Re-evaluating my Life

I will be graduating from college in a couple months. Thus, naturally I've been thinking my life through quite a bit (though I do this all the time anyway, so I don't know how much graduation has to do with it; perhaps it add a little something extra). I've been continuing work on my social progress projects of course, but I've also been focusing on the elements I need in my life in order to live happily. I've come to a few conclusions.

1) I need to make sure music plays a large role in my life. I've had a deep passion for music since middle school, but I began to neglect it as I became more focused on intellectual work some years after high school. It was bad enough the last years I was living in San Diego, but after I moved to New York without my music equipment, my musical side became even more starved. I've used the excuse of not having my gear here for not going about changing the situation--though to my credit I did look for people to collaborate with and did take music related courses at school when it I could. But now that I'm realizing just how essential music is to my happiness, I'm not going to let anything get in my way. I have paper to write lyrics; I have musical resources at school; I have passable computer speakers at home. So now the journey begins.

2) In realizing through my own life experience how important music is to my life, I also realized how limited the "wisdom" of professional scholarship can be. Many of the journal articles and books produced by academics have a very narrow relevance and do not connect to the legitimate core purpose of enhancing the well-being of society. Russell Jacoby has done a great job of describing the incentive structure behind this failure, however, I want to address the problem from a different angle. What I want to point out is that when it comes to my own concrete, real life happiness, I have been able to pull little wisdom from my college courses. I don't want to say that the production of academics is useless. I know this is not the case because I have gained much wisdom from reading books. However, the large majority of academic productions do not contain the life-changing wisdom I am seeking. I'm not saying that I have not gained important knowledge from my college courses--I have. I am arguing that this scholarly wisdom is narrow and lacking reflectiveness in the grander sense. Thus, the courses I have taken have seemed very distant from the content of my everyday life. But, I do not see this as necessary. I see it as an entrenched habit perpetuated by the mechanisms of academia's bureaucracy.

3) I think that I will be able to enjoy myself more If I am more liberal with my spending on entertaining activities. Working more in order to be able to travel and attend fun music events would probably better strategy for achieving an overall happy life. The fact of the matter is that grand events require grand resources, and most individuals are not going to foot the bill in the hope that others will reciprocate. The stakes are simply too high. Thus monetizing those activities makes them feasible. Though in theory it's all the same, since one is essentially trading the labor they they put into putting together one event for the ability to enjoy an event organized by someone else. However, the process of putting together these events must not be alienating to the laborers. Unfortunately, this principle is very rarely upheld in practice. It's not that it is a very difficult feat to accomplish, it's that few economic actors take the issue into consideration. But this is okay because alternative economic worlds are possible.

Getting back to my second conclusion--which is my core conclusion, it was the situation I found myself in, along with the advice of my friends, that were significant in my realization. I was unhappy, I thought about it, I shared it, and then I thought about it some more. Yes, academic knowledge influenced these conversations and thoughts, but academic knowledge alone tends to not go very far in these issues of fundamental human importance. Academic knowledge is largely produced for its own world. Others can go in and salvage some of that raw material; but this process of joining and shaping disparate materials for a truly life-enhancing purpose is something very different from the academic norm of activity. I wish this were not the case. I wish a bridge to this outcome would be constructed within the Academy. I know it is possible. However, until that happens, students will have to create that bridge themselves or else face the unfortunate situation of coming out of the Academy lost, scared, and ignorant.