Dusk of life in the dimming light of motivation

I don't see beauty anymore. I was once a photographer and graphic designer. I realized this when I was watching the film Chasing Ice. The photographer featured in the film was marveling at the beauty of his subjects. I realized that I once marveled at the same subjects, but no more. It reminded me how my digital photography became more problematic, with blurring, ISO settings issues, exposure problems, flash problems, etc. I was gradually putting less and less thought into my projects, and they suffered.

[ at this point I was going to rant about how miserable my life was, but then something dawned.]

It's simple conditioning really. If you don't get a reward for doing something, you stop doing it. I wasn't getting a reward because I was expecting the reward from certain individuals. I allowed myself to be demotivated by those people and it gave them a sense of superiority over me. I fell for it. They won.

When you do something to try to impress certain people, it will feel like a failure. If what you love to do does not impress certain people and they make you feel like your effort is a waste of time, then you should immediately find new people who will be impressed by what you do, and keep doing what you love.

There may be people who are impressed by what you do, but you don't value their opinions because they stand in the shadow of the people you are trying to impress. It turns out that people with larger shadows made their shadows larger through acts of malevolence. Those people are not worth your time. They are passive-aggressive in that they choose certain words to describe your efforts in a dimmer light than theirs. My mother once described my efforts to sell funny postcards I created with Adobe Photoshop as "peddling."