I am become determined, fuelled by some fiery desire to change, to truly improve and become something objectively significant. But to be truly better, you must focus on the aspects of your personality that you dislike. To be able to improve as a person, to grow as an individual, and to get closer to approaching your ideal, you must either withdraw from other influence entirely and become a completely solitary individual or else use your interactions with other people as mirrors, to understand yourself through their reflections, i.e. Lana’s Jim, "cause I was filled with poison, but blessed with beauty and rage."
If you choose to interact with someone, therefore, you must never accept incomplete interactions that are not entirely beneficial to you. You must consistently refuse stunted connections, and unless you feel that you are actively learning more about yourself through a given interaction - abandon it. It is only through another’s perspective, within an alien reflection, that you can see yourself in a truly objective manner. This exploration must be intellectual, physical, and thereby complete, and if The Other is unwilling or else incapable of playing this role, they are not the mirror that can empower your growth.
Indeed, the presence of high art in everyday life has eroded with mainstream media taking its place. Media in the form of small-screen TV shows, celebrity culture, the paparazzi media, bestselling novelists, The Juliet Society, Dan Brown, etc. We are now connected by being disconnected. Facebook is taking the place of conversations, condos the place of nightclubs, everything is being replaced. These replacements are trivial to the main change: the trade of our reality for hyperreality, true existence for a simulacrum.