I believe in music.
College is stressful, which I am sure is a surprise to no one. But it’s not just college – the entirety of young adulthood is incredibly stressful. Everyone makes it seem like I have to have a plan. I have to have a map of exactly what I want my life to become and how to make it so. And to some extent, I do. But much of it is a show. A lot of the things I do, I do because I feel I am supposed to; it’s expected of me. When really, I have no idea what I want to be doing twenty years from now. How can anyone be expected to know what they are going to be doing that far in the future? And yet, I, as well as every other young adult, am expected to know that. And why? Because we have to. I have to study hard in school. I have to graduate with good grades. I have to get a high paying job. I have to make money. Lots and lots of money.
God, it always comes back to money.
The world revolves around it, I swear. It’s like nothing else matters. A friend asks me to go hiking in nature? Nope, I have to study. My girlfriend wants to go see our favorite band in concert? Nope, I have to work. Both of these have happened to me countless times. We spend so much time preparing for the future that we forget to live in the present. We sacrifice making memories and enjoying life to make money so that at 65, we can sit on our asses in a luxury retirement home and wait to die. Pretty backwards, right? I think so too. And that is supposedly how we’re supposed to live life, but hardly any of it makes sense; people, society, government, money, none of them make sense.
And when I begin to feel overwhelmed by this massive world of utter confusion, I need some way to release that stress and so I turn to music. People need a creative outlet like music simply in order to function in everyday life. Imagine all the stressors of society with no way to express all of the emotions they cause. I would go insane. And while music may not exactly be a value or a principle, it has been, by far, the single most impactful aspect of my life. Music helps me deal with society because music is something altogether different from the rest of society.
Music is the truest, purest, and realest thing I have ever experienced in my life. I have not, do not, and probably will not love anything more than I love music; the way it makes feel emotions I did not even know I had, the way each note flows perfectly out of its predecessor and smoothly into its successor, the way voices can harmonize together to hit that perfect note, the way musicians find new and unconventional ways to create new sounds and revolutionize music, it all makes sense to me. There are no rules, no structure, no expectations and no limitations. People can create literally whatever they want, and all that matters is that they themselves are happy with it. The opinions or expectations of others do not matter.
Music is the transfer of thoughts and feelings from the heart of the musician, through guitar strings and a microphone, over sound waves, and into the hearts of the listeners. Music is about creating something so pure, so original, so uniquely your own that it makes you happier than any material item ever could. Music is about communicating your thoughts and feelings to others in a way that no other medium of expression could ever measure up to. Music is about creating something out of nothing. Music is about making yourself feel the way you want to feel, even if everything else in your life is against it. Music is about being happy. Music is about enjoying life while we have it.
And that… that makes sense.