Tell me the music you listen to and that’ll reveal quite a bit about you

By David McElroy · March 4, 2019

I have a friend who’s had the same hundred (or so) songs on his iPhone for a decade now. Before that, they were on an iPod. Before that, they were on cassette tapes.

But they’ve been the same hundred songs all these years.

He can’t imagine why anyone would want more music than that. And he certainly can’t imagine why he would want to find new music. He heard everything he wants to hear 20 or 30 years ago, so he’s set for life.

What do you listen to? Are you like the typical person whose music-listening is still dominated — partly or completely — by the music you first heard in high school or college? Does the music you choose — consciously or unconsciously — say something about who you are and how your mind works? I think so.

When it comes to music, there seem to be two basic types of people.

One type has already heard about 99.9 percent of the new music he ever wants to hear by the time he gets out of his 20s, maybe earlier. This person will spend the coming decades mostly listening to music that he first heard in high school or college. He thinks that pretty most everything made since he left his 20s is awful.

The other type of person is just as interested in new music at 35 or 45 or 55 as he was at 15 or 25. He might sometimes listen to music from his youth, but it doesn’t dominate his music-listening. Most of the music he listens to at any point didn’t exist a decade before that point.

I’m describing the two types as black and white, but there are clearly many people who are shades of gray. (I’m an extremist of the second type.) I find it interesting that the closer you are to the extreme of one direction or the other, the harder it is to understand those on the other end.

I have trouble understanding people who listen to the same hundred ancient songs over and over again. And my friends who do that can’t imagine why I would ever seek out new music beyond the old familiar songs they already know.

I tried an experiment this past weekend. I found a playlist of the top 100 Billboard hits from the year I graduated from high school and I listened to all of them. What did I find?

A lot of the music was pretty good. Some of it was great. Some of it was awful. I can see why someone still stuck in the past could enjoy listening to it. But there was one bigger and unexpected result of my experiment.

Listening to that old music put me back into the mindset I experienced when I was 18 years old. It wasn’t great. It wasn’t awful. It was just different. My emotions when listening to this music felt a lot like the way I felt back then, for better or worse. It made me feel like the person I was back then.

My experiment gave me some insight into why people listen to old music so much. They might think they’re doing it because “the old music is better,” but they’re really doing it because it allows them to escape back into who they once were — in an era when they felt young and alive.

But here’s the thing. I’m not that person I was when I was 18. I’m not living in that age. I need to think and feel and act in very different ways to do well in 2019 and be ready for 2020.

If I keep myself in the mindset of the people from the past, I’m not going to change. I’m going to be locked into a narrow slice of history — personal history, too — and I’m going to spend the rest of my life living there and defending that as “the way things ought to be.” That’s a terrible way to live.

If I keep growing and changing — adjusting my ideas and mindset to the new realities I find — I’m going to need new music. Why? Because music is very important to me and it helps me to find new ways to express my ideas and emotions, but the same old music would prevent me from being open enough to change.

If you’re still listening to the same old music you grew up with — what you got hooked on in high school or college — you might want to consider whether that music is helping to make you stagnant. Is it keeping your mindset in the past? Is it making it harder for you to seriously consider the major changes which the coming days are going to throw at us?

If you’re still listening to everything you heard in 1978 or 1988 or 1998 or whatever, you probably won’t know the effect it’s having on you. So I’m going to suggest an experiment for you to try.

For 90 days, listen to nothing except recent music — let’s say from the last three years or so. Don’t listen to any of your old music. Seek out new music that you have haven’t bothered to sample. Don’t listen to the pop on the radio — which is mostly bland junk manufactured by some pop-culture factory. Find great new music in genres you’ve ignored until now.

You might find that there’s some great music you’ve never heard.

Even more importantly, you might find that it helps you to get out of the mindset of the past. You might find that it helps you to look to the future instead of constantly escaping to the past. Even if you’re not consciously living in the past, I would submit that your “same old music” is keeping you there without you seeing it.

Until you try it, you probably won’t believe me. But if you change your music — by giving good newer music a solid chance — you might find yourself thinking and feeling like a younger person again.

The alternative is to join your friends who are becoming prematurely old and gray as they whine about how nobody makes good music anymore.

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In the coming months and years, we’re going to need inventive and productive people pursuing things that matter. We’re going to need smart and self-directed men and women who will find ideas and create enterprises that will help bypass the political class and build a new and better society. But everything I see in media right now seems geared toward telling people how to entertain and amuse themselves. The stories are full of advice about what to binge on Netflix and what games you should be playing while you’re stuck at home. We desperately need to ignore this advice and be looking toward building new futures instead. Being passive consumers got us where we are today. It’s time that we reclaim our former role — the one that made this country wealthy — as productive and free people who build far more than we consume. This could be a great opportunity for those who will take it. Turn off Netflix. Put down the video game controller. We need new ideas, new achievements, new goals — not more coach potatoes. This is the time to be thinking and creating and planning for the future that you and I both want.

The better I know myself, the more I realize that my core fault — and the source of many other failings in me — is that of believing on a deep level that everyone and everything in my world must be perfect, especially me. If I had seen any of this in myself as recently as 10 years ago, I would have dismissed it as a small failing that showed up only every now and then, but I now see it as the wellspring from which my other sins are born. It’s such an insidious belief — and one that can look on the surface like a reasonable desire to be good and right — that it’s hard to acknowledge it as the inner cancer it is. But until I understood this, it was always going to be impossible for me to get over my deep shame about my imperfection or to accept the love of another person, because she is bound to be flawed, too.

If it’s not yet spring where you are, you can at least enjoy 60 seconds of spring in the South with me. This was just outside my office late Thursday afternoon. Don’t you need a relaxing break today? See it on YouTube by clicking here.

It pays to be nice to the employees at Walmart — and everywhere else, for that matter. I was just in Walmart to buy some kitty litter when one of the employees called me over with a conspiratorial tone: “Hey, David, do you need some toilet paper?” she almost whispered. She had found a giant package hidden somewhere and she said she had been saving it for someone she really liked. So I’m the proud new owner of 24 additional mega rolls of toilet paper, which are worth something like $748 on the black market. On a more serious note, be good to people when you have a chance, as this employee was for me. And remember that people remember the way you treat them. I wouldn’t have treated this woman and her co-workers a bit differently in the past if I’d known she would someday do me this small favor, but there are benefits to treating people well, even if that’s not your purpose. Be good to each other.

My neighbor Cora — a retired teacher — called me while I was driving to the office earlier today to remind me that she wants to take me out to dinner sometime. We’ve talked about going out together, but we’ve never gotten around to coordinating a time. As she was about to get off the phone, she said, “I love you. You’re such a good neighbor!” And I told her that I loved her, too. I wonder how upset the racists of the unquestioned Jim Crow world — only about six decades ago — would have been that a white man and his elderly black neighbor care abut each other in such a way. There’s still a lot wrong with racial attitudes in the world today, but small things such as this remind me that we’ve come a long way.

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