Tuesday, October 27, 2009

No time for love

Almost 2 decades ago, Andrew (Andy) Warhol said in future everyone will have “15 minutes of fame”.

With a zillion mediums and a zillion things to do, there is ample chance of the prediction turning out to be true.

15 minutes of fame may come easy but making it last longer is a challenge.

Was actually reading up some stuff on highly successful people like Michael Jackson, Marylyn Monroe, John Lenon and the likes, and even though on the surface most of these people had a star studded flashy lifestyle, but underneath their shiny skin lived a unrest and unfulfilled soul.

Maybe the discontentment, the disillusionment, the sadness was their recipe for genius, but then each one of them, at certain times in their lives had expressed unfulfilled desires and longing for genuine relations.

Recently I read about the tapes that MJ had recorded earlier this decade where in he was talking about his life, his family, his work, his relationships and his belief system. It was saddening to hear that he said he was craving love, for genuine feelings. He had become so disillusioned that he had started doubting the intentions of everyone he met. He acknowledged that he was on the road to self destruction.

The more I read about the lives of artists and geniuses, I find some facts that are eerily common with all of them. One is that most of them have disturbed childhoods, they have sudden stardom, they have multiple complex relationships in quick successions, they have drug abuse problems, they have high levels of emotional stress, they earn negative media publicity, they run into huge debts and they eventually die unnatural sudden deaths. I believe they start out with a passion for their art and aim for humble beginnings and then the fame, popularity and strange fixations ruins the balance of their lives and they lose control . I know by saying this I am over simplifying things, but however complicated a picture you draw, the gist would more or less be this.

You work all the way to the top and then you realize that the money you earned becomes so worthless because you cant buy love and maybe you somehow cease to have time for it.

So what does it come back to? Contentment? Peace? Love?

I wonder if having-no-time-for-love is same as having no desire to feel loved. Is it the same thing?