So in my last post, I spoke about the importance of being able to separate subjective value from objective value on a collective and policy level. That’s because objective value is based on reality and facts and subjective value is based entirely on our interpretation of that reality and the facts. And unfortunately, how we feel about the world we live in might not actually reflect the truth of the world we live in.
And when we start to base collective policy decisions on how an individual (or selective group of individuals) feels as opposed to policies that are in the best interest of society as a whole, then we end up with the current state of the world where we all use our feelings to justify our course of action.
And so that’s why it’s important to separate subjective value from objective value on a collective level.
However, on an individual level, our interpretations and feelings about the world around us are what provides our life with meaning and purpose—even if those feelings are based on a complete distortion of reality.
Of course, it’s better for the world if the subjective value we assign to ideas or people around us are based on truth.
But it doesn’t matter on an individual level.
For example, if believing in God, Heaven, and an afterlife makes some people’s lives on this planet feel more worthy of living, what does it matter on an individual level if they find out after death that everything they believed in was a lie? The belief itself still made their lives more worth living while they were here.
So in this post, I want to share a personal story about the importance of celebrating subjective value. About the importance of honoring our feelings and personal experiences and how honoring subjective value on an individual level and abiding by objective value on a collective level doesn’t have to be mutually exclusive.
In fact the more we honor the value the subjectiveness of the human experience of both ourselves and those around us, the more we tend to seek out objective truth to begin with.
Times Square, Port Authority, and Whitney Houston
In one of my first posts here I spoke on the how the objective talent of Joshua Bell and classical music usually escapes me.
However, while I may not be capable of appreciating the talent of Joshua Bell and classical music, I’m not bereft of the ability to appreciate music altogether.
In fact, music has always been a source of refuge for me throughout my life.
Whenever, I need to escape the difficulties of reality, I put my headphones on and go somewhere else in my head while I autopilot whatever task I’m doing at the gym, at work, or at home. It’s something I spend at least 3 hours a day doing and it’s the best part of my day because it allows me to feel in a world that by and large tries to numb all feeling from you.
Nothing can get to me when I’m in that space. There’s a feeling of peace and acceptance that I can obtain during that short timeframe that I can’t readily get anywhere else.
It’s not surprising then that one of my favorite memories of my time living in New York City involved a street performer, music, and NYC’s ubiquitous subway system.
It was a week before or after Christmas in 2006 and my brother was in town visiting. We were 25 and 24 at the time which is a great age to be getting in trouble in New York City. We had finished our adventures with long-time friends in the city and were in the midst of scurrying across the city through a myriad of subway transfers trying to catch a bus from the Port Authority Terminal on 42nd Street to Livingston, New Jersey a smallish middle class/upper middle class suburban neighborhood in New Jersey where my cousins who were 6 and 10 at the time lived with their parents who were hosting my mom for the holidays. Both my brother and I had a sense of eager excitement and anticipation to get there.
It’s not that my brother and I were great fans of Christmas anymore. That feeling had long ago subsided. For those of us who grew up Christian in America, Christmas holds this spiritual, religious, magical, and familial experience that children look forward to every year. But as you get older, you realize that Santa doesn’t exist, December 25th is a made-up date for Jesus’ birth, and even religion itself might be entirely made-up by humans as a means of controlling other humans.
Needless to say, this deflates the magical experience of Christmas as you try and unravel why you were told a large lie all these years.
I guess in a way our experience with Christmas mirrors the typical passage of people from children to adults in the sense that a huge part of being human involves us having to unpack the deluge of distortions and outright lies we’re lead to believe is true in our youth and learning how to accept the reality of how life actually is as an adult.
Most of our teenage years and early twenties is spent trying to unravel this and cope with our growing teenage/young adult angst and outright frustration with this.
By the time most of us become parents we have learned how to accept the world the way it is.
What’s more is that it is through our children that we start to cherish Christmas again because it is through the eyes of our children that we are allowed to reexperience the joy, innocence, and excitement of youth that we had long forgotten about. Only this time we do so with a sense of awareness and deep gratitude because we realize how rare and ephemeral these feelings are once we become adults.
So this is what we were rushing away from the excitement of New York City to get to.
The Times Square station of NYC is a well traveled subway station with access to most of the subway trains that run through the city. As such, it’s a favorite for street performers especially during the holiday season when NYC and Times Square are packed.
My brother and I had just gotten off one of the trains at the Times Square station and were headed towards the long underground corridor that connects Times Square to Port Authority when we heard a woman with a beautiful voice singing. I can’t remember what that song was. But I knew my brother and I were really impressed—as were the 20 or so other people who had stopped to listen to her.
