Not many people get paid for musical or linguistic talents, actually.
"Passion" is a luxury. We all have to choose from what the market demands.
"Passion" is a luxury. We all have to choose from what the market demands.
Regardless, both of those talents have the potential to open doors and set the stage for opportunity, nor are they mutually exclusive to whatever economic skills might be viable in the future.
I'm not against things like learning to play an instrument, but if you're going to major in Music Theory, you better have a solid plan for a career on the other end. It can be a risky plan, but it has to be real with non-zero odds of success. It can't be just because you love playing the violin.
It's true it won't pay the bills, but knowing one instrument is a good skill that differentiates you from others.
Or are you suggesting one should also prioritise buying a guitar over paying rent too?
I wish we were living in a world were people could earn a living and follow their passion but capitalism doesn't allow for that. It's designed for consuming things and increasing profits, not for improving the well being of people.
They are saying a depressingly large number of people don’t earn enough to cover their essential daily expenses like rent and food despite working extremely long hours. And thus they do not have the same luxuries of time and disposable income that people in our position do.
So to say “everyone has the time to learn an instrument” isn’t technically accurate.
I was in my 20s before I learned to play a guitar because my family couldn’t afford one. So I had to prioritise other skills and those skills are what got me a lucrative career which allowed me the luxury of pursuing creative hobbies.
It sucks that’s how life works. But that’s the world we live in.
> So I had to prioritise other skills
Do you think prioritizing those skills and music could have coexisted? Why not? Why does learning to play instruments take away from that?
This thread is about what you might teach your children, and predicting what works well in 20 years. There's no future where knowing how to play an instrument isn't a great thing. If you can't afford a guitar, don't get a guitar. There are cheaper instruments. Humans have figured out how to make it work across the ages, regardless of financial status.
You might change careers several times in your life, but being able to play an instrument is always a viable way to enrich one's life.
That was literally the core premise of this thread.
Any kind of musical ability is a skill that differentiates you from the guy who doesn't have any. It widens your perspective, it allows you to talk about music more deeply (for example theory) with others, it creates joy to your life and you will gain bigger respect for the skills of other musicians.
This all doesn't have anything to do with money and it doesn't have to. Not 100% of your time is needed to make money at all times.
I’m older than YouTube and my parents didn’t have a lot of money.
Never seen free guitars in any charity shops otherwise I’d have picked one up.
Also singing isn’t playing an instrument. Which was specifically what the OP was discussing and thus specifically what I’m reply about.
> Any kind of musical ability is a skill that differentiates you from the guy who doesn't have any. It widens your perspective, it allows you to talk about music more deeply (for example theory) with others, it creates joy to your life and you will gain bigger respect for the skills of other musicians.
I agree. But that wasn’t the point being discussed.
Also the same can also be said for sports. Or knitting. Or in fact any skill.
I love music, it’s my biggest passion outside of computers. But it seems daft to argue music is uniquely different to any other hobby. For example, my wife actually hates music and it wasn’t my interest in it that she found attractive (ironically to this thread, it was actually my work ethic, because she saw someone stable who wanted kids too).
> This all doesn't have anything to do with money and it doesn't have to. Not 100% of your time is needed to make money at all times.
Unfortunately that’s exactly how some families do have to live.
Not all of us are fortunate enough to have the free time to enjoy a hobby. Some people literally work most of their waking hours just to pay rent and buy food. Life can be really hard for some people.
Jake the dog: "Music is powerful man. It speaks to a primal pit in our brains. It makes anyone wanna get up and get their knees goin'. Gotta get 'em pumpin' pumpin' pumpin', boompa boompa boom."
Music Hole: "Jake's right. A good song can really wrap people up in a mood, better than any words alone could."
But... Far more people do some sort of art as a hobby than will ever make a career out if it.
People have been freaking out about this pending doom for as long as we've walked the earth. Most of it stems from either old age or political hyperventilating (both symptoms of perceived displacement). Humanity's still grinding forward ... faster than ever.
Times already have changed. It’s not people freaking out about a theoretical scenario. It’s already happened for those entering the job market today.
