Dear PK,

Any endeavor that involves the contributions of others inevitably attracts adolescent creative leeches. They have never built or managed a large project on their own and have neither the slightest grasp of the magnitude of work involved nor any interest in trying to understand it. They have thus only interacted on any meaningful level with a set of carefully-culled “peers” whose interests mirror their own to an alarming degree—the same phenomenon you surely remember from the public education institution, though now made available to adolescents of all ages with the rise of instantaneous global communication. Accordingly, the idea that others may not share the same perspective on the creative process becomes literally unthinkable.

As you have witnessed first-hand on many occasion, the end result is a xenophobic and binary view of the world, where anything short of unconditional adoration for the person’s particulars is interpreted as a direct and hostile attack on those particulars, and often—especially for those who only know to define themselves in terms of microscopic interests—as an attack on the person as well.

Such people must either learn to interact with colorful and heterogenous groups, or doom themselves to lives of drifting between shrinking subcultures, clinging to any source of mutual validation for their quirk of the week.

Continue building things and sharing them with the world; anyone who takes offense that your creations are not personally tailored is not worth dealing with, let alone stressing about.

PS I would like to discuss these “other things” at a later date.