When You’re Envious of All the ‘Likes’

As I roll up and store away in the closet yet another drawing I’ve spent hours and hours on, I ask why I seem destined to languish in artistic obscurity while popularity comes so readily to others. And why can’t I have a trust fund and/or an anonymous benefactor who funds a glamorously nomadic lifestyle for my family?

Then the questions turn into accusations and become more malevolent: Hardly anyone likes your art because it’s just not that good. You should give up. It’s pointless. Your house will always be a disaster. Everyone else has figured out some essential key to life that you’ll just never have. YOU will always be a disaster.

The other day I laughed out loud at a phrase I read in a new article, “Click Farms.” We are so overcome with a pathological thirst for “likes” and affirmation of our online images that there is an industry devoted to generating fake ones. Quantity trumps quality, trumps authenticity at all, apparently, and somewhere there is a farm with rows of green, tender, dew-kissed “likes,” nearly ripe for indiscriminate dispersal.


Ashley Lande
Ashley Lande
Ashley Lande is a Jesus freak, artist and writer who lives in a tiny town in the Flint Hills of Kansas with her husband, two kids, two dogs and a small flock of chickens. Her work and blog are at www.ashleylande.com.

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