After an interview recast of C. Apple on C. Rose Show, in which they remark that Apple became a writer because he couldn’t play football. They wandered thru the observation that many performers, and artists do what they do as an alternate to what they would have preferred doing.

Perhaps economists do economics because they cannot do business. They are unable to form, to found or even to function within the world of work. So they are left out of the action. They can only jostle for a seat in the bleachers. And most of them have a poor view of what the players are doing. The what and the why elude them. The poor players of the economy, economists.

“Anyone who has lived through combat and tried to talk about it to someone who has not will remember the look. There is excitement, at first. But then the listener’s eyes draw away, sympathetic but distant and, finally, simply uninterested. And you realize suddenly that you have made your life, and your near death, a bore. So after a while, you do not talk about the war to those who have not been there. If you’re a journalist, you write the story, publish the picture. You talk about other things.”
–Christopher Dicky, “How I Got That Story.” New York Times Book Review (November 8, 1998):30.