This is not a bad trait, on your part, but you need to become more accustomed to dealing with the division between ostensible motivations and actual motivations:
even within a demimonde as obviously artistic and altruistic as rap music, ONLY A MINORITY OF PEOPLE really care about rap music itself, whereas some people are just trying to make money, just trying to get laid —some people are literally trying to deal cocaine (etc.) and the significance of the music is tertiary.
The same could be said —sadly— about stand up comedy (cocaine dealers, whoremongers, etc.).
Why did my father get involved with Communism?
Why did he get involved with Hinduism and (before that) so called "Christian existentialism"?
Perhaps for the same reasons he struggled to become an actor at the Stratford festival (a small town in Canada).
It would be jejune to meet my father at any one stage of his life and think, "This man has a sincere interest in the study of Hinduism", or the study of Communism, or anything else.
Some people do: some people's ostensible motivations really are the same as their "occult" motivations, shall we say.
It's rare.
For the most part, you're looking at that overly familiar list of motivations again and again: money, fame, power, respect, sex. Not necessarily in that order.
Even in Cambodia, even in Laos: people ostensibly doing humanitarian work.
It's pathetic, but it's the damn truth.
I've taken advanced (400 level) courses in the philosophy of Plato: I'm the only person in the room interested in Plato. I've been in political science classes: not a single other person there is interested in politics. Even the classes I took in Cree, as a language: nobody else wanted to learn Cree. I never met anyone else interested in the politics of Asia/China in a whole university program devoted to that subject.
That's my experience. And now I'm meeting people via a polyamory dating app (where I describe myself as a dissident intellectual, vegan and nihilistic atheist, etc.) because this youtube channel utterly failed to bring even a single colleague into my life.
