As an activist of sorts on environmental matters, I seem to be very much at odds with what passes for mainstream environmental actions these days. I struggle with the one- or two-dimensional aims of ‘net-zero’ and ‘recycling’ that implicitly assert that the way we live today is the only way that we can live. The central idea that we continue consuming as we do is not challenged. Therefore, the solutions proposed are just the same system doing the same thing in a slightly ‘greener’ way. Ultimately, the end point is not changing.
Consumerism in ‘developed’ nations is a major problem for the sustainability of our civilisation and the continued existence of many species, including our own. How we now live our lives is the result of a deliberate campaign to keep people consuming, to keep production up in order to keep the economic system buoyant. Our value and our values as human beings have been made subsidiary to the cause of economic growth and the profits that rely on such growth. While we have less poverty and longer lifespans than those in our recent history, the cumulative benefit of living lives that require constant consumption and waste are highly dubious to begin with. Now, consumption and waste threaten us with the collapse of our civilisation.
So what would we do if we lived truly ‘sustainable’ lifestyles? Not lives where we buy now and someone else pays later? Work less, produce less, own less, consume less? There appears to be a fear that we would experience poverty and deprivation as a result of reducing our consumption: “Let’s just face it, we’ll all be poor”, as one news anchor put it. The logic that, if we make things to last and produce fewer disposable items, then we will be better off does not fit within the current zeitgeist. It does not fit within the current economic system as that system requires constant growth. People are afraid of losing jobs, but why be afraid when a healthy system can provide for our needs so much better than the one we live in now – and we can be so much less busy? We can have more leisure time, more time for friendships and community, more time for following the passions of our lives and all the resources we might need to spend that time well.
The thoughts presented here have been on a journey through discussions with the various people involved. In itself, it is a story of occupation, meaning, purpose, and connection, mostly through my own work and play in the community of musicians. It started out ten or so years ago in thoughts about our relationship to things: material cultural artefacts in their widest sense. For reasons told below, I honed in on a hand-made violin, an artefact that gives great value in the making and great value in the using. It does morph into a cello a couple of times but you get the idea.
I started talking to fellow musicians and environmentalists about that value and passed on thoughts from one to the other: especially among musicians. Suggestions that the stories and ideas apply equally to sport, knitting and organic gardening are great and worth exploring but not what I choose to write about here. From these conversations and the reading they have led me to, it seems straightforward to me that, in our relationship to ‘stuff’, we can live better than we do now on far fewer resources than we do now.
Before we get to the chats, though, I would like to set the scene, say where we are in our society, our culture, our civilisation and, later on, I will speak about why we are here.
The Economy and What it Does
In his 1930 essay, Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren, the eminent British economist, John Maynard Keynes, discussed the future of work and productivity. Keynes predicted that advancements in technology and productivity over the following hundred years would reduce the need for long work hours, ultimately allowing people to work as little as 15 hours per week. Keynes anticipated that society would have to find a way to share the remaining work equitably, as increasing efficiency would mean that less labour would be needed to meet human needs and desires. Spreading the work around would be as much about giving people purpose in life as it would be of giving them a means of earning.
Between swings and roundabouts, Keynes was fairly correct in his growth predictions.
But we didn’t do that.
By contrast, in 1955, American economist Victor Lebow stated:
Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction and our ego satisfaction in consumption. We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced and discarded at an ever-increasing rate.
This is the dream we are now living.
But it is not such a dream because, in my country at least, everyone seems to be time-poor. Being busy all the time seems to be a badge of honour but, in truth, we are working on both the production and consumption sides of the equation. The productive economy needs us to work at our consumption in order to keep it inflated and doing what it does so well: producing loads and loads of stuff, both as goods and as services, not for our benefit, but for the benefit of profit.
Musicians (and a Forester)
Luthiers
For me, this journey in thinking about how we might live differently starts in Cremona in Italy during the 10th European Orchestra Festival in 2015. The festival is a wonderful example of community-building amongst musicians from across Europe. Entire orchestras travel to the festival from all over the continent and perform for each other. The really special thing about it, though, is that the players from each orchestra also participate in ‘workshop orchestras’, where they sign up for rehearsals and performances in a particular style of orchestral music and practice and play with the musicians from all of the other countries.
