Thought.is

The children or grandchildren of Irish immigrants, draping themselves in the Tricolour and swaths of green in their new Facebook profile picture. The IRA iconography; the Bobby Sands quotes.

Abraham Maslow came up with the term “peak experience” to describe the rare, ecstatic state a person can find themselves in through deep meditation, intense love, great art or the majestic beauty of nature. Or mushrooms.

At the end of the tour, the guide asked for a show of hands to see who would consider a job at the factory, devoted now to making tractors rather than planes. Not a single hand was raised.

Dr. James Kaufman coined the term ‘The Sylvia Plath Effect’ to describe the high prevalence of mental illness among artists. Particularly poets. Even more particularly, female poets. It makes sense. High levels of creativity require a willingness to defy convention, to go against the crowd. And any kind of genius requires a mind that works differently to most people’s; that in itself is indicative of mental illness.

You’ll learn skills you never wanted to have, and the time you used to spend making art will now be swallowed up by the endless task of marketing yourself in a world of seven billion voices, all shouting at once.