photo by funky_abstract

I think it’s time to get over this whole “self help” thing. There is an entire industry based around telling us that they have the elusive secret to happiness, that if you just read this book, watch that video, do these exercises, or think this way you can become a better, fuller person. I’ve read a lot of stuff like this, and even though I appreciate good advice, I’ve come to almost resent the whole idea of “self improvement.” I resent it because it tricked me into putting my energy towards trying to find something that I had all along.

You know those cheesy maxims that say you’re already perfect the way you are? It turns out they’re right. And if they’re right, that pretty much negates the whole business of helping you improve yourself. How can you improve on perfection? Thing is, you’ll never be satisfied if you’re bent on self-improvement. If you’re anything of a perfectionist, you’ll never be good enough. How can that be healthy? You’re not a work in progress. You’re a human being living a life in progress. You don’t have to work toward being a complete person, hoping you can achieve that fullness someday. You have it now. You just have to make the decision to recognize that.

Of course, if you’re already perfect then how can you explain all those bad habits you’d like to be rid of? Well, just because you’re perfect doesn’t mean you can never—or should never—change. Things are always changing. That’s how life is. And it’s in this seeming contradiction, that you’re already perfect but you should embrace change in yourself, that we can find the key distinction that shatters the fragile framework of “self-help.”

I think it’s as simple as changing one key word: Evolve, don’t improve.

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photo by prawnpie

I’ve been called cynical a good number of times in my life. Most of these times were when I was a little younger, particularly in my teenage years when I wore the label as something of a badge of honor. I believed that cynical people weren’t deserving of criticism because they simply saw things for what they really are, which just happened to be a harsher view than the average person. I felt as though being called cynical was really just a way of saying that I thought differently and saw clearly. I was proud of that.

These days, I try to distance myself from the term when I can because I recognize the negative edge that cynicism can have. Now I generally think in much more positive terms (or at least I try to), and consequently I’m far more aware of when negativity creeps into my thoughts and words. I think it’s true that being an authentically hardened cynic can genuinely be detrimental to a person’s life experience (or at least diminish the enjoyment one can have in their life, even if they don’t realize it). Still, every now and again I run into the cynic label and have to address whether I’m being misunderstood or if it’s coming from the tiny cynic that’s still hiding deep inside me, rearing its ugly little head. But I think I’ve pinpointed a key distinction that draws a practical line in the sands of cynicism.

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photo by mpeterke

Modern science can do some amazing things. The technology we use every day is the result of centuries of research, discovery, and ingenuity. The observations and experiments we’ve made allow us to probe the outer limits of our imaginations and understand how the universe works to an incredible degree of accuracy. In order for all of this to be possible, thousands of people have devoted their lives to asking the big questions, searching for the life-changing answers, and going out on the longest of limbs.

Consequently, there are many people who have devoted the better part of their lives to a complete failure, whether it’s an idea that never comes to fruition, a discovery that’s made by someone else first, or a theory that ultimately leads nowhere. Naturally, we only really hear about the successes, so it’s easy to forget the trail of failed destruction that those success stories have clawed their way through. Even the successful people themselves have a seemingly countless number of stories of their own previous failures.

But the reality is that there are a good number of people out there who wind up committing almost their entire lives to a mistake. For example, there are thousands of theoretical physicists today devoting their lives to figuring out if string theory is the ultimate unifying theory of the universe. While it could turn out to be the answer, there’s also a possibility that it’s not, meaning that all these great minds have dedicated all their time to calculations that lead nowhere.

A success could mean they’ve contributed to something that literally changes everything we know about the universe. A failure could mean immeasurable lost time and resources that could have been used working towards a correct understanding of our world, or towards innovations and discoveries that could save lives, not to mention the lost money spent on building costly lab equipment and experiments.

This isn’t limited to scientists, of course. In many ways we all risk the same mistakes in our own lives—pursuing a dead-end career, being in a long-term relationship that turns out to be a lie, losing our life’s savings in a scam, putting everything we have into what eventually leads to a dead end. But I don’t think any of it really is a mistake, even if things don’t pan out the way we pictured or hoped for ourselves.

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photo by Images_of_Money

I was very fortunate to have grown up in relative comfort as a kid. While my family wasn’t exactly wealthy, there was never a question of whether there would be food on the table or bills would be paid. I was encouraged not to live wastefully and to be smart with my money, but it was never a situation where we were conserving energy for fear that we wouldn’t be able to cover the electric bill.

