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There is a innate human desire to extract, to identify the most potent element, and refine it optimise it and reused it.
It was once a great survival trait and took us from tribes to organised settlements.
But the modern era and our vices turns this into hyper extraction, deforestation, species extinction and most recently individual human traits that can be commercialised and sold.
Alysa has an incredible story, but let’s not forget we are dealing with a young human being. I can only imagine how hard her rapid ascension to fame, can be on the soul.
Transcript
Alyssa Liu's post double gold fame is a perfect example of our species' obsessive desire for extraction. Since winning double gold, she signed with Nike, Samsung, Gillette Venus, Lucky Charms, and most recently Sephora. Six major deals in two months. Flights around the worse. Packed schedule. Missing competitions. She's 20 years old. What were you doing when you were 20? Beyond her unquestionable acrobatic ability and the ubermensch aura, the defining feature has to be her striped hair. Something that started as a DIY bleach job. Adding a new band each year for her figure skating career best like rank in a tree. A deeply personal tier, but it is being completely magnified. Both physically you look at these before and after pictures of her hair, now also commercially adopted by Sephora. They've taken this incredibly personal and quirky detail and fused it with their own brand identity. And I'm left wondering how much of this is her choice worse the machinery around her. She's got got IMG managing her and again she's only 20 years old. Genuinely enjoyed the post Olympic interviews. The joy was real and the comeback story was incredible. She retired at 16 because she felt like a dress up doll and then she came back on her own terms. But it feels like this could be early signs of the same better, now just with different people holding the strings. Yes, all of this is part of the human instinct of extraction. We do it with medicine, farming, trends. We find a potent thing and we isolate it because that's how we used to survive in the wild. But more recently, we end up just draining the source in the process. Alyssa is young and I'm worried that there's a world where those stripes stop meaning tree rings and it just starts meaning sephora.
