One of the fun little things that I’ve been engaging in recently is essentially a whole block of learning. Every single week, I take part in a set of two different music classes: one for cello and the other for DJing.

Along the way, I spend almost all of my time making myself a little bit more fit, developing my knowledge, and learning small things related to the things that I want to accomplish in those areas. The more I think about it, the more I can’t help but feel like I’m going through this whole process of commodification, of refining myself towards some specific end.

Of course, DJing probably is commodified in that way, or in some sense.

Maybe it seems a little strange that I’m thinking of even classical music in that way since that seems to be something that shouldn’t be thought of in that sense, but this really is part of the bent of my mind lately – and the fact that cello lessons themselves are relatively expensive itself isn’t very helpful for eliminating that part of the story from consideration.

Either way, I don’t know if it’s because I’ve been influenced by the neoliberal nature of the world or just some of the ideas I have about the economy that we have out there. It feels more and more that life is about representations, about creating things that other people can see and demonstrating parts of myself to create experiences. Somehow, all of that is flowing into a grand machine, whether it’s an AI model or a search engine, or into the soul of an indeterminate number of people that, in turn, will be quantified by an algorithm and converted somehow into monetary terms.

I wanted to start this blog post by talking about how it seems like every part of my life is commodified now and in turn, talking about how these skills were uniquely commodified, and I still will, but I suppose the twist on that thought is that I feel that everyone is commodified now and that’s how society works. 

Everyone – or at least the vast majority of people whom we’d call productive human beings – is constantly trying to sell themselves, to prove their worth to other people, to secure jobs, to obtain customers, and to receive from others what they are willing to give in fair exchange for the intellectual products of another person’s mind or the physical products they may create.

There lies the spirit of commerce and other things along the way – a thing that a person can’t be free from unless they’re a nepo baby, an ascetic far away from the human world, or a forager. (Suddenly, the people dressing up as monks begging for money at restaurants come to mind tho, haha).

I wonder if some of these thoughts are related to my thoughts about money and how it seems like it’s needed for almost every single one of these things, because that’s just how the world works. As I go through life, I see how almost everything requires it, and my mind falls back on it and causes me to view the world in those terms a little bit more than before, only to remind myself, in the interstitial moments like this one, that that’s not what life is all about. That it’s not about that procurement. That the money is a means to an end. That a lot of the things that I’m pursuing in life have their own intrinsic benefits. 

That perhaps I should just be thankful for having the opportunity, willpower, and skill to be able to pursue them to the level that I’m able to do so.

It is true that living in this society means you have to follow the rules of that society to be able to thrive within it. Certain things do need to happen, and in a very real sense, perhaps the question is not whether a person will eventually become commodified, but how, to what degree, and with what kind of differentiation.

This is some interesting food for thought as I move forward, in the knowledge that things are changing and that I am getting better. Whatever aspect of joy or otherwise there may be, I will have to commensurate it with the possibility that it will be something used to secure profit for myself – not necessarily because I am money-minded, but rather because that’s just an inescapable part of the way that society works.