Everything Is Finite

Cain Lowe. Most you never met him, the rest of you never will. Cain was a polite and quiet boy. He never complained, never called undue attention to himself and never took more than he was due. He was never rude, never had a bad word to say about anyone and never caused a fuss. He was humble and lacked arrogance. He liked to hang out with his friends and play computer games. Cain was gentle. That’s the thing that will stay with me. He had the most gentle and polite manner. He always said please and thank you and never seemed to think that he was entitled to more than he received. I would have been proud if he had been my son. Cain Lowe died last Thursday night. In October of last year he was diagnosed with inoperable cancer. He had a tumour on his brain stem. It could not be removed as it would have killed him. He received radiotherapy as a measure to extend his life, but it was always only going to be a temporary respite from the inevitable. He was in my form class, 8U. He was twelve years old.

Cain’s untimely passing has forced me think about the finite, of the inevitable and fragile nature of life and death. Our parents will die, our siblings will die and our friends, peers and colleagues will die. What will I be remembered for? What will you be remembered for? What will be your legacy? I don’t know about you but I’d prefer if it was something more than, “He/She was always punctual” or “Always followed instruction to the letter”.

I recently read a book about the American indie music underground in the 1980’s called Our Band Could Be Your Life. It detailed the forming of such seminal indie bands as Dinosaur Jr., The Replacements and Mudhoney alongside the D.I.Y. indie labels like Sub Pop, K Records and SST that sprouted up to support and promote them. These labels and bands originated in places that were considered, at the time, isolated and unlikely to provide anything of musical value like Seattle, Minneapolis and Amherst.  These musicians and music lovers had two options: They could plough the popular furrow and discontentedly slog in their local fishery and construction industries or they could, in spite of being largely ignored by the music industry at large, go their own impossible route regardless. Needless to say, these bands and labels went their own way and this ultimately paved the way for the alternative rock explosion of the 1990’s that changed the face of popular music. As Tommy Lasorda said, “The difference between impossible and the possible lies in a man’s determination.” While one would change his assertion to “a person’s determination”, his claim still rings true.

So, what’s my point? Essentially it’s a cliché. Our time is limited. Our potential is limitless. Don’t be fooled, it is unlikely that one’s meekness and obedience will be rewarded in the next life. What is for sure, is that these qualities won’t be rewarded in this life. If there is something you want to achieve in this life, stop humming and hawing. Stop making excuses for your failure or worse, your failure to even try. Decide what it is that you want to achieve. Figure out a route to achieving your goal. Put the wheels in motion to reaching your destination. There will be setbacks, rejections and disappointment.  Strikes and gutters. With determination, courage and the internet these will only be temporary. Stand on the shoulders of giants, and see exactly how far you can see. No one on their death bed ever says, “I regret trying”.

New Irish Sounds In Britain/Diaspora : Louis Brennan

The name: Louis Brennan.

The deal: A Dubliner born and raised, Louis is a London based singer song writer who released his debut album The Reductive Power Of A Coastal Town (Dublin?) in May 2013 through Full + Bless, a Levels Entertainment imprint. The album was launched with a powerful gig at the Sebright Arms in Bethnal Green that month. He commanded the stage akin to some kind of demented preacher: speaking in tongues and determined to save our souls.  Prior to this, his debut single “The Towpath” (for some reason all I can think of is the Topaz) received support from NME and Drowned in Sound.

The sound: Intense, dirge like, glitchy folktronica.

When you google Louis Brennan, the first result is the Irish-Australian mechanical engineer who invented the first practical guided missile. It took ten years for his invention to reap any dividends. The modern Louis Brennan is an inventor of an entirely different breed. His self described “future folk” is an odd proposition and quite unlike anything you’re likely to stumble across this year. With his music described as “dubstep Leonard Cohen” and “pound shop Bond themes”, Louis’ mine shaft deep baritone snakes through a stripped back electronic back drop with a Nick Cave type malevolence during  “The Quiet Room” as he channels Padraig Pearse and Ian Brown exclaiming, “I’m desperate to die for an audience. I’m desperate to be adored.” Let’s hope it takes less than ten years for Louis’ terse, apocalyptic tunes to reap the dividends they deserve.