Cremona is a city that is associated with luthiers (the making of violins and other stringed instruments). It was the home of Stradivarius for much of his life and today has over 150 active luthiers as well as many students of instrument making. It was with beers in a cafe with two such students, volunteers for the festival, that I was sold the value of a hand-made instrument.
Their argument ran as follows: a handmade instrument is expensive to buy but it is inexpensive to use. That is to say that a well-made instrument will last a very long time, often several lifetimes, and that, if it is used often over that time, the cost-per-hour, as it were, is actually very low. Party, this is because a well-made instrument will be purchased by someone who values such an instrument and will therefore play it often. A well-made instrument encourages this. It is a pleasure to play. By contrast, a poorly-made instrument, of which there are many, does not encourage the owner to play it often. It can be difficult to tune properly, difficult to play and the tone may not be very good. Such instruments often do not last very long so the cost-per-hour can turn out to be higher than that of an expensive hand-made instrument.
Add to this the fact that the money-value of a handmade instrument tends to hold and appreciate over the long term and the cost of ownership is reduced to the cost of insuring and maintaining the instrument and repairing any damage that gets done. While the owner may not reap this money-value by selling the violin, they are still in possession of a valuable asset from which they can gain many, many hours of pleasure and meaning and the cost of the initial investment eventually gets replaced by a sense of value other than the money-value.
I didn’t take much convincing. I was on board. Getting our hands on such instruments in our current economy is, of course, difficult for many but we need to think about that differently, as we need to think about so many other things differently. But I am thinking less about ownership and more about access. The great value for money that such an instrument represents can be distributed more fairly across society through social investment.
Relations
I started talking to other musicians about this idea. Some agreed and some had “buts!”. Often these buts came my direction feeling like contradictions but I think they were more “yes, but” or even “yes, and”.
In particular, a few people talked to me about the relationships around instruments in terms of the relationships between people. Sometimes the relationship was more important than the quality of the instrument. For one player, they inherited their grandfather’s violin. It was not an expensive or even a particularly-well crafted instrument, but it was the violin that their grandfather had played at family gatherings and held the memories of the man and the joy that he experienced himself and shared with others through the instrument. A bit of restoration and a few upgrades to parts made it perfectly serviceable and acted to keep their grandfather’s memory alive. It wasn’t just the community sharing music in the present, it was also a community with the past.
In another case, a person had taken up playing an instrument for the first time in memory of someone close to them who had died. They didn’t want to give away the instrument as it was a reminder of their loved one and, eventually, they decided that it shouldn’t just sit there doing nothing. That person now plays in an orchestra weekly and has found solace and community through the instrument.
A different take on why hand-made is not always better comes from the fact that our technologies are just better at doing some things. When it comes to making concert harps, hi-tech, machined parts are just better. I’m all for it.
I welcomed the challenge of the “yes, buts” and have nothing against workshop-made instruments or even those that qualify for the term “mass-produced”. But, I definitely feel that instruments, along with everything else that we make, should be produced with an eye to quality and longevity.
I also value hand-made instruments for another reason. Our economy and our society seem to be obsessed with productivity. And yet, we are producing ourselves out of existence. As of 2024, we are using up the Earth’s resources at 1.7 times the rate at which the Earth can regenerate those resources. We need to change this, and a real part of the solution can be for humans to engage in more slow and meaningful work rather than simply producing as much as possible as fast as possible. This becomes even more important as machines become capable of replacing many of our jobs and occupations. We need to ask the question, “What work is it good for humans to do?”
Luthiers (Reprise)
Jumping in time to another luthier – this one closer to home – we had a conversation about trees. This luthier mostly makes cellos and talked to me about getting suitable wood for cellos. His main source of wood has previously come from large spruce trees growing on the northern faces of hills in Italy. The trees on the northern-facing slopes have grown more slowly: the growth rings are closer together and this improves the strength of the wood and the sound-quality of the instrument.
Unfortunately, this wood is proving harder and harder to get as we cut down more of our old-growth forests. Even something as old-fashioned as making instruments by hand does come with a cost to nature. He was more concerned however about cutting down trees to make cheap instruments that don’t last. He spoke of mass-producing workshops which use wood from 400-year-old trees, don’t cure the wood properly and produce cheap instruments that do not play well and do not last.
