Artists have been sold a lie: that you can’t create real work unless you’re broken.

Pain sells. Trauma gets streams. Heartbreak goes viral. So the industry rewards artists who only create when they’re suffering, and punishes those who make art from healing, joy, or stability.

But here’s what nobody talks about: when artists only document pain without pairing it with resolution, they’re not just expressing themselves. They’re programming audiences to expect relationships to fail, success to be traumatic, and healing to be impossible.

Art isn’t neutral. It shapes how people see the world. And right now, most of what we’re creating is making the world uglier, not more bearable.

This episode is a call to artists: You have more power than you realize. Your work reflect reality and also constructs it. So what are you building?

Topics covered:

• Why the music industry conditions artists to create only from pain

• How gangster rap was weaponized against Black communities

• The difference between processing pain and weaponizing it

• Why creating beauty is rebellion, not escapism

• How to turn lived experience into masterpieces, not just content

This isn’t about toxic positivity or pretending pain doesn’t exist. It’s about refusing to let pain be the only thing worth creating from.

Leave this world more beautiful than you found it.

Full episode: So You’re Living in a Simulation podcast.

https://joliartist.com/portal

We’ve been taught that pain requires a target. Someone hurt you, so you hurt them back. Someone triggers you, so you defend yourself. The cycle repeats until you’re chronically inflamed and physiologically worn down.

But what if the problem is that you’re treating your nervous system like it has to fight every battle you’re invited to?

Pain is information. Inflammation is a signal. That tightness in your chest when you get a certain kind of text message is your body reporting that something needs attention. Not retaliation. Attention.

The culture trains you to look outward for resolution. Closure from the person who hurt you. Validation from the person who triggered you. Apologies, explanations, admissions of guilt. But none of that actually heals the physiological response you’re having in real time. None of it stops the cortisol. None of it regulates your nervous system.

Self regulation means recognizing that lashing out when you’re in pain just adds another layer of damage. Knowing this, healing yourself first becomes structurally necessary.

This episode covers why modern serial dating creates repeated chemical bereavement, how to redirect attack energy into healing energy, and why the “little you” inside deserves protection even when no one else is listening.

Full episode: So You’re Living in a Simulation podcast. Available everywhere.

https://www.joliartist.com/portal

#selfregulation #nervousystem #trauma #moderndating #healing #inflammation #consciousness #mentalhealth

Joli tackles simulation theory, reincarnation, and romantic programming in an episode that’s equal parts metaphysics seminar and therapy session with your most unhinged friend.

The core provocation, that the person you’re “inexplicably drawn to” might be someone who killed you in a past life, is the kind of idea that sounds absurd until you realize how much cultural mythology around soulmates relies on magical thinking and manufactured scarcity.What makes this work isn’t the tightness of the argument (there isn’t one), but Joli’s willingness to think out loud without protecting her credibility.

She’s 50/50 on astrology, admits to impulsively blocking people, and pivots from discussing fractured superintelligence to pranking her future self on mushrooms. It’s messy in the way real intellectual exploration is messy: following threads, abandoning them, circling back.The episode’s strongest insight is simple: compatibility is overrated, consciousness isn’t. In a media landscape saturated with manifestation culture and “divine timing” rhetoric, Joli’s insistence that relationships require work, friction, and mutual wakefulness feels almost radical. The “temporal jellyfish” Man O’ War) metaphor, that we’re colonies of selves across time with little empathy for our future variants, explains more about self sabotage than most self help frameworks manage in entire books.For listeners exhausted by spiritual bypassing and algorithmic positivity, this is a necessary counterweight. Rather than selling certainty or comfort, Joli models what it looks like to question everything, including yourself.Best for: Philosophy nerds, simulation theory skeptics, anyone suspicious of rom com logic.Follow: @Joli.Artist | [joliartist.com/portal](http://joliartist.com/portal)#simulation #soulmates #consciousness #temporaljellyfish #philosophy #relationships-----