[ellius]

I think ultimately we’re going to go back and forth about an unanswerable question: what fulfills people? You can’t answer it for anyone else. One artist will need the audience as a foil; another will be perfectly happy to toil away in obscurity. To my mind the best advice is “try a lot of things and see what feels right to you; don’t be dogmatic about your approach until you have a very high level of confidence based on experience.” Beyond that I’m just not sure this is a question with a meaningful answer.

[folksinger]

This is the solipsistic perspective of someone floating in the ocean, looking in only one direction and sure they are alone, sure they are surrounded by nothing but an endless expanse, completely unaware that they are just a few hundred feet from the shoreline that lies behind them.

The answer is not different, it is the same for EVERYONE! Turn around and swim back to land!

[ellius]

Recognizing that people are unique does not immediately equate to solipsism. That would be like me saying that recognizing any kind of commonality immediately implies collectivism.