🐔 or 🥚
This project is in the difficult middle of trying to grow. We search for ways to sustain financially, but the pace of which we receive income versus the devastating inflation of commodities puts us in a "death valley".
Business schools of the empire talk about this concept wherein a startup dips into negative cashflow due to "premature scaling, lack of customer demand, running out of cash, or failure to secure follow-on funding". This usually lasts a few years, which we cannot take on with everything collapsing around us.
We dream of what is considered a simple life by modern capitalist standards: the ability to grow your own food, make your own supplies, and not have to rely on expensive short-term machinery that you constantly need to repair or replace. Powers above make it a luxury to even dream of doing something essential to the human soul: creating art. This reel perfectly captures how the practice is always dimunitized and exploited.
Asking for such simplicity is rendered almost impossible in the current era of concrete boxes with restricted water supply, truly showcasing how abysmal the circumstances are.
Every convenience we learned in the urban landscape were seductive pathways to disconnection. They say "we'll do it for you" so that you forget how to live without them.
This is the warning that flashes rapidly across the use of AI. If not used critically, a person could lose the very ability to think. Mental atrophy as it's called. To erase critical thinking and creativity, which is why the same whistleblowers say these skills become even more vital. Technology at its best is meant to augment, not degenerate.
The vision I had for this endeavor was ambitious because the system claims it is. To build a home that is beautiful, healing, and compassionate is apparently too much to ask for. To speak of it in this essence inside conservative capitalist rooms would earn disparaging feedback. They would call it a "lifestyle business," overlooking why such a space is deeply personal. They do not realize how it reflects the larger sentiments of an entirely exhausted generation seeking relief in a system too rotten.
We lack the financial resources to even build the simplest iteration of this home, so we go out to find funding among those who have the capital. Yet we are told that we must prove our idea viable first with sales.
Those who resonate and are most likely to "buy" into our idea are fellow broke artists. We are building this exactly for those like us, and the system says we must further extract from ourselves as "evidence" of success.
Thus the title of this article.
Either way, we seem pretty cooked. Would you like the eggs omlete or sunnyside up?