There is a point to note here. As sustainable as we might manage to get, we will still use the resources of nature. We will still likely cut down old trees for their wood. But it is the manner in which we do this, the care that we take to not overuse, the idea of respecting the nature that we use. We need to own the responsibility that, when we cut down a tree, we do take a life. That is not to say that we should never do that, but we should show the decency and respect to that tree to make something high-quality and lasting from its wood. We should do justice to nature.
As we were talking, I got a view into the deep involvement of this particular luthier in his work. We were sitting outside in his garden, as it was that time of the pandemic when we could only meet people outside. As we talked, he went inside to his workshop every five minutes or so to check on his latest creation. After many years as a luthier, he had finally decided to make his own varnish and had just finished coating the first instrument to take that varnish. Had I not been there, I think he may well have just sat and watched the drying process unfolding second-by-second – literally excited by watching paint dry. It is this level of involvement and purpose that can come from such slow work and it is absent from the lives of so many of us today.
That instrument may, of course, be sold and passed to a proud new owner but the likelihood is that it will return again and again to its maker, along with the player(s), and the relationship between the worker and their work will continue for a very long time.
Foresters
Next, we come to someone that I haven’t talked to in real life. It’s on my list to find a forester to talk to about all this but, as you’ll notice, mostly I am talking about musicians and people involved in various aspects of music-making. The connection to the violin is, of course, wood.
The forester I am thinking of here is Peter Wohlleben, author of The Hidden Life of Trees. Having read that book, I will never look at a tree in the same way again. Through his description of his own interaction with trees, and by drawing on research, he reveals trees as individuals and as communities and shows us the richness of his life as a forester. It is from his work and the work of others, notably The Light Eaters by Zoë Schlanger, that I have understood the deep and meaningful work that people who study plant life engage in. As a musician, I understand the fascination that so many people have with music and the purpose that derives from steeping themselves in music. It is as a reader that I often get to experience the fascination and purpose of people that I am never likely to meet but who uplift me nonetheless.
The type of forestry that we need for sustainability is not the type that we often engage in for commercial wood production. That mostly consists of either a) tree plantations which are grown on an intensive industrial model, usually using non-native trees, that is damaging to the land and wildlife, or b) cutting down old-growth forests at a rate that is unsustainable, often illegally.
The forestry that we need for sustainability might include some amount of plantations, but mostly we need to restore natural woodlands and take from them sparingly and with consideration for the community of trees, other plants, and animals that make up a forest. This not only draws large amounts of carbon from the atmosphere but reverses the current decline in biodiversity and puts us back in the direction of a thriving and diverse biosphere that is healthy for its own sake and can also serve us with our needs.
In short, as the luthier said, we need to take less wood and stop being so wasteful. We need to restore the nature that we have erased.
‘Professional’ Musicians
I use the inverted commas because there are many professions within music: many ways that people can make a living, but in this case, I am talking about a friend and colleague who both plays and teaches the violin for a living.
Being a professional musician is not necessarily the healthiest of professions, mostly due to the financial precarity that can come along with it. My work often includes pointing out to people that their commitment to what they do results in their being paid below the minimum wage even though their nominal hourly rate can be quite good. Also, for professional orchestral musicians, for instance, their work can be monotonous and lacking in challenge.
The solution to both these problems was presented to me on a trip to a youth orchestra course in Norway. Firstly, engaging with young people seems to reignite the passion for music that can fade with a repetitive career. On courses that I help to manage, many of the tutors are just back at summer camp. They’re now “on the inside”, as it were, but they are still taking part in something they lived for themselves when they were growing up.
The term “portfolio career” is one that is often thrown about in some of the circles I move in. It certainly does work for some people but, for many of the people I work with, it often means overworked, underpaid, unpaid travel, lack of routine and financial precarity: the apotheosis of the gig economy.
The eye-opener in Norway, though, was learning about a quartet of ‘community musicians’. They were full-time employees of the government and played as a string quartet, along with teaching in the local music school, leading the string sections and conducting in the local amateur orchestra. Financial stability, an interesting and varied workload, and a real contribution to the life of the community: surely we are wealthy enough to afford more of this rather than needing to show our productivity as acquired goods!?
