Here's what I don't understand, though. While being a flat, boring person with no interests hasn't exactly been a special or even very rare way to go about life in the past, now we have the internet. Information on nearly any skill or subject you'd ever want to learn about is right there, often for free, assuming you can get online, and Amberlynn clearly can. She has no excuse for this level of shallowness in her existence, even if she doesn't leave the house very often. Hell, she could even up her game and actively study calligraphy, go balls to the wall, and come up with some reasonably impressive visual art, but she just commits to this monotony that doesn't even have to exist.
Because effort requires effort, which she's not willing to do. Psych sperging.
Amberlynn, like many people in this world, is stuck in this scaredy-cat defeatist mentality. Effort isn't just difficult,
it's scary. People like this are incapable of doing anything on their own, so if the people around them don't do X, then they can't do X either. She can't have any hobbies of her own because then she's alone. Whether this is purely from narcissism or some deeper issue no one here can begin to guess. However, this means she can only "doodle" calligraphy, because it's just a test of sorts. She can't take it seriously because taking it seriously requires feedback and change, and negative criticism hurts. It does! Part of being a mature adult is being able to separate the unhappy feelings from the useful feedback and advice you receive. People like AL can't handle anything that hurts her ego. So she can't improve with anything she "tries."
Combined with the general short-sightedness that helps create extremely useless fat people, the fact that she isn't instantly an expert at X means she can't do it and therefore has to give up. She is entirely self-defeating. Every functional human has things they're good at and things they're bad at. While few people are savants at things immediately, most people can realize they have an aptitude for something for try to make it a hobby. This is how people end up having talents, like drawing or playing the guitar: not something that's their career, but just a
thing they enjoy and are about as good at as they want to be. They may never be Michaelangelo or Buckethead, but they can get
good and enjoy it.
On the other hand, which many people fail to realize, is that there are also few people who are so terrible at X thing that they can
never accomplish a basic level of competency at it. Peoples' fear of math or public speaking is probably the best-known variety of this. I, personally, have issues with Philosophical Logic, which is basically math again. I'm certainly not good at it, and I have no interest in pursuing it beyond what I am required to do, but that doesn't mean that I can't work hard and try to gain a level of basic understanding and competency of how it works. It just means that I have to work harder and am slightly more prone to failure. Oh well. I am still capable of doing it. Sitting around telling myself that I can't do it doesn't make it go away. I can either do nothing and learn nothing from it, or I can
try and maybe learn something, even if I never become an expert at it.
AL never tries. She never tried to work when she had that job with Dusty, not seriously. She never tries to control her weight. She never tries to take care of her animals. She never tries to cook good food, a real meal with flavor. She never tries at all. It's easier for her to blame everyone else, be a victim of her (perhaps genuinely) unfortunate circumstances, and never rise above her problems. Because sitting all day in a chair was too hard. Eating less is too hard. Taking care of animals is too hard. Cooking is too hard, despite the fact she sits at home all day.
One of Pixar's rules of storytelling (I can't remember which, please forgive) goes something like this: "You admire someone more for trying than for their successes." AL willfully handicaps herself mentally, emotionally, and physically. That is what makes her insufferable to watch.
Because effort is too hard.
Also, her calligraphy is shit, gorl.