If you have the cojones, click the link below to bear witness to “Clean Break” from the album launch.

He says: ”If I had all the money I spent on drink I’d spend it on drink!” – from this Altsounds interview.

I say: Abstract and esoteric yet oddly infectious and addictive.

For lovers of: Thom Yorke, Tom Waits, Nick Cave.

In a word: Apocalyptic

What now? Download the album for free here. In other news, Louis is in the process of organising some acoustic gigs. It should be an experience to see how he translates his trippy electronica to a more traditional singer songwriter setting.

Like: Louis Brennan on Facebook.
Follow: @loubrennanmusic on Twitter.
Tagged: Thom Yorke, Tom Waits, Nick Cave.

Consume Less Create More

A girl once broke up with me because I played too much Football Manager. Man, I played morning, noon and night. I can understand why it seriously rubbed her up the wrong way. In hindsight, the issue was not that I played it so much, although that was a major bone of contention, the issue was the effect playing it had on me when I was not playing the game. In fact, over the last few days I’ve been playing that demon game again and it has had the same effect on me all over again. It makes me lethargic, lazy and apathetic. This over consumption saps my energy, ingenuity and enthusiasm. It becomes an obsession in that the more I consume, the more I think I need to consume. I need more and I need it now! This is an illusion.

Of course this is not the only type of consumption prevalent in society today. There is also the consumption of goods and services. Recently I read a very intriguing article about the topic of creating and consuming.  It explores how that after the end of the industrial revolution, companies found they had too much supply and not enough demand. As a result advertising was born or should I say spawned. People were and still are told they need to buy more for a variety of reasons such as supporting the economy. We’ve largely bought into this myth over the last one hundred or so years. The article argues that marketers establish a void in our beings through advertising that we are encouraged to fill with more and more goods and services.

I believe that the marketers are taking advantage of a void that already exists in most of us. Some of us fill the void with religion, some with work and/or family and marketers want us to fill the void with shopping and consumption. The problem is, is that one can never fill this void with rampant consumerism no matter how hard you try.  The more you consume and buy the bigger the void becomes and the more you want to buy.  As the article states the void becomes “cavernous”.

The void boils down to the question: “What is my purpose?”. It is essentially a meaning of life question. Again, this purpose can vary greatly. Some feel it is to expand their and the collective knowledge of the world and the people that inhabit it, for others it is to entertain and challenge through art and the arts, while still others have trouble narrowing down and indentifying their purpose. It is here that I feel the marketers pounce. Those that cannot identify their purpose attempt to fill their void with the purchase of goods and services. This is a crisis of identity if you will. It calls to mind a quote from one of my favourite novels, Fight Club: “You are not your job. You are not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You are not the contents of your wallet. You are not your fucking khakis.” Well then. What are you? How do you fill the void?

The void we feel is a creative void. We have become distracted by the distractions of consumerism. People are like magpies. Enamoured by shiny valueless baubles. We must be conscious about how we spend our time. Set time aside to create. Whatever that may be. We might start a blog, a cottage industry, paint, write. It doesn’t matter what the activity is. Do something that adds value to the world and we’ll find value in ourselves.

He’s Back And He’s Fuhrious

Ever wonder what Hitler would be like if he was alive today? You’re not the only one! Timur Vermes wrote a whole novel about just that topic called Look Who’s Back. I wrote a review of it. The RTÉ Guide kindly published my review in this week’s issue. You, the lucky and privileged, can read the review right here.

Why Did You Choose Your Career?

In July 1961, Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University, began his famous experiments regarding obedience in psychology. Milgram’s focus was to explore how far a person would go to follow an instruction if they believed the instruction resulted in the harm of another person. The idea grew out of former Nazi soldiers assertions that their compliance in atrocities during the Holocaust was due to the fact that they had been merely following orders. Milgram was intrigued by the notion that one could absolve themselves of responsibility for an act, that they knew to be wrong,  if they had been instructed to commit this act by an authority figure.

