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Notes -
Does anyone else have trouble truly enjoying music anymore?
Specifically, in a world where I can hear any song I want at any time on demand, and I can listen anywhere and everywhere I go, I've found that I get weary of the same ~1000 songs that end up cycling through my playlist, though they're all good songs, and even branching out to less-repeated songs I rarely find one that actually gets an emotional reaction or strikes me as a 'banger' as the kids say. Its just the Diegetic background music of my life.
Occasionally I find a new artist with some solid songs that I end up playing on loop for a couple weeks, then I add a couple good songs from them into my larger playlist, and go back to baseline.
Note, this is NOT a complaint that "all modern music sucks." More like I've saturated my brain with the music I like to the point that I can't properly enjoy it anymore?
Also, live concerts are still a blast, so I also don't think its a general sense of anhedonia.
jumbled thoughts
Music is strongest for the young, as you get older its emotional strength reduces, just as other emotions reduce in potency.
Music is in some sense charged from everyday experience and auditory phenomena. Its patterns are an arrangement of real life phenomena. As you listen to more music without re-experiencing its charging antecedents, the music will refer to fewer emotionally charged experiences.
As you listen to a song more and more, it’s surprise reduces, and emotional potency is associated with surprise.
Your tastes may have just evolved. I find a lot of music to be garbage that I enjoyed in my teens, not because I can’t see its allure, but the allure is toward an emotional state that I no longer consider beneficial. At the same time, I experience intense emotions listening to religious music.
Good points, all.
This in particular, though:
My tastes have evolved some but also crystallized a lot around my early twenties, it feels like. Definitely got past my more angsty and awkward stage where music that spoke to outcasts was a lot of my go-to. Find hard rock to be kind of silly now but I embrace it nonetheless, and I'm more open to genres like country, once I saw past the boring pop schlock that actually gets radio play.
The last time I think I felt an intense emotional connection to a song was back during the pandemic when the internet suddenly got obsessed with Sea Shanties for a couple months, and This song was produced from one of the most popular ones. Not even sure exactly why but I was very taken with that version in particular and it became a personal anthem of mine for surviving lockdowns.
And, very similar to religious music (good choice by the way) I cannot help but feel a deep, almost primal sense of joy and frission when I hear a bunch of people singing a Sea Shanty together. There's some deep psychological programming at work there, I think. But I don't become obsessed with it like I might have when I was younger.
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