A message of hope for a new year
A message for everyone - particularly a challenge - as we pass one year on a Grigorian calendar and enter a new one.
I’m not a big believer of entertaining any form of “look back” on a year or a “look forward” to a year coming, just because my calendar tells me that we are moving from one Grigorian state to another. I never have been one to celebrate the changing of numbers in lives.
What I am observant of, however, is that our own individual lives are finite and that we go through stages, which I have always seen as quarters. From the first quarter of our lives when our parents nurtured us, and our job was to learn to learn, communicate, socialize, etc. To the 2nd quarter, when we define who we are – the “building phase” as I call it, when you build a life, career, identity, family, home, etc. To the 3rd quarter, when we consolidate and optimize, realize that we have something to offer and we try and save our pennies because we know that final quarter will come.
This year, I entered my final quarter. I turned 60 years old. I didn’t particularly want to face that point, because it forces me to face the inevitable – that we begin a demise process. Most of us fight that tooth & nail. We don’t want to accept mortality because that is just too depressing. Yet one strange thing that has always been foremost on my mind since my first quarter was that I wanted to leave the world better than when I arrived in it. I realize that if I spend all of my time looking at the labor output that I, a singular entity, can produce, when it comes to a point where I either can no longer produce like that, or choose not to, then I didn’t really optimize what I really could have done with my life.
When I was about 14 years old, I had that typical sit down at the kitchen table talk with my father. The inevitable question I had to find an answer for was “What do you want to be when you grow up?”. 46 years later, and I still don’t have the answer to that. What I do know is that at that time I was forced to choose a pathway – do I make music my full-time focus, or do I embrace what was a new and emerging industry of computers and technology. Despite it seeming like it was a binary decision, in truth it never was. Your life can have multiple pathways, and that’s what I chose. It is just that the landscape that you find yourself in has a say in what is possible. Because we have to live with other people, and their value system is often forced upon your own.
Decades later, I realized that if I was to try and live in a capitalistic world, I had to respect the value system that the world was forcing upon me. The world of growth, consumption, quantity over quality, etc. This is our modern day world it would seem. However it is so short term.
Some of us are blessed (many might call it cursed) to have a sensitivity to things. We can’t often understand what that is, only that we are sensitive. If could the the music you hear in your head when you wake up, or the words that you resonate to as a writer. Maybe it is the imagery that you see in your imagination that turns into a painted picture, or a photograph, or a movie. Maybe it is a story that you wish to tell. But it seems no one else is seeing those things. And your job is to capture it, codify it and record it so that others can finally touch what you were feeling or seeing inside of yourself. This is the world of the creative – the artist. Someone who can create something that the future world can finally connect with and take from that helps them in their journey forward.
And that is really the point of me writing this. When you are in your 4th quarter of life, you value the things that you can create that others will be affected by in a positive way for the future. And the enemy of anything you do is the term “short term”. You have more years behind you than in front of you, and you have to realize that if you just keep doing what you did in your previous incarnation, it won’t work. The stupid fallacy that I hear all the time is that people cannot survive unless they work until the day they die. To me that is a wasted life. We must fight against that narrative. If you are just an actor on someone else’s screenplay, then you can never author the story of your own life.
When I had to make that choice at the age of 14 of a pathway, I realized two very important things:
- The world of modern convenience, technology, etc. took the same amount of human effort to create something, even with the assistance of computers, to do it, than it took to create things that touched other human beings – stories, art & music.
- That art & music has a much greater chance of living far longer than I ever will.
Look back at history – the music of the classical composers. Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, etc. They lived a life with generally a far lower life expectancy than we have today. And yet their work is still revered and taught today as the cornerstone of musical achievement.
Our modern world and our technologies are magical, but they suffer from something that art & music doesn’t generally suffer from – entropy. The second law of thermo dynamics. The simple rule that eventually everything in the universe will turn to dust.
If our lives are to embrace a value system that capitalism teaches us – the “pro growth agenda” but we never grow to do anything other than feed the 1% of society with the product of our labor, so that they can create assets and milk them for their own wealth, then all of us have missed the point. A point often only embraced in one’s latter quarter of life. The measure of your achievements come down to what you created that lives on beyond you. The family you raise, the art you created and the friendships and motivation of others that will do the heavy lifting in your absence.
So I write this message to the artists out there that I hope to have some connection with in the coming decades. Don’t squander your time. Because you have a finite supply of it, and one day you will realize you have less ahead of you than behind you. That if you just adjust your mission to suit someone else’s narrative and value system, it probably won’t be compatible with ultimately your own. I watched my own father die after devoting his entire life (at least the 75% of the waking life he had where he went to work) to support the corporate mission and not his own. Yes, his greatest gift was to me. To inspire and show me that I could be anything I wanted. The difficulty was that he couldn’t answer for me the question of what that was supposed to be. And I think that he felt failed in that when he looked back at his own life, he didn’t live with an array of massive achievements that would live beyond him.
For the artists & musicians today, you can change that trajectory. You can run the marathon and not the sprint. You can create a body of work that will live beyond you. You don’t need to run away from the scary parts when you do things everyone else either doesn’t get, or doesn’t embrace. Maybe they won’t today because they are only interested in the fast-food like products – the 3.5 minute long pop songs or the short form TikTok videos. If you simply succumb to that value system, you will find yourself at a point in your life when you realize there isn’t much to show for what you did. And with a finite timespan, you will live in regret that you didn’t pursue what you *could* have done, and not what society told you to do.
Those that have a true lasting impact – the writers, painters, poets, musicians, etc. are often not recognized until they are gone, but their legacy and the impact that they have to the future generations that come after them is incredible. The impact at a scale that you could never imagine. If you think your goal is to “go viral” and find your 15 seconds of fame, you are going to be pretty sad once that moment is gone. Because life is about millions of moments.
I recently heard a really important statement that I believe strongly in. Put in a way I far better than I ever could:
“All the time, I’ve been trying to take the lessons of the past. To build a world that wasn’t that much of good world at all. Where everyone was in it for themselves, where cities were grey with pollution, where beaches were filled with waste that will take 500 years to decay and disappear. If we live in harmony with our planet, maybe it will teach us how to live in harmony with each other.”
There’s a simple choice here – do things that will make the world a better place beyond our own lives, or do things that will make it worse and harder for the generations that come after us to fix it.
And for the creative visionaries, this comes down to finding a solution to the challenge of how do you live in a value system that doesn’t support making things better for the future, and yet survive. I don’t have the answer for each individual person. I can only say do not accept defeat in that quest. The future you will live in regret if you don’t find the answer now.
Make your new year a connected pathway towards solving that challenge for yourself. And have courage to face doing things differently, if not juxtaposed to the value system our modern society has today. Because if you don’t do that, you will live in regret and that is worse than any disease or disability you will ever have to face in your four quarters of life.