Not Talented Enough

As I age, I find that the things I learned in prior years, which I considered skills and made me money then, aren't valuable anymore. I am slipping back into mediocrity and middle age with little to recommend me other than showing up on time and knowing where the apostrophe goes in I-t-s. The nicest thing I can do for society is stay in my hole, out of the way.

So when I watch an anime like the Pet Girl of Sakurasou (Cherry Blossom Hall), which is about being the normal untalented person surrounded by genius level talent (and quirks), I feel his pain. I honestly want to cry on his behalf, and know that his decision to leave the dorm, to move away from the talent that outshines everybody else, is the only sane thing to do. I had talented friends in junior high and high school, and nothing I did mattered at all. They got the attention. They were special. I wasn't. That is a life defining experience. The show makes itself out to be cheerful dullness, but its actually serious subject matter all the way through. It is a drama, not a comedy.

Now that I'm older, and I've wasted twenty years on useless dreams, like a career and a wife, and it has come to nothing, seeing a kid at the start of his career getting stomped carelessly because the market is saturated with more talented and able people, and his ambition exceeds his ability, and even his ambition is modest in comparison to their talents. He's a dim bulb. He won't get anywhere. The best he can hope for is talent management, because he has no talent himself. And being constantly reminded of this is one of the painful bits in the anime, and an extremely pointed bit they keep hammering home. Like a nail.

Of course, he is manipulated into staying, because his distractions from achievement are convenient for others. It frees them up to achieve more. And it tears him up, worse as he tries to talk himself into accepting it. I think this is why book editors are such bastards. They aren't writers themselves, and the resent those who can create, and attack those they can while claiming its to make those surviving authors better. Its really just endless violence driven by jealousy. The kid is more of a janitor than a talent manager. He doesn't have the subtlety to manipulate the best out of talent. That's for others, with talents in manipulation. They even show you that. This kid really is going nowhere, but he's next to people who are, temporarily next to them. They'll graduate and move on into careers and he'll end up wiping down tables and dreaming of very modest achievements he doesn't have the talent for. And that's really harsh, but the art world in Japan is industrialized, like everything else. If you can't produce highest quality on demand, and take direction as required to meet the market, you are wasting everyone's time and will end up ignored.

Kinda like my useless degree, and my not really skills. It's all very depressing. I keep cutting the fat off my ambitions and dreams and everything just gets smaller and smaller, like a hamster wheel. Going nowhere. This economy no longer has use for me. I have sufficient scruples not to break the law, and not to take jobs that deliberately and specifically try to actually kill you, like welding for example. But in the end, like the kid in the show, we end up doing what we're able, and that ends up not being very much at all.