I really enjoy art. I frequently watch niche artsy movies at the arthouse cinema, attend sparsely attended concerts of music that most people describe as random noise, and spend a lot of time in online communities dedicated to discussing this type of art.

In such environments, nearly all the artists and accompanying enthusiasts are homogeneous, in one of the worst ways possible.

There is a general culture where everyone harbors moronic far-left political views, is misanthropic, overly negative, contrarian, rejects mainstream society, looks down on working hard, and generally hates everyone else. Nearly all the artists and communities I’m exposed to share the exact same vibe as those who post on /r/redscarepod, one of the meanest online communities I’ve encountered.

I was recently reading Philip Glass’s amazing book, which reveals an art community in the 1950s-1970s United States where people weren’t like this. I’ve been trying to figure out what changed.

My take is that everything in our society now is expensive; any career requires years of hard work, a lot of conformity, and planning to succeed; it’s either you commit 100% to making it in this society or you don’t. But if you don’t, you’re not going to advance in it. In Philip Glass’ time, anyone could afford to live in Manhattan. To work as an artist, you could work part-time in a job you just picked up. You didn’t need to be invested in the conventional conformist path just to be a person.

Artists and artsy people today generally see themselves as smart, talented individuals who are superior to most others and need to build a framework that makes them feel better about their current position in society. These people can’t afford to live in New York City, or generally enjoy material comforts or status in the ways they’d want, and they believe they deserve such status, so they blame society and rebel for making them feel like losers.