transcript
“Pretty shitty how baseline human activities like singing, dancing, and making art got turned into skills instead of being seen as behaviors, so now it’s like ‘the point of doing them is to get good at them’ and not ‘this is a thing humans do, the way birds sing and bees make hives.’”
Real I’m 14 and this is deep vibes.
Nobody’s gonna stop you from doing any of that. Well, maybe from singing in public but that’s less about skill and more about not disturbing others by being loud and obnoxious.
And making art in public is vandalism, dance and maybe someone will think you’re on drugs and call the police. Spend your time doing human things alone for no profit and maybe society won’t let you have shelter or medicine. People are absolutely going to stop you unless you’re really good at fighting for it.
Be the change you want to see, no one will stop you. I certainly won’t.
I think these things still exist on the full spectrum of “feels human, so do it!” to “you’re so great, it’s a skill you can use to earn a living.” There are tons of things like this. Cooking, massage, comedy, playing an instrument…nearly any service or entertainment skill. Believe me, ain’t nobody gonna pay to hear me sing (maybe to stop…), but I still sing along at the top of my lungs (when it won’t torture anyone) because it makes me feel happy!
ETA: This is nothing new. See “bards.”
“ETA”?
“Edited to Add”
My baby niece started bobbing up and down when a song came on, happily waving her little fists and shaking her little diaper butt.
I was like “that’s terrible, you’ll never be a star, keep your day job you untalented hack!”
thought i was on linkedin for a sec
Lemmy is LinkedIn for NEETs
My partner made up a word - Dysfunctionlust: the pleasure you get from doing something that you feel no pressure to be good at.
She’s quite a good writer but super hard on herself about it, whereas drawing is a dysfunctionlust for her and so quite relaxing.
It’s based on the German word funktionslust: the joy of an organism doing what it’s meant to do, like a dog running.
Can’t not see the “Dysfunctionslut” in there, though. 🤷🏽♂️😅
That’s also great! Dysfunctionslut is much cooler than just saying “I have really bad ADD”
some people make steel frying pans all day to pay the bills, some people sing at restaurants to entertain them, others people work in the kitchen to fry them both their dinner
Capitalism causes us to commodotize everything. I saw this switch as well during the 2000s in Internet culture. It went from people making websites about their cats and stuff to people chirping out “but how will that be profitable?!” in response to most ideas.
I remember 11 year old me trying to monentise a crappy weebly site I made.
Only if you let them. I do all these things without regard to skill. Maybe surround yourself with more laid back people?
This only applies if you give a shit what other people think of you doing innocuous things.
Paint a terrible picture and have fun doing it. Dance your way down the sidewalk when the mood strikes you. Sing whenever you want. Sometimes I’m in the grocery store and they start playing a banger on the speakers, damn right I’m gonna sing along to it while I’m evaluating the pros and cons of competing spaghetti packages.
And if you show any ability above terrible, everyone starts telling you about how much money you can make.
Fuck off. I do this for me.
I’ve been playing music for over 14~ years and I personally love that it is difficult and I always have something to work on
I want to be good at. I will be good at it. I don’t feel bad because I’m not a gifted musician. I play for myself and improvement is an amazing feeling as a musician.
This post has had me thinking for most of a day. I kind of love the phrase that these are things that humans just do.
But I think that learning and improving and sharing ideas and methods are perhaps even more a thing that people do. So, practicing and studying e.g. music or dance should be peak human activity.
Making it a business is… let’s say an opportunistic option. Definitely should not be a necessity or a default, but possibly an option.
(40+ years of music practice for me, too. I’ll never be professional, but I also won’t voluntarily ever stop.)
I mean… Those things are all skills. They are skills anyone can develop barring some kind of disability (you’re probably not gonna be singing if you don’t have a larynx, for example).
maybe they could learn to whistle? Does that require a larynx? For that matter, does whistle count as singing? Now I have so many questions.
That’s a good question. Personally, I think it should but I am pretty sure I’ve seen it classified as playing an instrument once.
I guess it’s really no different than a flute… I also can’t play a flute worth a shit as well as whistling so yeah. Makes sense as an instrument.
Before late capitalism forced most everyone to make their art more “commercial”, there was this thing in modernity called symbolic capital, and in the artistic fields this brought the cons of competitive spirit, but a pro - in my view, at least - was enabling approaches to art which are more sophisticated, albeit requiring specialization also on the part of the reader (for the pleasure of “writerly” texts see Roland Barthes; for why many people want to passively consume elite art rather than participate in democratic art, “The Weak Universalism” by Boris Groys is some food for thought). More exactly, modern artists placed their bets on getting recognized by critics and historians for their efforts at innovating art without the pressure to always meet halfway the audience.
Downsides included the possibility - in bourgeois capitalist societies, not so much in, say, Yugoslavia - to starve before receiving due recognition, being dependent on the critics’ whims or agendas… and being dependent on there being an infrastructure for the art world, gatekeepers - which suffered from more or less systemic biases such as sexism, though sometimes sexually transgressive authors got away with upholding the idea that somehow art is never moral, but instead quintessentially aesthetic - and all… And, of course, in the background should still lie classical education of sorts, in the lack of which today some might end up believing they’re reinventing the wheel or that it’s nonconformist to be conformist, aka hip to be fash square…
At least these are my (more than) two cents as a writer from Eastern Europe who witnessed the fall of the traditional literary system - which in other circumstances could have been enabled me to secure a modest but content existence through a stable job in one of their state-funded magazines - and read Pierre Bourdieu and Pascale Casanova to make some sense of all this. As a lower middle class person, I was privileged to have been supported by my parents to pursue literature for years without the pressure of making it on the job market - now I work almost 7 days out of 7, leaving me in no mood to read or write books… Alas, I was looking forward to UBI or negative income tax, but it seems like we have to fight a techno-feudal dystopia first.
…
She does realize birds are literally in a clmpetition trying to find a mate, right? Right?
The birds singing is basically the same as some lads pumped full of testosterone yelling “hey sweetie, wanna hang out?” In high street…
As long as it’s not your sole source of income why would you give a shit about being good at it as long as you enjoy it?
I think you missed the point. It’s not about income at all, it’s about expression. Not speech, expression. It’s about how today most forms of human expression are viewed as only valid if that activity can support a person by making money. Rather than expression being valid because a person expressed it.
Now there has always been people who were particularly talented at expressing themselves and were valued because of it. OP’s point is that as today society says that no one should bother expressing themselves unless they’re one of the talented people who were fortunate enough to turn it into a career. Which is bullshit, express yourself.
