Q: how do you balance this take with e.g. the financial reality of artists? i was thinking about this with relation to art, and even a thousand years ago, a lot of paintings and music were made presumably for religious patronage or rich benefactors, and not necessarily at one's own creative whims. idk
A: you can surely make things that other people like, by making things that you like, and then other people who have similar tastes to you will like it too. but if you are going against your tastes, then you'll actually have no idea what you're doing. again, like painting with colors you can't see. or baking with ingredients you can't taste. For example, you may notice that some other people like "slime" and you don't like such slime, if you say "well now i'll just make slime, and those people will like it", well, the thing is, those people obviously are seeing something in slime that you can't see. so if you try to make slime for those people, you'll have no idea how to make it because you don't know what they like and don't like about it. I just thought of a better example: let's say you are surrounded by people speaking a foreign language. you don't understand a word of that language: it sounds like nonsense to you. but you want to please the people who do speak it, so you try to write stories in that language. so you write the stories in nonsense because, to you, that's what that language sounds like. i think you see where i'm going with this