In response to a conversation about this post with my good friend Mark.
Instrument, as in the things that measure, not the ones that you make music with. But some of those instruments are still integral to producing music aren't they? Like the needle on a record player, you touch the rest of the world and ring out in response.
Let's look past individualism - it's more a symptom of something else than it is an interesting or useful world view. Do you know anyone who you would say is really living life well? If you do, most likely they'll be an average sort of person and not, say, an olympian or an executive at a fortune 500 company. For the average well-livers that I know, one thing I've noticed in common for them is an orientation of their lives towards something specific that they're in awe of or in love with. Usually it's their kids, but often there are many of those things they orient themselves to, and they're not all people.
Importantly, they don't see what they're oriented towards as dependent on their drive, or as caused by their own genius. Rather, those things are wonders in themselves that they have the fortune to be in contact with and react to whole-heartedly. You get to discover the sort of person your daughter is and have the love in you that you've been dying to share take real shape in the world, according to the form and particularities of this adorable new person.
Great things likely come out of that realization of love, but those are ultimately, sideffects - clues that something right may be happening. The real source of that look of contentment in the well-liver's eyes is that realization itself - the ongoing process of it, embodied in the every day happenings of the relationship. Their resonance together.
Love is always a directed thing, and so this resonating faculty in you literally can not really exist without knowing and responding to her in particular, and could never take this particular shape except for her particularties. The same is true for your relationshisp with your parents, your brothers, your lovers. And your projects!
With that sort of other-orientation, "you" is still an important and integral part of your life, which you should take care of and be true to and respect. But you may realize (and even if you don't, your life will still demonstrate) that "you" on its own is not the source of your life. "You" does its thing best when it's put in contact with the things it can resonate with - it doesn't conjure anything out of a vacuum with how cool or smart it is. Life well lived is this kind of strong resonance. There are commonalities in what "you"s resonate with across people, but each ultimately has a unique shape that defies formulas and requires constant testing against new realities to see what kind of sound comes out.
And what's more, "you" changes in response to the way it's been resonating. It stays more or less the same when it hasn't done much of any. The world is full of things people can't help but resonate with when they just get a glimpse of them, so probably that lack is from active avoidance of real contact with the world. When "you" does have that contact, not only does resonance often happen, that resonance slowly changes "you"'s shape. Gradually, "you" can start to pick up on new resonances. You might be able to hear a symphony when you put it against something that only produced noise before.
Just as a result of how the numbers work out from the definition of the word "average".
And that's good here, since it helps remove any distorting effects of cultural norms around success. Yes, I mean living well and success aren't well correlated - positively, at least.
And it's especially clear when I compare them with the most ostensibly miserable people I see. They tend to idolize their "you"s the most.
For instance, they see that your kids aren't defined as things to be raised the right way and that owe what's good in their own lives to you and your good sense, a project isn't a thing that owes its existence to you and your smarts and creativity.
Your kid's good grades, confidence in herself, her own well-orientedness. In the arts, I suspect masterworks in all their forms require this orientation
I hesitate to use artifacts as measures of something good happening. The children of abusive parents often have good grades too. The Nazis produced very beautiful things. Isn't it that kind of obsession with artifice that allows some people to not be sure whether abusive parents or Nazis were actually wrong?
That is, there's always a "lover" and "beloved" - never just one person involved.
Sort of like what separates having a crush and actually loving someone. Strong feelings for someone from a distance - without really knowing them, I mean - are more feedback with yourself than resonance with them.
There's something in the artifact you get at the end of a project, of course, but the process of getting there is where the life is, the resonance. With anything truly creative, you should have no real clue how it'll turn out in the end. There's a process that begins when there's continued contact between "you", the inspirations, and your craft (the latter are the things you're resonating with). That mostly unconcious process is the resonance, and sometimes we're lucky and something comes out of it worth keeping. That something memorializes and communicates to other people something of those things that came together.. But really the value is that they come together.
Anything you make where you know from the start exactly what you want and get that at the end - that has no place for the sensitivity involved in good inspiration and craft - let the machines have that sort of work and take it straight to hell. There's no life in it.
My lack of concern for machine generated stuff is related to this.
See pg on taste, and the fact that its hard to find a culture that doesn't expect a sacred mother-child bond.