When Art Imitates Life — A Perfect Metaphor for the Current Human Condition

I am not your typical art lover.

I admire beauty, of course, and appreciate the beneficial impact it has on the culture and our heritage at large. I may even go to the odd gallery from time to time.

But sometimes you see something you cannot help but admire and be moved by.

This is a piece of art called ‘Can’t Help Myself’ by Sun Yuan & Peng Yu.

It was a robot arm programmed to try to contain the hydraulic fluid that was (deliberately) leaking out and required to keep itself running…

The premise being that if too much of the fluid escapes, it will cause the robot to malfunction and die so it is desperately trying to pull it back to continue to fight for another day.

They also gave the robot the ability to do these ‘happy dances’ to spectators.

When the project was first launched in 2016, it danced around spending most of its time interacting with the crowd since it could quickly pull back the small spillage. It continued to do this showboating as it delayed its own self-care and maintenance.

As time went on, the leakages got bigger and bigger.

A few years later… it began to look tired and hopeless as there just wasn’t enough time to dance anymore — it just had to focus on its own survival. The robot arm only had enough time to try to keep itself alive as the amount of leaked fluid became unmanageable as the spill grew and grew over time. It was losing too much ‘life’.

Its purpose was one thing, but it had prioritised another until it was too late.

The robot artwork lived its last days in a never-ending cycle between sustaining life and simultaneously bleeding out… (Both figuratively and literally as the hydraulic fluid was purposefully made to look like actual blood.)

The robot arm finally ran out of hydraulic fuel, came to a halt and officially ‘died’ in 2019. It was programmed to live out this fate and no matter what it did or how hard it tried, there was no escaping it. Spectators watched in horror as it slowly bled out until the day that it ceased to move forever.

It was then posthumously renamed “Couldn’t Help Myself.”

This is the perfect metaphor for the current human condition and a great example of art imitating life.

For me, the robot arm represents our state of flux and our lack of purpose in our life. So we’re slowly killing ourselves spiritually, emotionally, mentally and physically for money, for attention, for likes, just in an attempt to sustain the status quo, an environment which is set up for us to fail and keep us enslaved, to steal the best years of our lives to serve in a broken, horrid system that does not serve us.

We are drowning in never-ending mindless work in the day and entertaining ourselves in the downtime, forgetting that like the robot, we, too have a shelf life. We too, had a different purpose. And we, too are prioritising the wrong thing until it is too late.

There is some good news, though.

We are NOT robots.

We CAN “help ourselves”.

It is not YET too late.

You can rediscover your purpose and finally help yourself in the way you truly deserve.

Check out the free training at www.secondgoldenage.com/purpose and book a call with me to begin the journey to rediscovering yourself.