I am smarter than 90% of doctors
By Ben Owens
If a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Lately, I often find myself thinking about this question. I wonder if I am doing things for myself, by myself, if they really matter. I do wonder about how much of doing something and having it be seen is what makes it matter. A lot of people say that you should make art for yourself and that the audience should come last.
When it comes to making music, I think about the audience all the time. I think about how I want them to feel when they hear a song we wrote. I think about how it will feel to them and what I want them to do when they hear it. I guess, at the same time, I am making the song for the target audience, which is me, because when I think of how I want people to feel when I’m making music, I think about how I would want it to make me feel. I want to give people an experience that I want to have or something close to what I have felt in the past and enjoyed.
But then, I have songs that I have made just by myself that I have never shown anyone. I used to make a lot of electronic/house music. To be honest, I hardly do it anymore. But when I did, a lot of things I would make, I would just keep for myself. Maybe like 80-ish full songs I have never shown anyone. Maybe because I thought they were bad or because I was trying something new that I didn’t want people to hear me sing a certain way. Regardless, I wonder—if I made those things and don’t show them to anyone, do they even matter? I don’t listen to them at all. I have written so much that I just read once when I’m done and delete or just tuck it away and never look again. You could argue that I’m just practicing and getting better, and I think that is a pretty valid point, but at the same time, what is the point of making anything if you just hide it?
I made a whole beat tape once and then just decided not to do anything with it. Maybe six or seven songs that I thought were really cool and felt were worth sharing, but for some reason, I never did. I could, but I feel like at this point, if I did release it, it would just be for the sake of doing so. I don’t think I would really even care if people listened to it or liked it at all. If I released it, I would probably do it just because I felt like people would think it’s cool that I made a sneaky beat tape.
Which sort of brings me to my next question—is it wrong to make something just because you think it’s cool? For example, is it a bad reason to start playing guitar just because you think videos of Van Halen are badass and he probably gets hella chicks? I don’t really think so, especially if you are young and impressionable. When I was a kid, I think most of what I liked was based on what seemed like the coolest thing to be. I thought being a rockstar was so cool, so I wanted to be one. I watched School of Rock, and when they played the battle of the bands at the end, that was, at the time, the coolest thing I had ever seen in my life. I could not, at the time, conceive of anything better than playing a kickass rock show. I think, to this day, I still can’t.
But maybe that’s just because I made up my mind when I was just a kid about what the coolest thing to do was, and it just so happens that my mind never really changed. It is funny for me to really think about it, though, because my dreams are pretty juvenile at this point—write a really cool fantasy book and make money being a rockstar. That is really dialing it back and taking away any of the complexity of why I want to do those things at this point, but nonetheless, that is what I want to do.
I think it helps me to look at it that way in a really simplified version because the simplified version is what I thought of when I was just a kid, and it is the purest version of that dream. I think that before you start to get horny when you are a young man, that is the purest, most unadulterated version of who you are—maybe when you are 10 or 11. At that age, when I thought girls were just pretty and I did not understand any of the more adult implications in media or conversation, was when I decided I wanted to be a rockstar. And honestly, at the same time, I loved books and fantasy worlds, but we will put that on the back burner for right now.
I wanted to be a rockstar because it seemed badass and because people would think I was badass. I think my dreams got sort of convoluted when I started playing sports because people were telling me sports was a better dream for me and that I had a better chance of making it big in that world. So I think for a while, I changed my dreams a little bit because it made more sense to me.
Something funny about chasing your dreams is that people, for some reason, think it is their job to tell you whether or not you could do it. No one would ever discourage someone from becoming a doctor, but before you can even start making money for real, it takes basically 12 years, and you have to go into hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, which is honestly insane. Unless you have rich parents, that is, in my opinion, an equally herculean task as chasing any other far-off dream. Imagine just being poor for 12 years and having to be busy all the time. Do people who become doctors really like medical stuff that much too? Like, are they going to sit down and tell me they’d rather do surgery than go for a bike ride? I’m just saying that if you want to become a doctor but you like riding your bike more than doing back surgery, maybe you should reconsider your goals.
I’m just using the doctor analogy because becoming a doctor is really hard and takes forever, but if you told someone that’s what you wanted to do, they would never discourage you. I think a lot of that is just because there is a charted and marked path that people can follow that leads directly to becoming a doctor, and there is no map to making it in a lot of other industries.
In the Bible, there is a story in the book of Joshua about the Battle of Jericho. Jericho has really big walls, and there is no way to get into the city, and the Israelites are trying to take the city. So God tells them to march around the city for six days. Then, on the seventh day, they marched around the city seven times, and the walls just fell down, basically. That doesn’t make any sense, and if I was them, I would have felt like a total fool just marching around the city while those Jericho mfs watched from those walls. But the thing is, they just marched around those walls because it was the only thing they could do, and for some reason, that gets me really fired up.
I think most people would have said they could never get into Jericho, that the walls were too big and strong. But sometimes, you just gotta march for six days, even if to keep marching doesn’t make sense to you or if you really don’t get why you are marching in the first place. But if that’s the one way into the city, and that’s where you want to be, then marching is the only thing you can do. I think a lot of other people would have tried to conquer other cities and become doctors because there were obvious paths of entry. But there’s not a lot in the Bible about guys who conquered cities the regular way.
I think that’s why I think about the tree in the forest so much—because I, like many men, am obsessed with legacy. I don’t think a tree makes a sound if no one hears it because it is something being heard that even makes us call it a sound. I think, for the same reason, if what I make never sees the light of day, it probably just doesn’t matter. That’s why I’m trying to just keep marching on and on because I think eventually the walls will fall, and I’ll have my day of glory. Even if my marching is just posting up on my blog, I think it still counts. And that’s also why even if i’m not super proud of something or i don’t really even think this is my best writing i still need to put it out into the world to be seen, I'm not sure what it is about that part of the process but it feels super necessary to me. I also know this is a very “you miss every shot you don’t take” sort of thing but smoke if you gottem.
Also, sorry if you guys feel like I was dogging on doctors. I have mad respect for doctors.