The Hump
An idea occurred to me this morning about kind of the hump of life where you can kind of do anything, you know, after teenage idiocy is gone, maybe 18-ish, going off to college, everybody's excited about what you're doing, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And then once you get old and in your 50s, you start to lose your sharpness. Me, at 53, I'm kind of in a good position where things and feelings are kind of nice. Rounded off.
But, you know, once you're in your 70s, maybe part of your 60s, you get to that stage of life where, kind of, people in the hump find you less useful, let's say.
So what if there was a way to concentrate on the people outside of the hump and what they have to give?
That's the point of this idea, I guess, involving music, period. There's also an idea that everyone has music in them. They just have to figure out how to get it out. And a lot shouldn't be getting it out, so you have to deal with that.
And you have a lot of divergent paths, too. Some people are just going to concentrate on the gear, some people are going to concentrate on the making, but what if you showed them a very easy way to make music, and above all else, to share it? And then talk about it with people and a community of people. And what if that, for the older, I guess you call it, the ‘too old’ and the ‘too young,’ what if this was a pathway to earn value or to recognize their own value on a daily basis? The interesting thing about both of those periods of life, the too old and the too young, the non-humpers, is that they've got the time to make and then share and then to talk about it.
Offer them a system free of any financial anything. We can get the tools, that's the easy part, but you don't have to play shows or worry about making money or getting paid or what is an artist's worth, all this terrible stuff. It's just a bunch of noise, anyway. But what if the value was concentrated and shown in the making, in the sharing, in the discourse?
Could you make earlier and later in life better? Yes. Give them something that's theirs? Yes. I mean, you created it, right? Make it valuable and shareable and something that other people can talk about.
No thought to legacy, right? Who cares? If you're gone, it doesn't matter.
But that you were able to live this part of your life and be more valued is such a gift, either earlier or close to the end. I don't know what else you could do for people that could be more impactful.