This not-so-little digression comes back to my friend, also the beneficiary of the mixed benefits of a portfolio career. His violin is at least a hundred years old and has been through several musicians, some of whom he knows of and some that he knows nothing of. But the instrument itself is a connection to the lives of those musicians, both known and unknown, which is something that gives an extra dimension of value to the instrument. It is a high-quality violin, it is a joy to play, it helps him earn his living but it is also an instrument with a history of its own that connects the player to the wider culture and history of the artform within which he works and lives.
Amateurs
This can be a dirty word. On my travels, I have picked up the impression that, around the periphery of Europe, ‘amateur’ is a byword for poor quality in many respects. My experience in central Europe, however, is that it means people just don’t get paid. It is their passion and they can be very, very good at it.
My story here comes from an organiser from the UK who I drove to the airport in Dublin after a conference for late-starter orchestras. Brexit had just finally happened and the country was divided and engaged in a cultural civil war. However, she said, when two people sit beside each other and play cello once a week, they have something in common. It is very hard for them to hate each other based on which side of the ‘stay / leave’ debate they are on. Enough said.
Teachers
As a musician working in music, it happens that many of my friends are also as musicians. There comes a point where we cross over from being colleagues to friends but this can actually take quite a long time. That is because, for many of us, we have vocations rather than jobs and the vocations involve something that we simply love: music. One good friend who does wonderful things for young people and music swears that, if she were on a desert island with two children, she would have them playing music together. When it’s working, we have a dedication to the artform itself, a desire to bring it to more people and a desire for those people to enjoy it as much as we do and hold and pass on the culture to others.
I have many great examples of dedication to the artform and to the young people who are inducted into it. The example I choose here though involves sitting in the back seat of a car with two musicians who I was and still am in awe of. One had been mostly a performer, the leader of a number of famous orchestras, and the other was mainly an educator with a love of performing on the side.
It was a long drive (for Ireland): four-and-a-half hours from Sligo to Cork. And they talked all the way about their students. The passion and the care they had for the students and for the culture of music was something it was a privilege to listen to. One particular part of the conversation revolved around a student who needed to realise that they were a great 2nd violin for quartet-playing.
I remember a TV ad from some years ago where the watching audience was asked a series of questions like, “Who was the first man on the moon?”. “Who was second?” The implication being that second is nowhere. And, of course, ‘second violin’ or ‘second fiddle’ is a derogatory term: not good enough to lead. However, the second violin has a distinct role to play that is vital to a string quartet’s cohesion. It is not the subsidiary role that popular culture says it is.
The player in question had all the skills to be a really great second and to have a far more impressive career by giving up the glory of being first and embracing the role that they were made for. And these two teachers discussed how they would convince that player of the importance of the role and embrace their true talent.
For me, this journey, listening to two old men talking, has been one of the big privileges of my life, to be in the presence of such mastery and passion, just as a back-seat passenger.
Students
When we think of students, our minds (mine at least) jump to young people. And this is definitely where the foundations of learning are best laid. But rather than preparing students primarily for their roles as economic producers and consumers, we should instead view their education as a preparation and training for using the most fantastic gadgets that we are aware of: their minds.
For me, a player of a stringed instrument with frets on, I regard my music degree as the best gift my mind could have ever been given. I wanted skills in music which I gained some of, although I think my brain is not wired correctly for it. Mostly I got through my degree on good academic and good negotiation skills. However, I got what I most wanted which was to understand how music is constructed.
I recently had the reason to study some systems theory, rather than just winging it as I had done previously. Systems theory was exactly what I expected it to be and I realised the reason was that the analysis and composition of melody, harmony and small- and large-scale structures in classical music is pretty much the same thing. In systems, theory, a system is a thing. But it is a thing that can not be understood fully just by looking at the whole. Indeed, the ‘whole’ is often just a theoretical framework to describe the sum of the parts. In musical analysis, there are just notes. For most music, the structure has never been written down or notated in any way. It is only through understanding the relationships of the notes to each other that the underlying structure can be understood.
And being a music student is also for people much older than me. One double bass player I know, who plays regularly in an orchestra, took up learning and playing music for the first time after retirement. There are benefits at every age. Student, amateur and orchestral player all fit comfortably under the one banner and contribute to lifelong learning, occupation, meaning, purpose and joy. It is never too late to start.