Milgram recruited 40 males between the ages of 20 and 50. The experiment was held at Yale University, to increase the perceived legitimacy, and the participants were told they were involved in a study regarding the relationship between punishment and learning. Milgram then setup a “teacher” (true participant), a “learner” (associate of Milgram), and an experimenter, who was played by an actor and wore a white lab coat, again to augment the legitimacy. The subjects drew lots to determine who would be the teacher or learner, but the drawing was rigged so the true participant was always the teacher. The teacher and learner were then taken to another room, where the teacher observed the learner being strapped down to an “electric chair” connected to the large shock generator in the adjacent room. The learner was taken to an adjacent room with the very intimidating shock generator. The generator had 30 switches labelled with voltage levels, ranging from 15 to 450 volts.

The learning task involved the learner memorizing various word pairs, where the teacher would read the list of pairs and then test the learner on his memory of them. The learner gave mostly wrong answers deliberately and for each wrong answer the teacher gave him an electric shock. During times of hesitation by the teacher, the experimenter had standardised responses, called prods.

Prod 1: Please continue.

Prod 2: The experiment requires that you continue.

Prod 3: It is absolutely essential that you continue.

Prod 4: You have no other choice, you must go on.

There were four prods, in which the second could not be used before the first and so on. However, if the subject refused to obey the experimenter after the four prods, the experiment ended. 65% of participants continued to the potentially fatal level of 450 volts.

The experiments concluded that the majority of people are likely to obey orders given by a figure of authority even if the orders results in the death of an innocent human being. In essence, we are socialised to defer to authority through the manner in which we are brought up. We are inclined to follow the orders of parents, teachers and generally anyone in authority.

At this point, you are probably thinking what does this have to do with people stagnating in jobs that they despise and know are wrong for them. Let me extrapolate my theory. Throughout our lives, we are continuously instructed that if we do certain things and pursue certain goals then this will invariably result in life success. For instance, if one studies in school, does well in university and subsequently procures a job within their chosen discipline, they will be happy and content. We have been told this constantly throughout our lives by figures of authority, people in white lab coats if you will, such as parents, teachers etc. As Goebbels famously once didn’t say, “If you repeat a lie long enough, it becomes the truth.” As a result, not taking, altering or abandoning this route becomes inherently terrifying for an individual akin to stepping out from the crowd, peering over the parapet during a siege or stepping into the rain from under the protective canopy of an umbrella.  In fact, just to question this route, that has been written in our cultural script, is, at times, a completely unfathomable thing to do.

On the contrary, at this juncture the most important thing to do is to question this status quo. As with most things, it is extremely dangerous and detrimental to adopt an idea, concept or mode of thinking on faith alone. Instead of blindly following the routes that authorities have set before you, it is far more helpful and productive to ask yourself a number of questions. What are you passionate about? What tasks do with ease? What do other people say you do well? Where do you want to live? How much money do you really need? How much control do you need over your own time? Undoubtedly, these are fundamentally complex questions to answer. However, if you succeed in answering these questions, you will be one step closer to career satisfaction.

You Are Not Your Job

I am an accountant. She is a mother. He is liberal. People seem to be more comfortable when people can be easily and simplistically defined. According to Social Identity Theory, developed by Henri Tafjel and John Turner, we, as humans, categorise objects and people in order to understand them. Furthermore, this process includes categorising ourselves. Tafjel and Turner posited that the social groups that people belong to are fundamentally central to their sense of pride and self esteem. It seems to me, that this suggests that people find a comfort and safety in being able to easily and readily label themselves and others around them. Taking this theory into account, it is apparent that one demotivating factor faced by those that wish to change their career is the damaging effect the very consideration of the change of that particular social group has on their sense of self worth. Without your particular job, you are nothing.

