What can we do?

I don’t think a topic like this really needs a lot of explanation. Here is a very quick summary: The world is desperately out of balance. Being a musician or artist can feel like having no money and having no impact. It’s easy to see ourselves as peripheral to the more pressing concerns of the wider world. We are not.

There are numerous things we are well-equipped to contribute to the people around us as musicians and artists. Here are a couple that I suggest considering.

The best investment we can make right now is in human connection. Virtually every other form of value is under threat of collapse. The one thing that we will be able to rely on regardless of how things may change or collapse in the future is our bonds with other people. In order for human connections to form, people need to be gathered together. But first people need a reason to gather; we need something to gather around.

Influences such as consumerism, indvidiualism, and convenience are pushing people more and more towards social isolation from each other. In resistance to those influences, our ability to connect to people through the things we create can be used to gather people. The obvious example is performance events. The economic system that we have frames our gigs as transactions where the value of our performance is delivered en masse to a gathered audience of consumers all at once. We can’t ignore that economic framing, because it is necessary for our survival. But that perspective doesn’t have to be our first priority in order for its importance to be observed.

Once people are gathered for some shared reason, they are also significantly more prepared to take shared action towards something else for a related shared reason, because they are now gathered. Each of us as artists has our own message which resonates with a particular subset of people who are waiting to gather around our work. And none of our messages has the power to resonate with everyone, so every single one of us will be needed in order to gather people together.

We’ll often hear that our value in society is to inspire people. I want to be more specific than that. These three specific qualities - effort, leadership, and growth - are capacities that I think are being disarmed and paralysed in a lot of people’s lives today. Some people will say that is intentional, some people might disagree with that, and I don’t think it matters either way, because ultimately it is bad if people lose access to these qualities socially or mentally — even though they are technically within reach in a “physical” sense, in most situations.

When we demonstrate effort, we remind people what humans are capable of when they try. When we demonstrate leadership, we remind people what humans are capable of when they work together. When we demonstrate growth, we remind people what humans are capable of when they refuse to accept the status quo within themselves. (And that can prepare us to refuse the status quo outside ourselves.)

I trust people to recognise that on a fundamental level, there is nothing separating me from them as we are both human beings. If I can demonstrate these qualities to an audience, it provides a reminder to them that they are fundamentally capable of the same. The more frequently I demonstrate that, the more often they are reminded, and the more accessible those qualities become in their lives in a social and mental sense. And the more I can GATHER PEOPLE, the more chances I will have to demonstrate these qualities.

It’s signifcant that these are qualities that are paralysed by social isolation, and they are things that require people to go beyond the path of least resistance. There are an abundance of products being sold to us that make us reliant on the path of least resistance, and then provided even MORE assistance on that path. Social isolation can often BE the path of least resistance when we have a lot of access to these types of products and develop a reliance on them (eg you can get everything delivered, you don’t have to talk to anyone and it’s easier not to have to consider how their day is going).

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That’s all I have for today. I hope this was valuable to someone out there, even if it was just to remind you of things you already understand and believe in so that they are more mentally accessible to you.