Then I went to college.

Many of us get a pretty good dose of living the “poor college student” life, then graduate to join a workforce that pays a reasonable—if modest at first—salary and holds the promise of future growth and prosperity. But I didn’t do what most people do. I chose to pursue the artist’s life, one that all too often lives up to its “starving” cliche.

And so I’ve spent the better part of my 20s being poor. Sometimes it’s been broke-ass, knee deep in credit card debt, holy-shit-what-am-I-going-to-do-about-rent poor. Other times I’ve done OK, but anything beyond basic needs and a few small luxuries here and there has been out of the question. It didn’t help that I lived in two of the most expensive cities in the country (Boston and Los Angeles) from college onward.

As with any situation, I’ve tried to make the best of it whenever possible. Looking back, I think I’ve learned some valuable lessons from being poor. Some of them are in tune with the old “money doesn’t buy happiness” adage, while others are the result of the harsh realities of living paycheck to paycheck. Here are some of the things I’ve learned:

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photo by ToniVC

“Nothing is worth more than this day.”
–Goethe

I was staring irrelevance straight in the face, and I didn’t like it. The conversation began innocently enough: We’re in an interesting time musically, I was explaining to a friend, because popular music as we know it was created at a time that has allowed us to see an amazing amount of creative innovation, but recently enough that we don’t have to be completely overwhelmed with the amount of music we could potentially explore as listeners and performers. (Though sometimes I still do feel overwhelmed when trying to cover enough musical ground to feel as though my grasp of music history is reasonably comprehensive.)

I told my friend that with the Internet allowing thousands of indie and self-released artists to find their way into my listening space these days, I do find it challenging to keep up to date with the trends. Imagine, I postulated, how hard it will be to feel encyclopedic about music in 50 or 100 years. There won’t be enough hours in the day; there will just be too much music to sift through. You could never feel like you’ve been exhaustive in your listening experience. I’d be so stressed about hearing as much music as possible and connecting all the dots that I’d probably never relax enough to actually enjoy the music I did hear. I sure am glad I live now and not then, I told him. What a privilege it is!

I sat there feeling satisfied by my position in the universe when he lobbed the bomb at me: “In 50 or 100 years, it won’t matter. None of the music that’s important now will have the same importance then. It will be as relevant as the music from the 19th century is today.”

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photo by art ascii(paul)

If there is some cosmic, overarching lesson in my life that I am supposed to learn, it seems to be that when it comes down to it, the only person I can truly count on is myself.

This is the lesson that has been beaten into me over and over and over again. And just when I think it’s the last time I have to learn it, I learn it again. Sure, I’ve learned my fair share of hard lessons just like the next person, many of which have taken more than one go around before I get the hint. But none have been so prominent and recurring as this one.

As the saying goes, you’re born alone and you die alone. In between we all get the chance to share and experience our lives with others. But when all is said and done, we’re still navigating through our lives on our own. We’ll meet some amazing people along the way. Some of them will be around for a long time, others will appear and disappear from our lives before we even realize it. Some will help us, some will hurt us. Many will do both. Some will go out of their way to boost our morale, to open doors of opportunity to us, to listen when we need to vent. Some will do anything to get ahead of us, manipulate our good intentions, or damage our reputations. A precious few will say they would do anything for our benefit, and even mean it.

But the fact remains: at the end of the day we’re only responsible for ourselves, we only have to answer to ourselves, and we can only, truly, fully count on ourselves. Friends and family, partners and lovers, they are beautiful things to have in our lives. But the healthiest among them will make decisions that, though they may take your feelings and desires into consideration, ultimately come down to what they need for themselves. And that won’t always align with your own agenda.

So what does this mean? Does this mean that we’re born alone, we die alone, and we live the whole stretch of life in between alone as well? I suppose on some level the answer to that is yes. But the true takeaway from any lesson shouldn’t be the negatives. I think what it means is that if we can only count on ourselves to make the decisions that will help us lead fulfilling and virtuous lives, we have no choice but to have an incredible amount of faith and belief in ourselves. We have to realize that our lives will only become the lives we want if we make them that way. If we choose for that to happen to ourselves. Not if we hope others will figure that out for us.

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photo by thebadastronomer

For millennia, man has wondered the same thing, over and over: do our lives have meaning? Is there some larger purpose that transcends the biological, evolutionary machines that are our physical bodies, something more important than basic survival and reproduction?