After she stopped singing we made our way past the crowd towards the corridor. We were about 30 yards down that corridor when she started her second song that began with the words,
“If I…….should stay……”
The second we heard that, I remember shaking my head saying “No fucking way” and my brother had a similar reaction and we both immediately turned around and started walking back without any other discussion between us.
For those who don’t immediately recognize that phrase, it is the beginning of Whitney Houston’s iconic “I Will Always Love You” which was a staple on radio stations across the country for almost a year after it came out in 1992.
I was one of millions listening to it on repeat on cassette in my Walkman as well. At the tender age of 11, Whitney Houston became my first celebrity crush.
In fact, 3 decades later I’m still upset over the fact that she chose Bobby Brown over me.
As big a fan of music as I am, my brother is only person I know who loves it more than I do. In fact, he loved it so much that he quit his stable software engineer job to start a music startup called Anthems that now has close to 1 million users across both mobile and web platforms.
This is why we both stopped in our tracks and turned back even though we had a bus to catch.
The singer absolutely blew everyone away with her rendition. By the end, the crowd had grown to around 50 people and she earned a well deserved ovation after her performance.
We walked the long corridor to Port Authority afterwards where we of course had missed our bus and had to wait 45 minutes until the next one.
It was so unbelievably worth the wait.
Another hour and a half later we were sharing holiday festivities with our mom, cousins, and their parents.
17 years later I still remember that moment and the impact it had on me and cherish it as one of my favorite New York City memories.
The subjectiveness of the human experience
I’m sharing this story with you with the hopes that you’ll see all of the subjective preferences embedded in that story that led to it holding it such a special place in my heart.
That experience is not the same for me if not for the fact that it incorporated so many elements that held such a huge significance in my life up to that moment: my brother, our shared love of music, Whitney Houston, my mother, my love for my cousins, the nostalgia of childhood Christmases, and finally the thrill of being young amidst the aliveness of one of the most famous cities in the world.
I don’t think any of the other 50 people (minus my brother) who listened to that woman sing Whitney Houston’s iconic song in that cold Subway station 17 years ago even remember that moment.
I’m sure for them it was completely forgettable. In fact, even if it was Whitney Houston herself singing that song in a disguise, I’m pretty sure the other 50 people still wouldn’t have remembered that moment any differently.
That’s because it’s not the objective talent of the singer that derived the meaning—or lack thereof—for the people who sat there listening to her that evening.
It was entirely the subjective value we assigned to the individual elements that made up that moment that derived the meaning for us.
However, this memory and story, while deeply important to me, probably holds no weight with you other than to help understand me and my value systems better and to elicit an emotional recollection of a holiday, family, or musical experience that holds a special place in your heart analogous to the place that subway story holds in mine.
So while the subjective value systems we apply to the same experience may be different, at the end of each of our value systems is purpose and meaning. This is what most of us are seeking to begin with.
The experiences and relationships that give my life meaning are probably not the same as the ones that give meaning to yours.
But the sense of purpose we both derive from our individual value systems are often very similar.
The search for purpose that drives a surfer to dedicate his or her life to surfing is often the same feeling of purpose that drives a doctor to commit his or her life to medicine. The feeling is the same; it’s just the individual pursuit and the experiences that led up to the decision that differ.
And this is why understanding the subjectivity of the human experience is so important.
I only think, act, and feel the way I do because of my individual experiences and the environments in which those experiences were fostered.
If I had your exact experiences and environments, I would probably think, act, and feel exactly the way you do.
So while our subjective value systems can lead us to flawed and erroneous conclusions on a collective level, they nevertheless make us who we are on an individual level.
And by better understanding who we are—and what makes us who we are—we can better understand what makes others who they are.
It’s this understanding that breeds both a deeper side of empathy for the other side and a desire to seek out truth first instead of leading with our subjective experiences first and trying to distort logic to justify our feelings.
Often times we feel that the world would be better if everyone would just do things the way we do them. Based on this logic we often feel an overwhelming need to convince others to see and do things the way we do.
But in practice this rarely works.
Perhaps a more effective approach would be to try and inspire others to understand why they feel the way they do better simply so that it encourages them to want to understand the world they live in on a deeper level.
And this search for the truth will hopefully lead them to where we wanted them to arrive at in the first place.
And if it doesn’t, maybe it was because it was us who was in the wrong to begin with.
Happy Thanksgiving 2023 everyone.
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