The Unease
I began thinking about this essay not from theory, but from unease. Over the past several years, I’ve noticed that making art simply because one wants to—without a clear plan for reception or validation—has started to feel strange, even socially suspect. What once felt natural now feels lonely.
I didn’t arrive at this question academically. I arrived at it by paying attention to how certain things I said started landing differently.
There was a time—not that long ago—when artistic expression was widely understood as something internal. You made things because you wanted to. Because an image, a melody, or an idea wouldn’t leave you alone. The reward wasn’t applause so much as alignment: the sense that what you made was honest, that it reflected something true about you.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, this orientation toward art felt normal. Bands inspired other bands. Films made people want to make films. Appreciation was active, generative. Art didn’t just produce audiences; it produced creators.
At some point, that posture began to feel out of step with the culture around it. Making something without an audience in mind now risks being read as indulgent or out of touch. Independence can sound like ego. And rather than dismissing that shift, I wanted to understand it—because the loneliness I felt wasn’t merely personal. It seemed structural.
The Shift in Fandom
I noticed the change most clearly in fandom culture.
Previously, loving an artist often meant being inspired to make something of your own. The call to action was implicit: go and do likewise. Today, the call to action is more explicit and more constrained. Buy tickets. Buy merch. Participate. Make fan art.
None of this is inherently wrong. Fan art, in particular, can be meaningful and even deeply fulfilling. But it is, by nature, communal. It is expression generated within a shared symbolic environment, oriented toward collective enjoyment rather than solitary compulsion.
This is where the tension surfaced for me.
We seem to live in a moment where community has become the primary site of meaning. Belonging feels urgent. Art increasingly functions as connective tissue rather than as a site of self-exploration. In that landscape, the solitary artist—driven by an internal compass and unconcerned with immediate reception—can feel outdated, even vaguely selfish.
That observation led me to a question I couldn’t shake: Was the earlier emphasis on self-expression merely disguised egotism? Or have we swung the pendulum so far toward communal validation that we’ve lost something essential?
When Rejection Feels Existential
At some point, I realized I wasn’t only critiquing culture. I was trying to understand why rejection now feels existential.
Why does hearing “this is ugly” or “I don’t get this” feel like a judgment on the self rather than the work? Why has resonance become synonymous with worth? Why does invisibility feel like erasure?
It became clear that art had quietly taken on a new burden. It wasn’t just something we made; it was something that proved we mattered. If the work connects, I exist. If it doesn’t, maybe I don’t.
That realization forced a deeper question: What actually validates a human being?
Without setting out to write theology, I found myself circling it anyway.
Christian Individualism
Christian thought begins with a claim that is increasingly counterintuitive: human worth is intrinsic. People are not valuable because they are useful, visible, or affirmed. They are valuable because they are human.
Theologically, this rests on the idea that human beings are made in the image of God. God does not create out of need, insecurity, or a desire for validation. Creation flows from fullness, not deficiency. Creativity, in this sense, is not a strategy—it is an expression of being.
This is what I mean by Christian individualism. Not isolation. Not ego. But the conviction that a person’s worth precedes social recognition, and that creation can be an overflow of that worth rather than a bid for belonging.
From this angle, making art for yourself is not antisocial. It is ontological. It flows from who you are, not from what you need others to confirm.
Darwinian Collectivism
By contrast, much contemporary art-for-connection seems shaped by a different logic—one I’ve come to think of as Darwinian collectivism.
Here, value is not assumed; it is negotiated. Belonging confers legitimacy. Praxis comes before ethos: you act in order to belong, and belief follows. Difference becomes risky. Sameness becomes safe.
In this framework, art that doesn’t circulate feels pointless. Work that doesn’t connect socially feels irresponsible. Visibility is no longer a byproduct; it is the goal.
I don’t think this shift happened for a single reason, and I don’t think it was malicious. It feels more like an accumulation of pressures.
Part of it is a reaction against the late twentieth-century version of individualism, which often collapsed into narcissism. “Be yourself” slowly drifted into “center yourself,” and many people experienced that as isolating rather than liberating. The cultural correction, however, didn’t distinguish clearly between egotism and intrinsic dignity. Both were rejected together.
At the same time, traditional sources of belonging—family, church, local institutions—have weakened for many people. Community didn’t disappear; it relocated. People began searching for belonging elsewhere, and art became one of the available sites where that hunger could be expressed.
Layered on top of this is the internet’s constant emphasis on connection. Social platforms reward immediacy, repetition, and recognizability. Over time, this normalizes sameness and makes deviation feel costly. When everyone is always connected, creating something only for yourself can start to feel like a refusal rather than a choice.
Taken together, these forces shift the cultural center of gravity. Art-for-self doesn’t vanish—but it becomes culturally unintelligible.
The Problem With Connection Alone
At this point, it’s important to be precise.
The problem is not connection itself. Art can connect us to others, and art can connect us to ourselves. Both forms of connection are human and good.
The problem arises when social or collective relevance becomes the sole measure of value—when connection to others eclipses internal alignment as the primary source of validation. In that scenario, creativity slowly turns into performance, and worth becomes conditional.
Christian individualism insists that value comes first. Community responds to it. Darwinian collectivism reverses that order.
The Right to Appear
If art is already valid in itself, a reasonable question follows: why publish it at all? Why release work into public space if it does not require validation to be real?
The answer still emerges from Christian individualism. To say that a human being has inherent worth is also to say that they have the right to appear—to take up space, to express the fact of their existence. This is not a claim to attention or agreement, but to presence.
Creation is one of the primary ways humans inhabit the world. To make something and place it somewhere—privately or publicly—is an extension of being embodied and real. In that sense, a platform for expression is not a reward granted by the collective; it is a right that flows from personhood itself.
Publishing, then, is not a contradiction of intrinsic validity. It is its consequence. The work does not ask permission to exist. The creator simply exercises the freedom to let it be seen.
Others are free to engage or not engage. What matters is that the right to speak precedes the response.
What Technology Certifies
At this point, a position has to be taken.
There is such a thing as a self—real, coherent, and meaningful—that does not depend on external validation to exist. Any framework that denies this does not merely misunderstand creativity; it quietly dissolves personhood.
Across history, movements obsessed with cohesion—political, cultural, or religious—tend to erode the individual. Sometimes this is explicit; sometimes it hides behind the language of unity, belonging, or efficiency. In every case, the individual becomes a problem precisely because they are irreducible.
This logic is not new. What is new is the way technological systems now validate it. Algorithms reward sameness. Optimization favors predictability. Homogeneity performs better under measurable conditions. In purely functional terms, cohesion appears efficient, scalable, and rational.
Technology does not invent this worldview; it certifies it. It provides constant feedback that uniformity works, that alignment outperforms deviation, and that difference is costly.
What survives under these conditions is not what is true or meaningful, but what is adaptive.
The Cost of Visibility
The loneliness that accompanies making art without validation may not mean that this way of creating is obsolete. It may mean it is costly in a culture that increasingly treats visibility as permission rather than as a right.
Christian individualism insists that worth comes first. From that worth flows creation, expression, and the freedom to appear publicly without begging for legitimacy. Community, when it is healthy, responds to this—not by manufacturing value, but by recognizing it.
Belonging should never be the price of being. It should be the fruit of it.
To create from an internal compass, and to publish without demanding affirmation, is not a retreat from society. It is a refusal to let social relevance decide who is allowed to exist.