Being a "Tortured Artist" Is LOSER Behavior

Why you shouldn’t emulate those who were successful despite themselves and their self-destructive behavior:

Transcript:

I wrote a post recently that said something along the lines of: young male writers tend to look up to tortured artists like Jack Kerouac, Hunter S. Thompson, and Ernest Hemingway. There's nothing really wrong with that per se — all those guys were great artists and great writers. They provided an example to emulate from the standpoint of their storytelling, their clarity and communication, that type of stuff.

But the belief that you also need to have a crazy, wild lifestyle — out-of-control substance use, turbulence in your personal or professional life — as a necessary part of the recipe, that's where it goes wrong. If you really examine those guys' lives, they all ended themselves. Hemingway and Thompson definitely did. Kerouac may have drank himself to death. It's a dangerous path.

This came back into my frame of mind when I was listening to the Shawn Ryan Show. The guest, David Rutherford — a Navy SEAL and CIA contractor — talked about how in college he was an art major and fell into this same trance. He mentioned figures like Ken Kesey and Jim Morrison: wild, crazy guys who ultimately were really self-destructive. As he's telling the story, he describes thinking, "I want to be an artist, so I have to take things to the limit and push things really far." Sure enough, while still in college as an art major, he ended up loading a shotgun and sitting there with it, almost ending it all.

This is something I reflected on personally. I did an exercise once with a men's coach named Kyree Oliver. He asked me to name 3 people I admire and look up to. One of them was kind of a tortured artist type — more of an entrepreneur, but someone who lived his life in an artistic way: John McAfee. Wild and crazy guy, had at least a dozen kids with a ton of different women, traveling the world, an eccentric tech entrepreneur.

As I mentioned a few others, I started to realize I was looking at these people as examples, and I could see the path toward walking that way myself. This whole concept of being a tortured artist — a starving artist, a wild and crazy person — where everything you do, however you screw up your own life or other people's lives, is in service of the art... it's just not true. And it's a dangerous line of thinking.

You start to emulate these people not just in their craft, but in the way they live. You don't think through the actual ramifications, or consider what their real day-to-day life experience was — how they felt about themselves, their spirituality, their emotions. That's probably not a place you want to live.

If you actually read about their personal lives, their financial lives, their professional lives, it opens your eyes a little. Yeah, he may have written a great book, but he died alone — or ended himself alone. It's not a healthy example to emulate.

Taking that forward and thinking about the life I want to live: you can inject art into how you live and still pursue a fulfilling life without following that archetype. You can strive to be the best person you can be in all the right ways — prioritizing family, your spiritual life, your emotional life — and still do great work and make great things. Those aren't mutually exclusive.

Pain and negative experience can inspire art sometimes, for sure. But it's not a prerequisite for doing great work. Some of this thinking probably stems from feeling like your own life is boring or too routine...

Hemingway was fishing off Cuba, hunting big game in Africa. Hunter S. Thompson was doing drugs in Las Vegas for Rolling Stone. Those things are cool, sure — but they're not necessary ingredients.

Let go of that loser behavior. Choose better examples to live after, or you risk going down the wrong path believing you need self-inflicted pain to make an impact.

-Michael McGovern

The Wildman Path

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