I asked someone what kind of music they listened to.
“Only meaningful songs,” they replied.
“So… every genre then?” I said.
Apparently not.
They doubled down. Only songs with meaning.
I found the exchange amusing–not because they had standards, but because of the peculiar confidence with which we crown ourselves custodians of refined taste, of meaning, as though the universe wrote its story with us as the protagonist and quietly handed us the final draft for approval.
It’s a curious habit. Not just curious–bad, terrible, actually. We encounter something that fails to move us and, instead of admitting the distance between ourselves and it, because doing so removes us from the imagined pedestal we think the universe has bestowed upon us as the sole protagonist, we pronounce it empty. Meaningless. Beneath us. We mistake unfamiliarity for absence.
I’ve come to agree, within myself, that very little is actually senseless. Most things are simply written in a language that isn’t ours. And every language is, in its own way, a code–shaped by context, location, lived experience, and circumstance, with much of its meaning baked into culture, norms, and shared practices. Every song, every piece of art, every obsession belongs to a specific context, a people, or a person. That it misses me does not mean it misses everyone and is therefore vacuous.
The irony, of course, is not lost on me, and shouldn’t be lost on you, that somewhere else, under this same dying sun but in different circumstances, the very thing we hold so dear, adore, and tout as profound is someone else’s motor garage noise. Our masterpieces are another person’s background music. Our strong convictions are somebody else’s punchline. So it would pay you to, at times, touch grass, because there’s something oddly humbling about remembering that, depending on where you’re standing, you’re probably the joker in the deck, the fool, the court jester, in someone you turn your nose up at’s story.
So I have grown suspicious of absolute dismissals. I no longer say, “This is senseless.” I prefer, “I find this senseless.” The first pretends to describe reality. The second merely admits the limits of my own bandwidth, though I can be hypocritical at times.