Organisers
And now we come to the only person who was ‘interviewed’ as such for this piece. The honorary president of the organisation I work for, who had just organised the previously-mentioned international conference for late-starter orchestras. It was February 2020 and the delegation from Singapore had not made it due to a new disease that was spreading in that part of the world.
Joanna had, to my knowledge, started her voluntary orchestral career as a mother of children in a recorder ensemble in the early eighties, and then the newly-founded Dublin Youth Orchestras in the mid-eighties. She was the first manager of our annual Festival of Youth Orchestras, which reaches its 30th anniversary next year. She managed the Irish Youth Orchestra for ten years and had grown it in scale. She had co-founded an instrumental-teaching-for-all in a poor area of Dublin that has given music to so many people and spawned an arts centre and a late-starter orchestra. Why, I wanted to know, was she still creating new organisations and structures for people to play music together?
It was a great chat. We talked of objects made by hand, the value of things that are old, how people have treasured objects from previous generations. There can be real value and meaning in things but that value and meaning is often to do with the connection to other people, other places, other times. These days, we seem to be stuck in an ever-present now. Managing our stuff is a problem. We would be better off re-learning to live more slowly, living at human speed rather than at industrial production speed.
She is a born teacher and gets a kick out of seeing people develop something that they enjoy and take it as far as they can or want to, helping people reach beyond themselves. “Orchestra gives people an opportunity to use the skills from the other parts of their lives to contribute to the common good.” And, also, she has a passion for music herself, taking up the violin and now playing weekly in the orchestra that she was instrumental in starting.
And the moment I most remember. She said to me: “People come up to me and say, ‘You have no idea what this means to me'” And I felt as though she leaned forward into the other end of the phone and said, “Oh, I do, Allin. I know exactly what it means to them.”
To give is to receive and I have come across no clearer example of the power of that giving.
Composers
They’re not all dead white men, you know! We are uncovering the history of women composers these days but the connection to the past is mostly through white guys and so it is a bit unbalanced. That connection is still wonderful, though. Travelling back to the beginning of the story to Cremona in 2015, I attended rehearsals and concerts of the various international workshop orchestras. One in particular was rehearsing a ‘concerto grosso’, for an older form of string orchestra, in a very old building. It was cool inside on a hot summer day and it struck me that this was where this music had come from: not Cremona specifically, but Italy and the music took on an extra significance for me.
While we have many composers alive and well today and writing music in many styles and ways, the connection to the past, to the history of our musical traditions creates a sense of continuity with the past and how it arrives at the present that doesn’t seem to work, for me at least, with history. There is a sense, in listening to music, that we are connected to the minds of the people who have written the music, even though they are long gone.
And when we connect the minds of the past to the work of the forester, growing the wood for future instruments that may also play the music of the past, then we are talking about a sense of community that bridges the past to the future and reaches right across our planet. Which is a good place to take a little leap to something else.
Civilisation
I would now like to zoom out again to the context in which we live our lives and do the things we do on a day-to-day basis. As I mentioned above, I recently had reason to study systems as part of a climate course. It got me to thinking about the systems in which we live and what those systems do.
While we live in a solar system in a galaxy in a universe in goodness-knows-what-else, none of these systems are anything we can do anything about. On our planet, it is our biosphere – life on Earth – that is suffering the consequences of our collective actions as human beings. Human beings are beginning to suffer the consequences too but the damage is bigger than us.
And as to what is causing the damage, I have chosen the level of civilisation as a whole. We might reasonably say that it is our economic system that is really doing the damage but that economic system is a subsystem of civilisation.
Systems, systems, systems! Even as I am looking at profound damage to our ecosystems, I still do find the whole thing fascinating.
I use the singular ‘civilisation’ here as I feel that, by-and-large, our economic models have caused the convergence of previously separate civilisations and cultures. There are a few human cultures that remain outside of this global civilisation but they are a tiny minority of the people now alive.
