The Benefits of Being Unhinged
The Benefits of Being Unhinged
Here’s what’s been on my mind lately.
Too many people think that watching a 20 minute youtube video or reading some half-baked and white-washed book about how to do something is more than adequate when it comes to learning how to do something. And if you want to understand something on a deeper level than that, then the thing to do, obviously, is attend college.
Now, there are certain benefits of attending college. I think the benefits are summarized nicely in the words of George Bailey “To see what they know.”
And then if it ends up that they don’t know anything at all? I guess leaving ain’t so bad of an idea after all.
See, in college, you spend a lot of time proving that you know something. If you already happen to know the material, this amounts to just busy work. And if you don’t know the material, then you hope you can guess enough right answers to land yourself a C.
The actual amount of time you spend learning in college depends a lot on the individual person, because any reading the college professors assign may or may not actually be understood. And for any student who is astute enough to actually understand the material that they read, it’s likely that they also are astute enough to figure out themselves what they actually need to learn in order to become competent at a given subject.
A large amount of the learning that is done in college is done on an individual basis. Therefore, in spite of the systematization and bureaucracy, not because of it.
Unfortunately, many people do not have an objective measure or real understanding of what it means to actually know something, having gone to schools for most of their lives and perhaps never having done the requisite soul-searching to realize that just because you read something in a book once, doesn’t mean you understand it, and it also doesn’t mean that it’s true.
This means that they typically rely perpetually on scholastic procedures like tests, books, lectures, and degrees to tell them when they’ve “learned” something instead of having some independent measure for being satisfied with themselves.
Y’know, something that has real effects in reality instead of just effects in the made-up world of academia.
Because of this over-reliance, many people get trapped in this never ending cycle of going to school. They never graduate, and if they do, they go to graduate school. And after graduate school they either have a mental breakdown where they finally do accomplish this soul-searching, or they become professors, and then they never leave at all (sometimes, not always, of course).
The breakdowns always come up eventually, though. And this is because the systems, procedures, and order of completing school is, at best, unsatisfactory. This is why graduates often times feel like they have something called “imposter syndrome” which used to just be called “feeling inadequate” until the mental health community decided to trademark it and sell it to people as a “mental health condition.”
Well, it could be that you are inadequate. That’s possible. It’s also possible that you feel inadequate because the only way to gain a feeling of adequacy is through soul-searching, shadow work, developing your character, and then putting it into action.
University is no substitute for real action. And many people go to university because they’re looking for that kind of confidence that only comes from building your own character. And perhaps people reify the procurement of a college degree as a substitute for this confidence, but it’s not.
Furthermore, the tests, books, lectures, and everything else that comes along with college a lot of times means that you have to learn how to basically copy someone else’s work. This is the antithesis of developing your own character. And then maybe when you get to graduate school you’re encouraged by some of your professors to branch out and try to explore things yourself, but because you’ve been in the school system for so long at that point, trying to extricate yourself from the habit of subordinating your opinions to what you can cite as a source from someone else’s paper is almost impossible. Regardless of how well thought-out your opinion is at all.
And so we get roped into the endless cycle that is college attendance again and again. And no one ever learns anything. And musicians are permanently miserable Little Psycho Balls of Stress™.
Unless…
We Decide to Become Unhinged
And I mean something very specific by this.
I don’t just mean going crazy for crazyness’s sake. Though that can be a good time.
I mean intentionally, wisely, and perhaps in a morally outraged way, reconsidering what it means to actually learn something and know something, and then believing that the only standard that matters is what you decide that matters.
Taking responsibility for your own character.
Gaining enough confidence in your own judgment to believe yourself.
Not letting the narcy-narcs and lizard people gaslight you into thinking that they know better merely because they’re meaner about it than you are.
That kind of thing.
When we do this, it’s important to remember our original intentions and goals. We’re doing this to develop our own character and musicianship. So we can’t go out there and start bossing everyone around as if the only thing to be considered is what we can get out of them.
That’s not what I mean when I say that you have to believe your standard is the only one that matters. In fact, that’s the way to shoot yourself in the foot because other people are almost certainly going to the way you eventually succeed as a musician. So you’d better play nice.
Ultimately, no matter what your standard is, that is the only one that matters. Because when your motivations are good or bad, you’re always going to act in accordance with them. The key here is to develop your standard and actually intentionally choose it. And then to test it out to make sure it gets you the results that you want.
Lots of people either never choose their own standards. Which ends up meaning that they’re easy targets for other people to use them for their own purposes. Or they choose something nefarious because they think they can get away with it.