And as for the fear of WW3, have you turned on the news recently? That fear is just as real now than it was in the 80s.
The American Midwest would like a word.
If you don't mind being a couple hours drive from anywhere Taylor Swift would play, you can find affordable property, a good community, and amazon prime service. Any town that lacks tech work opportunities will still have solid internet from Starlink to support remote work.
There are awesome opportunities if you look.
My biggest frustration, currently, is a lack of time and energy to devote to my creative projects. I still give them some time, but between a full-time job, child care, and other day-to-day responsibilities, it is not as much as I would like.
My wildest hope for society in my lifetime is that we will experience dramaticly shorter work weeks. Keynes predicted 15 hour work weeks by 2030 or so. If I could afford a modest life on only 15 hours of labor, and devote other time to family, friends, and art, I would feel so amazing. I'm skeptical of the claims of AI, but a society where a shorter work week is the norm would turn me into its biggest fan.
Anyway, despite my frustration, the time I spend with my creative projects results in my greatest self-satisfaction, after the time I devote to raising my children. And the creative outlets I pursue today are directly related to the artistic skills I developed in my youth (including music). So yeah, it probably won't pay the bills, but there's much more important things in life than bills.
I recall reading of studies that found that a significant majority of adults who did not learn to play an instrument when they were young wish that they had.
Only a small minority of adults who did learn to play an instrument when young wish that they hadn't.
I'm still not amazing at piano. But having a basic understanding of musical theory, understanding how a lot of these concepts of harmonics and tones and waves are related, have really unlocked a lot of neat things throughout my life. Their push for me to learn an instrument drove me to performing for family events including a couple of weddings, with my involvement in their day still quite a powerful shared memory between us. It led me to learn additional musical instruments, which I enjoyed a lot more than piano. It helped me in other artistic endeavors like theater. It helped me understand music production, something I moonlight in as a volunteer. It gave me instant connections with lots of people who were important people in my life but probably would have forever been passing strangers. It has given me something else to share with my children, as they routinely ask me to play for them and show them how instruments work. A basic understanding of waves and harmonics and what not even helped me understand a lot of more complicated EE topics.
Learning an instrument early in my life was definitely a powerful and deeply impactful thing in my life journey, almost entirely positively outside of many afternoons where I had to catch up on DBZ later.
It was a funny moment where she was like "you have perfect pitch!" "What is perfect pitch?"
I guess it's a shame, I could've been a great musician if I was trained.
In any case, if you want to meet up online, my email is in my profile. You sound fun!
The music bit is mostly things you’d want to impart on your kids if you care about that sort of thing. (Which I do!) The public versions of it are not great where I am but individually you can do a lot.
Proficiency in musical instrumemts is not necessarily useful by itself, but it's a path towards mastery of something hard that typically involves a lot of intentional practice. Having been able to master something hard once makes it easier to master other hard things, because you can reuse the learning skills. Music has a little bit of applied fractions and what not, too.
The same thing learning to learn journey happens with learning a second language. But also, learning a second language helps develop skills and understanding of your first language, and helps develop communication skills for situations where there's a limited mutual understandable vocabulary.
Some languages have market value too. Better communication with employers, customers, and suppliers is valuable.
And yet the highest earning people I know who didn’t come from affluent backgrounds are musically and linguistically talented.
Focusing on what the market demands is chasing a moving target and if you miss the boat you might just end up a low-level peon holding a wrench.
See it that way, having a normal social life requires other skills than your job.
It’s either some form of socialism or mass starvation.
From what history shows, there's not much difference between the two.
Scaling it up is hard, though.
What sort of socialism was at play when the British forced Ireland into famine during the potato blight? What about the British role in India’s famine? What about the many famines brought about by civil wars and ethnic conflicts in Africa? The Great Depression, famously brought about by socialist policies and definitely not gilded age wealth inequality decadence?
If you’re looking for a common thread, it’s authoritarianism, not socialism.
I guess you needed some validation today.
Modern Western European socialism has probably suppressed wages and increased unemployment relative to the US, but hasn’t led to starvation.