Unfortunately, in addition to the links to pride and self esteem, there is an inevitable danger to confining oneself to an easily definable but reductive job label or category; we fail to see the actual skills and abilities we possess and how they are in reality fluid and transferable. We become artificially trapped in the perilous idea that “I can’t do anything else, I’m an electrician.” It’s akin to Dr. McCoy in Star Trek, “Damn it Jim, I’m a doctor not a botanist!”

But where does this leave us? The modern, adaptable person must be a chameleon and learn to define themselves more expansively by their skills and abilities rather than something as narrow and suffocating as a job title. For instance, a teacher is not simply a teacher. A teacher must be able to communicate, work with others, plan and problem solve amongst other things. Within these skills and abilities are sub-categories of skills and abilities. If one is to communicate effectively they must be adept at speaking, influencing, utilising technology and presenting ideas and concepts in a variety of formats. To work efficiently with others one must be able to empathise, lead, be assertive, and be constructive. In order to plan one must be proficient at prioritising, time management, working to deadlines and being flexible. To successfully problem solve one must be able to identify the problem, research, analyse, and evaluate. That’s not even taking into account each individual teacher’s in depth knowledge of their chosen discipline.

Ultimately, through identification with one’s skills rather than job title, one should hopefully be able to redefine their role and confidently state, “I am currently working as a teacher, but I have the skills and abilities to be a curator, counselor, retail store manager or market researcher.” You are skilled; the world is your oyster.

Burden of Choice

My dad has always called it the burden of choice. He went on the tools in 1967 at the tender age of fourteen. He left school for a number of reasons, not least of which was his inability to hear 60% of higher pitch sounds. This led to inevitable altercations with ignorant teachers who presumed he was being rude and disobedient when in fact he simply couldn’t hear them properly. As he says “There’s nothing Christian about the Christian Brothers.” He then became a joiner because his dad was a joiner. That was that.

My mum had three choices. Which is just about three times the choice that my grandmother had. My mum could become a teacher, a nurse or a house wife.  As such, neither of my parents had the myriad of choices that I have had and continue to have. As my dad alludes to though, this opportunity is also a burden. Instead of there being two roads diverged in a yellow wood, I feel as if there are an innumerable number of roads diverging in front of me. Many look as appealing as others. Some are overgrown and look extremely  difficult to navigate.  How does one choose which is the most suitable road to take?

I’ll admit it readily. The burden of choice is not the only issue that has presented itself to me. I was and remain extremely lazy. This is one of my major flaws and one that I am aware of and attempt continuously to remedy. In my early twenties through to arguably the present day I have regularly coasted through things. In school I coasted through my final exams. I did reasonably well. I did enough to continue to University but I certainly didn’t push myself to the best of my abilities. In University I continued to coast along. I managed to coast my way through to a Masters Degree and a Higher Diploma in Education. Luckily, I am reasonably intelligent and so was able to regularly get through to the next stage of life without much effort really. I believe this was because I didn’t value the opportunities that were essentially being gifted to me. My sense of entitlement was disgusting. I am surprised that my parents were not more revolted by my attitude considering the lack of choice they had at my age and how diligently they had worked to ensure that I would be able to see further than they had been able to.  In retrospect, I’m unsure if I simply expected everything to fall into my lap without much effort or if I just didn’t really care all that much at that stage. Either way, the attitude I had was a disgrace and if I could go back and work harder, I would. This hubris, this arrogance has added to my burden of choice.

Ken Robinson has stated that the education system in place now is redundant as it is a system designed to service the industrial world and as such is not fit for purpose in an information age. This is reflective of my time in education. The time in which we live is a time of transition. A time when simply learning skills associated with English and maths is not enough to ensure success. The advent of the internet changes everything. To put it in perspective, there has been only four information revolutions in the history of mankind: the spoken word, the written word, the printing press and the internet. Surely, this emphasises how unique and pivotal the time in which we find ourselves is. This will be recognised more and more as a fundamental turning point in human history. As such, I feel I was not adequately prepared to tackle the information age with my fundamentally industrial education. Having said this, it is not my aim to deflect blame from myself. It is my responsibility alone to ensure I can succeed and achieve in an ever changing environment.

