Competing with eternity
My attitude to making music and art is it doesn't have to be perfect, a lot of what people found to be lifechanging music in past decades is, listening now with our current tech (not fuzzy radios) - poorly mixed with clunky instrumentals, doesn't matter though because the meaning and motive behind the music is what people find inspiring. I stumbled upon two random poems on tiktok the other day which I thought were very meaningful, from someone with 22 followers, and my comment was the only comment. Meaning comes from intention, not from perfection and not from fame, two things people chase now. They chase perfection because of the illusion of eternal content streams, they think they are competing with eternity. And fame because they see numbers instead of people, and think big number good. But what actually matters is meaning, motive, intention, expression and that is done best without trying to create perfection.
The more thought is put into something, the more self aware it is, the more meaning is likely to be self consciously removed from it. And the illusion of eternity is false. Maybe there is enough recorded music now to listen to for eternity - but what is being *made* now? Are there enough living artists and bands to make art and music to fill eternity if the starting point is today? If you take recordings away, back catalogues away, archives away, the number of artists actually making music and art right now is far smaller. It's looking at a library versus looking at current active authors. And the artists making art now are responding to our current reality, that is what any current artist should concern themselves with, not competing with an eternity of back catalogues (and an extended eternity of AI copies) but what peers are making right now. Or, simply what you want to say, draw, and make.
