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I feel like COVID should have put the lie to this delusion, but as always, apparently no one learned anything from COVID. We had a natural experiment where most of us were locked inside with pay and absolutely nothing but time to self-actualize, create, organize our lives for weeks/months. And what did we do? We watched Tiger King and played Among Us and learned how to commit various types of fraud at an industrial scale. Some of us engaged in some casual rioting and arson. Some of us planted half a garden we immediately abandoned once the bars opened back up. Nobody made any good art. To the extent people made anything at all, it was insufferable naval-gazing drivel. Not one of my "artist" friends took the opportunity to actually write that novel or record that album they all swear is in them somewhere.
Art is subjective but I will note a decent number of people created really amazing content in a niche community I'm a part of during the COVID days, and now that those days are over a lot of these people no longer produce content. Nothing too crazy big but the bigger works probably had 100s of hours of work put into it over the course of months. The creatives had more time and also had a bigger audience to get their work out to. With things returning to normal the audience size diminished and people had to return to their day to day jobs so activity simply isn't what it was back then.
I don't disagree with your point about people that say they want to do X but never do X. People like the idea of being a writer or artist or creative type more than actually doing the work. Making anything takes work. There are the artists that don't have a career but do spend like 10 hours a day drawing, and then there are "artists" that draw once a month and spend 95% of their free time scrolling reddit and watching TV shows. I don't think there is much you can say that is going to flip the second type of person to the first type.
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