transcript
"Pretty shitty how baseline human activities like singing, dancing, and making art got turned into skills instead of being seen as behaviors, so now it's like 'the point of doing them is to get good at them' and not 'this is a thing humans do, the way birds sing and bees make hives.'"
I think I get the point they're making, but eeehhh? I don't think "art is something inherently human" and "you can (and maybe even should!) be improving your abilities in art" are in conflict with each other. Humans have been able to make art for as long as we've been human, but we've also had an implicit understanding of seeing two pieces of art and picking which ones we preferred in the moment. Capitalism didn't really change that, we've had masters and apprentices since antiquity.
Couldn't we say that the desire to make better art and the anxiety that comes with examining your own progress just as easily be called a behaviour unique to humans?
(Edit: writing that last part made me come up with the image of bees that have imposter syndrome about how they build their hives and I don't know how to feel about that)
Also just as an observation: monotony is boring and I think aversion to boredom is a big reason people seek different things (maybe even things that require more skill to perform). Who wants to dance the same dance their whole life?
I feel like people in the past were as susceptible to being bored that we are -- maybe even more because there were a lot fewer things to actually do back then.