Fortunately, an aspect of being a musician that no one can really escape from even if you are evil, is that who you are on the inside eventually comes out of the other side of your playing. If you’re an asshole, then your playing is going to be rough and difficult to listen to.
This means that in order to really become a successful musician, you’ve gotta learn how to integrate your character and become a real person. And a lot of times college keeps you so busy that you can’t possibly do any of that during your “education.”
Becoming Unhinged
So how do you do that?
Well, I’ve written about a few strategies before here on my substack…
But there’s a little more to it than that.
And it kind of looks a little like a psychotic break. Which is why I’m talking about this idea as “becoming unhinged.”
You’ve gotta eventually get so sick of everyone telling you what to do that you double check everything that anyone tells you before you believe it. And then if they complain at you about it, you’ve gotta develop the strength of will to ignore them and do what you want to anyway.
You’ve gotta get so sick of everyone telling you to postpone having confidence in yourself in lieu of having it in your professors, your degree, your university, or anything else that isn’t you. Because you’ve finally realized that there is no substitute for having unhinged amounts of confidence in yourself. And if they complain about it, you take a moment to consider their allegations against you. Then, if you honestly deem them to be truthful (emphasis on you), then you do something to fix it. And otherwise, you ignore them.
Now, in order to successfully form your own opinions about things, it’s necessary to know a thing or two about the thing you’re forming your own opinion about.
Not that this stops people from having opinions about things they know nothing about, but if you want to be successful and mature about it then you’ve gotta know stuff.
This means that you can’t be satisfied with surface level explanations that are repeated ad nauseum by people all over the place.
This means you’ve gotta start reading books, watching lectures, pausing stuff in the middle of watching it to make sure you really understand the things being said, stopping when you’re reading new books to look up the definitions of words you don’t understand instead of blowing past them, taking notes after you’re done talking to people when they mention something you’ve never heard of before (which happens to you all the time, don’t think that it doesn’t), and then taking the time to look it up later.
And then not just reading more books and watching more videos, but spending a lot more time actually thinking. And then even more time actually experimenting. The proof is in the pudding. If someone is trying to tell you that transcribing more saxophone solos will make you better at improvising, but then you’ve transcribed 80 solos and you’re still not any better, maybe there’s something missing here.
A lot of musicians attribute this to “magic,” but they usually call it “talent” instead. And if you don’t just automatically understand the alchemy that magically transforms “transcribing solos” into “being good at improvising” then it’s because you don’t have enough of this secret ingredient called “talent.”
Yes, indeed. Turns out that some people are so desperate for a short and simple answer to their problems that they’ll turn to unscientific, nonsensical, not to mention nihilistic solutions as long as they get to fill the void of uncertainty in their brains with something.
It takes real courage to sit with the void and to let that discomfort propel you into unhinged amounts of inquiry.
But that’s how you really start to become a real person. And that happens to be the first step of becoming a mature musician.
Maybe this is scary to some people because they think that they’re not smart enough to retain all of this information or something, but believe me. Your brain is a lot more capable of storing information than you probably realize. And as long as you’re not exhausting yourself completely, why not push the limits of what your brain can do?
Why not pursue all lines of inquiry until you’ve learned all you can out of them?
Many people think that this kind of effort is unnecessary in order to get good. And they’re right. But it is necessary if you want to become a master.
These are all clues that your direct experience is giving you of things that you don’t understand well enough that delving deeper into could help elucidate maybe something you’ve been struggling with for a long time.
Knowing Enough to be Dangerous
There is an oft repeated bromide that floats around the academic milieu: knowing enough to be dangerous, but not knowing enough to know what you’re doing.
This is a primary reason why seemingly everyone believes that the ivory-towered professors of music should be believed above even the evidence of their own experience. It’s because they’re so afraid of falling into this trap of knowing just enough to be dangerous, but not knowing enough to be competent. The problem is that just because someone is a professor or is Credentialed™ doesn’t guarantee competence or knowledge.
So ironically, we’re falling into the very trap of believing people who know enough to be dangerous, but not enough to be competent that we were trying to avoid in the first place by believing that professors are automatically competent or knowledgeable.
Final Thoughts
The only way to avoid this is by taking responsibility for your own learning, your own competence, your own mastery. And not being satisfied with the 20-minute video on YouTube that doesn’t even purport to tell you all there is to know about a given subject, but that sometimes people pretend that it does anyway.
And then when you actually do take the time, putting in hours and hours of research, intentional effort, questioning the things people tell you instead of immediately believing them, you’ll realize that there is so much more to explore about life than most people think.
And you’ll never, ever be bored again.
Because after all, you’ve got books to read, lectures to watch, philosophical quandaries to solve, platitudes to debunk, and, of course, instruments to practice.