I wanna live in heaven

• Faust - Bladee and Ecco2K

How many artists have the balls to just straight up admit that they want to live in heaven? How many people for that matter?

I want to live in heaven.

There’s something childish about your deepest desire being for an unrealisable fantasy. The Serenity Prayer says to accept the things you cannot change and being tied to the material world is regrettably one such thing. Better to instead tick enough boxes in the material world that you forget that you ever had higher hopes for your existence. Hearing that line from Faust stopped me in my tracks and made me think ‘Shit, I forgot about that’.

As childish as indulging in fantasy is, there’s also something admirable about diving deep into the recesses of your own soul, taking it all seriously, and communicating it to the outside world, no matter how fanciful it is at face value. It’s admirable precisely because it’s so hard to take all your inner world seriously while being a functioning adult with responsibilities.

Everything is perfect in the void

I don’t want it to be spoiled

I avoid it for so long

But I can’t forever

• Noblest Strive - Bladee

Such is the curse of the melancholic. They say that of the four temperaments (sanguine, choleric, phlegmatic, and melancholic), the melancholic is the richest, but at the greatest cost.

Here’s the deal as laid out by natural selection when coming up with the temperament in the first place: you spend your life being dissatisfied, feeling that there must be something greater and deeper, and the only catharsis is in producing something that evinces that ideal. If you are lucky your creations will captivate an audience and you’ll be rewarded with recognition, influence, and, for the very lucky, money. If you’re not so lucky then you’ll be trapped in existential dread till you drop.

I’m not a neuroscientist but I believe nature achieves this by giving you a deficit of dopamine in some region of your brain which leads you to always be searching for something to fill the hole. This is a particularly cruel hand to be dealt: it’s like a run of the mill hedonic treadmill but on steroids.

And I’m still sinking, need a curse lifted

• Obedient - Bladee and Ecco2k

As if melancholics didn’t already have it hard enough, since the invention of drugs, the hole has become much easier to fill, if only momentarily, so the curse is even worse than before!

Inhale fairytale, real life realisation

Dream life over real life, I ain’t waiting

• 2Beloved - Bladee

But it gets worse still: once upon a time a melancholic creative type could create some art and get some local recognition for it. Nowadays in our digitally connected world, creativity is a winner-takes-all game, which is why right now I’m listening to Bladee, a guy in Sweden on the other side of the world, and not a local Australian. And as AI improves at making its own art, the melancholic may find themselves with even fiercer competition than before. The median melancholic creative is doing it tough.

For humans, the kind of sensitivity and openness required to mine for insights and produce original art comes at the cost of making you a bit of a weirdo. If your works have garnered sufficient acclaim, then nobody cares that you’re a weirdo, in fact they may even expect it. But if not, it’s just another handicap on your daily existence.

Damn is it a terrible time to be a melancholic. And yet I still wouldn’t change it about myself because I do want to experience the richness, no matter the cost.

Even if I can’t live in heaven.

Could it be?

That heaven is fleeting and always

And nothing is forever, and wishing will get you nowhere

• 5 Star Crest - Bladee and Ecco2k