I did not understand this at a younger age. I felt I could continue to coast and still succeed. I felt I would get whatever I desired simply by turning up. I failed to recognise that to achieve anything in today’s world and really at any time in history one must work as hard as possible and as consistently as possible. The education system taught me skills but not how to live or how to make essential decisions about my life. My parents are wonderful and two of the most inspiring people I have ever had the luck to meet in my life but they were and are unable to advise me beyond encouraging me to get a qualification. Their life experience is fundamentally different from mine and my generation’s. Now is my time to change. Now is my time to take responsibility. Do or do not, there is no try.

Now What?

I spent quite a bit of time naming this blog. A daunting prospect considering I’ve never been that adept at naming anything. As a child I procured two goldfish that I dubbed Goldie and Mel, who were inexplicably named after Goldie Hawn and Mel Gibson. They died. Well, more accurately I killed them by overfeeding them. Anyway, I digress. For the moniker, I required something that was at once abstract but also intrinsically connected to the purpose of the blog. It needed to be short and snappy but incisive and meaningful. Essentially, I desired to uncover the meaning of one’s life direction in three words or under. Destined to fall epically short of my lofty goal I eventually, in what my friend’s will no doubt assert is a very stereotypical and clichéd move, settled on a lyric from a Pearl Jam song entitled “Rearviewmirror”. Eddie Vedder, baritone turned squeaky lead singer of Pearl Jam, years ago eloquently stated that the song is about “getting the fuck out of a bad situation”. This is often easier said than done.

I have harboured the inkling that my chosen career path is perhaps not ideally suited to my particular skill set for quite a lengthy spell now. This seemingly autonomous thought festered at the recesses of my mind for an indeterminable space of time while I vainly and foolishly justified my disillusionment with work by means of convincing myself that it would undoubtedly get easier once I acquired some more essential experience and that everyone dislikes their career and one must just man up and get on with things. In retrospect, I probably should never have embarked on this career path in the first place, but I had reached an impasse that I imagine many people do after university. I was slap, bang in the middle of my twenties with no idea, not the slightest concept, of what direction I wanted my life to head. Fear gripped me. I felt I was emphatically lacking the tools required to successfully complete a PhD. Confidence has never been my strong suite, although a friend once told me that I am at once the most arrogant person and the most unconfident person she has ever met in her life. Consequently, I headed or more like ambled, floated and coasted down the road most travelled.

Robert Frost would be appalled.

Fundamentally, my chosen profession does not play into my strengths in any way, shape or form. It requires me to be a disciplinarian despite the fact that I am so relaxed that my dad used to call me the Little Buddha when I was a baby. It demands that I operate in a system that is at best flawed, if I am being generous, and at worst, fundamentally and deliberately unfit for purpose. I feel like a bricklayer in a Pink Floyd song. Or maybe I am one of the lowly bricks? One of my favourite activities is debating ideas and issues with friends and peers. As such, I simply can’t abide another day of reminding people to use capital letters and not to call each other faggots. I always presumed both things were a given. It’s always been an unwritten law for me; the route to a fulfilled and happy life is tolerance of peoples’ differences and the pursuit of accurate punctuation. Add regular sex and potatoes to that and you potentially have yourself a regular utopia!

On occasion, in moments of weakness, I think that perhaps I should just suck it up and get on with ploughing through my life. Maybe I should simply be grateful for the blessings I have been graced with. I have struggled with this thought a great deal. My job is permanent. There is a pension. I live a fairly comfortable lifestyle. It is, after all, what many would classify as a ‘good job’. My parents are proud of me and I have the respect of my peers. I remind myself that I must be vigilant. These thoughts are a disease; they are a usurper of ambition and a supplanter of confidence. Every day, I attempt earnestly to banish these conservative invasions from my mind. Why do I care that the job is permanent? Why do I care there is a pension? What do I need these safety nets for? I have no responsibilities. No anchors. No obligations. I think to myself “Do it. Just jump.”

So, now what?

Procrastination over order