Any intelligent, critically thinking person knows that there is a very real possibility that nothing lives on beyond these fragile shells we dwell in—that when you die, the lights go out and that is that. I’m not saying this definitely is the case, but most people should have an understanding that this could be the truth of it all. Many have faith that there is something more; many don’t.

But for the sake of argument, let’s say that’s how it is. Would that mean our lives—insignificant specs in the vast cosmos—are intrinsically filled with no more meaning than our brains, with their immeasurable complexities, trick us into believing? Would it mean that, although helping others and changing people’s lives for the better is an indisputably noble cause, the fact remains that anything appearing to transcend the basic tenets of survival is but a byproduct of our own consciousness?

I obviously couldn’t tell you the answer to our endless existential query, but I can tell you the answer to the slightly smaller question of whether or not our lives could have meaning regardless of the post-mortem outcome.
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A few years ago, I decided I’d record a (pretty cheesy) rock guitar instrumental version of the Philadelphia Eagles fight song, a well-known tune among Philadelphians who sing it after every scoring drive during football games. No doubt it has come to be hated by many an opposing fan (just like how I despise the Atlanta Braves chant), thereby cementing its status among the Philly sports faithful.

I loved the obnoxiousness of it all, and thought it just hadn’t been represented in a modern, hard rock sort of way. I sent the result into my favorite morning radio show (and #1 show in Philadelphia), the Preston and Steve show, and to my delight they began playing it regularly on the air. At one point I even went in the studio and played it live. I have fond memories of that day.

This past week I was listening to that old recording and noting how shitty and lifeless it sounded. So to correspond with a new football season filled with the usual lofty hopes and dreams, I decided to give it a little update. This version sounds much better, thanks to advancements in recording technology and my own far superior engineering abilities. If you’re a Philly sports fan (or just curious to hear it in all its new glory), I invite you to take a listen below.

Here’s to hoping the Eagles can pull something off this year.

photo by Ben Bunch

One morning in high school, I woke up and looked out my window. It was gloomy; a thick, charcoal cloud blanketed the entire sky and light rain dive-bombed from above. On this particular day, I would be flying west to Colorado to go camping with my sister and her family. I was never a big fan of flying on days like this, but there was no use complaining about the inevitable. I groggily packed my things and shuffled out the door.

I sat in my airplane seat as it taxied to the runway and felt ambivalent. I was excited to go on a trip, but less than enthused about the flight that would precede it. It’s not that I was a nervous flyer…  I just didn’t feel like sitting in a cramped seat for five hours and breathe recycled air while snacking on stale pretzels. Waking up to dreariness had affected my demeanor accordingly.

The plane accelerated down the runway and angled up into the air. I watched raindrops streak across my window and shook with the bumpy turbulence of entering the cloud cover. I leaned my still-fatigued head back into my seat and closed my eyes.

Suddenly, the shaking stopped. I felt a warm light against my face. I opened my eyes and took a look out the window.

What I saw was nothing out of the ordinary, but it folded over me like a warm blanket. The sky was flawlessly blue, with a cheery sun shining brilliantly, alone in the atmosphere. Below lay the same mantle of clouds, but from above they looked like a fluffy dessert topping of bright white, expanding into a soft and pillowy landscape on all sides. The scene was inviting and serene, and my mood had abruptly changed along with it.

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During a recent recording session, I had a conversation about creating music and art for yourself vs. creating it for others. In some ways you create art for yourself, because it is a fulfilling thing that expresses a part of you. In other ways, the moment you have created something, it is no longer yours and suddenly becomes the emotional property of someone else.

So which is it? How can art be both for ourselves and for others’ enjoyment?

Actually, I retract that question. It’s pretty obvious from my first paragraph how it can be—and is—both of these situations. Us and them, creator and consumer, in it together. My new question would address how much of a share each side gets. Where is that line drawn, and what is the ideal balance between the two sides?

As with all things creative, the answer is largely dependent on the situation. If I write a song that’s entirely for myself, a song that satisfies every personal indulgence to the point where it is entirely satisfying to me without any thought given to the potential enjoyment of others, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Of course, I should be well prepared for the consequences of that, namely that this song very likely won’t be a smash commercial success. (Of course there’s always the possibility that it could be, but that’s not the point.)

If I write a song that completely panders to the audience I’d like to capture, I may have set myself up for a better chance at success among the masses. But I’ve also run the very real risk that this song will not be personally fulfilling at all, unless my only fulfillment comes from units sold. I’m sure for some people that’s the case, and all the power to ‘em.

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