Stop romanticizing what you structurally refuse to support

Something occurred to me today — the same thing that occurred to me months ago, but didn’t yet have the capacity to fully feel.

People become quite attached to your identity — I've written about this before here and here — but in this case specifically, it’s the part of me people found inspiring.

It's shocking, really... how many people need and want me to:

Be the first.
Build the vision.
Lead the way.
Trust.
Keep going.
Risk it all.
Manifest the dream.

It appears that people love the symbolic role I play more than the material reality I live. It doesn't matter how much I've lived to tell a confusing tale, they’ll passionately tell me that my vision can succeed, that I just have to believe in myself, be positive, stay committed, trust the process, and keep creating.

But the moment I counter that optimism with actual realities — with lived experience, 20 years of evidence, trends, numbers, consumer behavior, or economic viability — suddenly people become defensive.

And today, that made me ask a different set of questions, out loud, and probably more confrontationally than I intended:

Are you or someone you know actually purchasing art from local artists?

Are you or someone you know working with a creative consultant to clarify a brand's messaging?

Are you or someone you know investing in long-term somatic practice or nervous system transformation?

Because there’s a difference between emotionally supporting an idea and materially sustaining it.

That distinction matters.

And I've lived it. People love to pretend that their encouragement and admiration magically appears as food on my table.

And I'm so tired of it.

I'm tired of others glamorizing the path of being in these spaces while they sit safely on the sidelines, eternally remaining in the brainstorming process.

I'm done being the source of inspiration.

I'm done being the one who holds the line, when everything in my body is screaming "Bullshit."

I'm done with others living vicariously through me.

I'm done being the "brave" one. The one who goes first.

All while others refuse to acknowledge that many people can only afford to invest in these industries by abandoning parts of themselves elsewhere. By working jobs they don’t resonate with just to survive.

I’m not saying there’s no market for creative or wellness work. There obviously is. People make careers in art, writing, design, alternative health, somatic healing and other wellness industries every day. I'm one of them.

But having a market is not the same thing as having stable, structurally sustained demand. What people say they want, what they engage with, and what they can consistently support financially are all shaped by the same conditions that produce exhaustion, urgency, and fragmented attention. In that sense, the “market” is not separate from the culture — it is an expression of it.

That’s not cynicism. It’s observation.

And I find people resist these conversations not because they threaten optimism, but because they threaten the emotional frameworks many people use to survive.

Because once you fully confront how unsupported most nontraditional labor actually is — how many creatives, entrepreneurs, and small businesses are surviving through overwork, debt, second jobs, burnout, family support, or years of undercompensated effort — the fantasy that passion or positivity alone overcomes structural reality begins to crack.

And from lived experience, that contradiction creates a lot of grief.

The grief of realizing that many people will spend most of their lives serving systems they do not believe in simply to survive within them.

The grief of recognizing how much exhaustion modern life requires just to maintain basic stability.

The grief of understanding that awareness alone does not guarantee change.

The grief that destabilizes identity.

And I think many people avoid fully feeling that grief because once it is fully felt, performance becomes harder.

Much harder.

Because once the fantasy cracks, there's consequences.

At that point, the questions are no longer out there, they're in the body, fully alive and needing.

"What am I going to do about it?"

And yes, there are people genuinely embodying that question and giving space for Life to reorganize their lives around the answer. But there are many more it seems hoping that a small minority of people carrying the emotional, financial, and creative labor will somehow be enough to transform the whole system.

It won't be.

These conversations don't create so much defensiveness because they threaten optimism or spiritual frameworks... but because they threaten emotional survival strategies.

If people fully allowed themselves to feel the grief underneath these realities — the exhaustion, the limitation, the dependency, the compromise, the loss of agency — many would have to confront how little of modern life is actually structured around what humans claim to value.

And that grief is not abstract. It’s physical. It lives in the body as burnout, numbness, overwork, chronic striving, compulsive positivity, and the desperate need to believe things are improving simply because we are talking about them more openly.

But awareness alone does not transform systems. Naming a wound is not the same thing as reorganizing society around healing it.

So the coping mechanism becomes mistaking realism for pessimism.

It becomes easier to dismiss reality than to confront the powerlessness, dependency, and grief that reality evokes.

The grief of realizing how much of life is spent surviving within systems you did not design.

The grief of recognizing that life is not painless, permanent, or organized around human fulfillment.

It seems the second someone acknowledges structural limitations, they’re treated as though they’re “killing the dream."

And the pressure doesn’t stop there.

When artists, creatives, or entrepreneurs eventually choose stability, employment, or a different path entirely, they’re often quietly judged for that too.

As though stepping away from chronic financial instability reflects a failure of belief rather than a response to material reality.

As though exhaustion, burnout, changing priorities, or economic limitation are moral shortcomings instead of human conditions.

People romanticize risk right up until someone no longer wants to carry it.

And I think that reveals something uncomfortable: many people are emotionally invested in the existence of “dreamers” far more than they are invested in creating conditions where those dreamers can sustainably live.

In that sense, optimism can become its own form of social pressure.

A demand to continue performing possibility for others, even when your body, finances, or lived reality are telling a more complicated truth.

Observing economic conditions is not the same thing as rejecting imagination.

A society can celebrate creativity culturally while underfunding it materially.

And I think that’s what people don’t want to confront.

People love the idea of artists. Of entrepreneurs. Of paving your own path. They love inspirational stories about creators overcoming impossible odds. They love the symbolism of passion, purpose, and authenticity. Entire industries are built around romanticizing the pursuit of dreams.

But admiration does not automatically translate into financial support.

Encouragement is easy.

Sustained economic participation is harder.

Many people will tell creatives to “keep going,” but how many are:

consistently buying independent work,
paying fair prices,
funding experimental projects,
supporting local entrepreneurs and small businesses long-term,
or helping create systems that allow people to survive without burnout?

That’s the uncomfortable part of the conversation.

Because when you look closely, many small businesses are not fully sustained by market demand alone. A huge amount of labor is subsidized through:

second jobs,
family support,
personal debt,
underpaid labor,
exhaustion,
or years of uncompensated effort.

And yet society still frames creative success as though it’s simply a matter of belief or perseverance.

As if structural economics have nothing to do with outcomes.

But markets matter.

Disposable income matters.

Audience behavior matters.

Infrastructure matters.

You can deeply value art while also acknowledging that the average consumer may not spend enough money on independent creative work to sustain most creators financially.

Both things can be true at the same time.

What frustrates me is that people often hear this kind of analysis as cynicism. They interpret realism as emotional defeat. But I don’t think refusing to ignore economic conditions is negative.

I think it’s honest.

And honestly, if more people were willing to have these conversations openly, creatives might be able to build healthier expectations, better systems, and more sustainable models instead of constantly being trapped between fantasy and survival.

So no, I’m not saying dreams are fake.

I’m saying inspiration without infrastructure is fragile.

Awareness without material change is fragile.

And optimism that cannot tolerate reality eventually becomes another form of avoidance.

Maybe asking difficult economic and emotional questions isn’t negativity at all.

Maybe it’s the beginning of responsibility.

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Stop romanticizing what you structurally refuse to support

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