So, I considered the idea of civilisation as a single system and took the viewpoint of, “What if I considered civilisation as if it were an organism?” As a system, it has very many characteristics that are just the same as any one of us. It is constructed of information and materials. In our case, the information is contained in our cells and in our DNA. In the case of a civilisation, it is contained in the minds of humans and and the artefacts that we use to store and transmit information. In our case, the materials from which we are constructed are absorbed through food, drink and air that we absorb from the outside world. In the case of civilisation, it consumes from the planet and the life of the planet. We create waste. Civilisation creates waste. Although, here we diverge somewhat. Our waste is part of a long-running natural recycling programme where materials are broken down and reused by other forms of life and often subsequently by ourselves again. The waste of civilisation is accumulating and poisoning those other forms of life along with ourselves.
I could zoom in and out to information processing, energy exchange and all sorts of other things but the principle is there.
So, I thought, “What if this system has a purpose?” “What would that purpose be?”
I’m not proposing intelligence or consciousness here although that is a fascinating thought. Systems are often thought to have purposes or directions, though. Often, it looks like a system has a purpose of balancing itself, maintaining its own internal status quo.
Tracing our civilisational path back to Mesopotamia in what we generally refer to today as the Middle East, thus far civilisation seems to want to grow. Civilisation has grown and shrunk over time but subsequent iterations have grown and become more cohesive in one way or another. As part of colonial expansion, the civilisation centred on Europe expanded to cover 84 – 90% of the planet’s land surface (depending on how we count it) and even though many former colonies are now independent, they still partake in the globalised civilisation that resulted.
It’s worth taking a very little time here to look at the economy as it is also predicated on growth. The emergence of money, again tracing ours back to Mesopotamia, and financial innovation over time has given us a world economy that is driven primarily by return-on-investment of financial capital, profit for short. As profit takes a percentage of income from the economy each year, if there were no growth, then profit would eventually absorb all income within the economy and the system would collapse or have to change dramatically in some way. This is because capital would increase, like compound interest, and grow and grow relative to income.
So we might say that the economy is at fault, that it is driving civilisation to consume more and more. But, then again, maybe financial capital and our modern economy are just an innovation of civilisation in the same way that civilisation is an innovation of broader human culture.
In any case, civilisation seems to want to grow. It does seem to be its main purpose. But in the process, that growth is absorbing more and more of the planet and the life of the planet into itself; consuming life on Earth. If it keeps going this way, it will consume until lifesystems collapse and it can no longer maintain its own growth or existence. Maybe we might get off the planet and harness resources beyond the Earth but is it worth the gamble? As I noted previously, currently, at a global level, it is estimated that we are consuming the world’s resources at 1.7 times the speed at which they can regenerate. In Ireland, we are consuming resources at almost twice that global average.
Civilisation is a cancer of life-writ-large on Earth. It is consuming it.
The purpose here is not to pontificate. I am still thinking of us and our relationship to our stuff. And my question is, if this system is in some way following its own goal, then what are we to that system? In our economic system, our value to that system comes in two ways: as producers and as consumers. What we might produce varies widely, it could be technological innovation, care or electric bicycles. What we consume varies widely also, including all of the above. But the economic system, as a subsystem of civilisation needs us to do those things in order for it to continue its growth.
We are production-consumption units, ‘talent’ and ‘consumers’. The system hijacks our basic human needs in order to keep us buying, and to keep up producing to earn enough to keep buying.
More bluntly, we are cattle. Farmed for a system that may well have grown beyond our control.
What makes a good human life?
And so, as we zoom back in again to the level of individual people, I ask, what might be the alternative to being production-consumption units? In caring for life on Earth, we can and should still aim for satisfying human lives. There’s no need for the two to be at odds with each other.
For a start, let’s look at what it is that we are ‘designed’ for. I realise that this might put a few people off but, whether for die-hard evolutionists or those who believe we were created just as we are, but there are ways to accommodate the word “designed” wrapped in inverted commas to many different viewpoints. I hope at least.
For quite a long time, I held a suspicion that our brains were over-engineered in relation to lifestyles as hunter-gatherers or for the life of early civilisation. How come we can create this modern technological civilisation with brains that were created for a much simpler life? However, reading a book about early human culture, I realised that the range of skills and the adaptability we needed for those early lifestyles were actually quite sophisticated. As for the range and skills needed by hunter-gatherers, here is a non-exhaustive list:
- Geography and navigation;
- Season cycle awareness;
- Weather prediction;
- Climate adaptation;
- Fire making;
- Food preparation and cooking;
- Vigilance for predators and other threats;
- Tracking and hunting;
- Foraging, recognising plants and fruits;
- Tool-making;
- Clothes-making;
- Shelter construction;
- Learning new skills and knowledge.
