Yes, it is hard.<p>I have a very good friend who quit his job in finance three years ago to focus on photography. (It&#x27;s been a significant improvement to his health and happiness, but that&#x27;s a story for a different day.) He has been doing a lot of very abstract photography, lately. He shoots and develops his own film in a pinhole camera he built, and the imagery is intentionally motion-blurred. He gets heaps of praise from other photographers, and tons of vitriol from randos on the internet. It&#x27;s all of the very predictable, &quot;this is bullshit, anyone could do this,&quot; kind. That&#x27;s not true at all, the images are much harder to make than you would think. But he has not replied to the critics directly. Instead he works on making the images more obviously about the sort of dream- or ghost-like qualities he&#x27;s chasing.<p>It is so easy to just dismiss a critic. &quot;They don&#x27;t understand what I&#x27;m trying to do.&quot; What&#x27;s harder is building that explanation of what you&#x27;re trying to do in what you&#x27;re trying to do. It makes us better to not completely dismiss the critics.<p>And you do it for the next person. You&#x27;ve pretty much lost a person forever if they get to the level of vitriol. Don&#x27;t bother with replying to them.<p>For me, I have a project that I care very much about. I want to make it work, because it has things in it that I want in my life. I haven&#x27;t ever cared about my side projects as much as this one--which has more to say about this particular project than my past projects, I cared very much about some of them. Which is why I have to be honest about it. I can&#x27;t delude myself about it, because I certainly won&#x27;t be able to delude anyone else about it. I don&#x27;t have that kind of social media power.