Some People Only Support You Until Your Success Starts To Outgrow theirs
On what "Support" means going into 2027
There is something quite funny about how people support you until your success “moves faster”then theirs; and suddenly they go quiet. Which in 2026 can be translated to not supporting others, especially if they are “close” to you. And they will probably only pop up when they can utilize your access and resources to tell their stories, regardless of the fact that they stopped supporting you a long time ago. Consider it the version of quiet quitting, but only on the support aspect of your work.
While nobody is entitled to support from others, we find it quite interesting that people can support you until they feel threatened by your growth rate or by how much you are advancing in your career. And honestly, we couldn’t find a good article about that topic (please send it here in the comments in case you know one!) so we decided to create our own version of it, hoping others will find solutions between the lines.
You know who we are talking about. The same ones that cheered for you at the beginning, always said “that’s hard,” “let me get that,” dapping you up; or choose from the 50 other ways people can support an up and coming idea.
For a fashion designer it might be the circle that says the work is hard, or that they would love to wear it; but when you tell them the price, because god forbid your work has a price and you don’t just give it out, they either go quiet or low key or start calling you out and downplaying your achievements. All because they couldn’t bring to fruition what you did.
There are so many small invisible ways that are so easy to dismiss or explain away when you are too zoomed in. But once you look at the full picture, well, it’s not that pleasant.
That’s why it’s important to stay creatively-vigilant in a way, not because it’s that deep for some of us, but rather to understand the parameters of the game. And realize that yes, not everyone will support you the same way that you support them. Believing that it will be reciprocal at any given time or situation is being naive.
Once we accept that conditional support was never real to begin with, we can start moving with more clarity toward the end goal. Because now we understand that truly all we need to do is conquer ourselves, and from there on the rest will happen according to the plan, regardless of how much fake support we witness throughout the journey. And furthermore, we will be able to further notice real, proper support from our peers; the same ones that truly care about our work and are here for it, the same ones that have been here since the jump and never changed.
When you stop waiting for support from people who were always in secret competition with you, you basically dismantle any future competition that might arise, or any opportunity to compare work with others. Because if we notice it, we can reverse engineer the experience, understand where the fake supporters came from, and ensure that we will never be surrounded by those types of people again. Let alone ensure that we will never become one of them. And that, to us at least, is priceless.
Internal support comes first. And if you can't support your work enough to believe in it, no amount of external support | fake or real | will make you feel like it's worthy of something.
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affection > self-image