We are very sophisticated creatures and it is really no surprise at all that, generation-on-generation, we have been able to add to our knowledge little-by-little to lay the foundations of civilisation, which has sped up the technological advance, which has brought us to the place where we are now.
As I said, the things that we did in earlier stages of cultural development might well be thought of as what we are ‘designed’ to do. And it makes sense, that if we are to live satisfying and fulfilling lives, that what we do in our day-to-day is aligned to what we are designed to do. Humans need ‘occupation’ in order to give structure to our existence. We have a need to be occupied, to exercise our physical and psychological selves in a manner that is in keeping with our physical and psychological functionality.
So! What makes a good life?
There are certain freedoms that we need as a foundation for a good life such as freedom from violence and oppression, freedom of association, and freedom from poverty (where we do not have enough resources to live or those resources are precarious). I would add freedom of speech and of mind to these, just the freedom to be oneself. It may be possible to live a good life without all of these freedoms in place but it is certainly more difficult to achieve it.
Beyond these freedoms, the things that allow us to live well fall into categories of occupation, meaning, purpose and connection.
Occupation! Something to do with our lives. It’s as simple as that. There may be a rare person who can happily while their time away doing absolutely nothing but, for most of us, that’s not really an option. We are designed to be active and our bodies and our minds grow weak if we don’t exercise them. And it’s not that we all need to be musicians or artists or poets. Occupation doesn’t need to come with a fancy contribution. One musician I know who didn’t make the cut above is a street-cleaner and a very happy one at that. I know him from when I used to pass him on a daily basis whilst walking my kids to school. He’s very chatty and his work is social. He also does a good job as far as I can see. He is an amateur choral singer and his social life revolves around the two choirs he takes part in, one of which he joined after meeting someone like me in the course of his work. His job may be looked down upon by some but he makes something great of it, enjoys his life and makes a real contribution to the collective wellbeing.
Meaning: this is what is important to us. In this post, I have chosen music as the meaning although there are lots of shades of that meaning also. And we don’t just have to have one meaning in our life: we can have lots of meanings that all contribute to our wellbeing as a well-rounded human.
Purpose is meaning in action. It is what we do about realising that meaning in the real world: making instruments, playing and performing, teaching and just sharing the love of whatever it is that we love with others in whatever way we choose to do it. Again, many purposes are great as long as we don’t stress ourselves by getting more done than is reasonable for us. Our purposes can be cross-purposes. The classic, in that respect, is someone who focuses too much on career and ends up regretting not being present for their children growing up. The Goldilocks principle applies here.
And connection, possibly the most important of all. We are social creatures and participation in family and community are important to our wellbeing. People who are well-connected socially tend to be healthier, have longer lives and be healthier for more of those lives. The science is in. Personally, even as someone who has a low need for people, I found myself having run out of introversion around April of 2021 amidst ongoing Covid lockdowns. I was glad when the world opened up again and I could start taking part in the community of music again.
And, if there is a cherry on top, for me that is contribution. The sense that I am connected to and giving to something that is bigger than myself. That is why I am writing this. The ‘something bigger’ is the biosphere; life on earth. Choosing the biosphere as that something bigger has been a choice and, in some ways, it is akin for me to what participating in a religious faith is to others. I also happen to love music and feel that more people should have the opportunity to learn and take part and I see the two things not only as compatible, but that music and other activities we participate in just for joy are necessary for us to care for life on our planet.
Our meanings and purposes have been hijacked, and are being ever-more hijacked, for the purposes of the growth of a civilisation that does not care for us. I see reclaiming those meanings and purposes for ourselves as the solution. When we focus on what really matters, we don’t need to buy much in order to get the best that life has to offer. Lives where we use our bodies in a variety of ways, use our minds in a variety of ways, find and practice our passions and take part in community at whatever level we like; these are lives most worth living.
I’ll finish with words from a former President of the International Music Council that really struck a chord with me.
May you always be useful, and find pleasure in what you do.
C’est ça.