From the outside everything always looks ridiculously easy.
You see someone’s success, beauty, stability, high income, emotional fortitude — and the brain immediately goes, “Ah, lucky them,” “born gifted,” “nothing special.”
Meanwhile, when we look at ourselves, the list of reasons why everything is hard becomes a three-season Netflix special.
We compress other people’s complexity down into a headline.
Reality? There’s no simplicity anywhere — just our laziness in acknowledging the mess.
Take NFT art success.
People see big sales, hype, instant sellouts, nonstop productivity.
Everyone cooks up their own quick explanation: fate, luck, algorithms, favoritism, divine intervention.
It’s like looking at Earth from orbit — you see colors and shapes, but none of the tiny lives and endless effort beneath them.
Success isn’t a big clean shape.
It’s thousands of points: bad decisions, good decisions, effort, burnout, breakthroughs, depression, miracle moments, stupid mistakes, and tiny victories.
But from a distance — oh, how simple it looks.
So here’s this portrait.
It could have been drawn in an hour with fast expressive lines and looked perfectly neat.
Instead, I spent weeks and set almost a million dots — because that’s what real effort looks like: repetitive, exhausting, beautiful, maddening.
Why?
Because I caught myself doing what we all do: simplifying people’s lives.
Because I watched others envy my friends’ success without having a clue what it cost them.
Because I looked back at my own path and realized it wasn’t a road — it was a mosaic of ten thousand choices.
This artwork is basically me writing on the cosmic chalkboard, over and over:
“I must respect the effort behind every journey.”
And every dot — all 700 000 — is my small apology for ever forgetting that.
…
Digital drawing, 2025
65 hours
708400 dots