car brands, clothing brands, appliance brands, etc etc.  Anything to feel like you belong to something.

Everything these days are to 'catch the eye.'  All-over prints were designed to catch the eye, until the eye rejected the messy barrage of meaningless and odd-objects mashed together to create a unique all-over experience. A gun, brass knuckles, AK-47, boom boxes, music notes, hearts, stars, a break dancer, another musical note, definitely paint splatter, and the old old obsession with foil print too.  Once the eye rejects, its over.  It shakes off all past notions and searches for the 'new' look.  The old style is trashed, forgotten in the index of past trends.

It's not about fame, but it's definitely not about money.  Money, I love talking about money. Money is the dream that nobody can ever remember in the mornings.  You were so close to some entity so amazing you couldn't describe it, let alone remember it.  You fidget all morning in bed trying to remember but the memory has faded, drifted off into the sub-conscious.  You go on the rest of your morning frustrated with your slippery memory.  It is that idealistic drug that everyone wishes to obtain. Only for when they obtain it, all they find is empty happiness.  Money is truly an addiction.  Even when I take the time to highlight our greed and obsession of money, it is just another affirmation of how myself, a product of capitalism, is so money-obsessed.  Money is much like a drug because the mind contorts crazy and far-fetched ideas to try to convince oneself to get more; always more, never enough.  We always promise ourselves happiness after we acquire loads of money.  I really don't think rich people are happy but the grass is always greener on the other side.  We'll never realize how empty money can make us feel until we waste our whole lives searching for it.

I am going to stop rambling and leave you with this quote.  It pertains to a lot of people living their lives doing things that don't necessarily make them happy.  I will expand on this at a later date.

"Life is about living. And you cannot live your life by selling your time.  You can sell your time but you cannot buy it back."

-Paulo Coehlo

being mindful of self-reflections and enjoying alone-time,

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