This morning I rediscovered music. It’s not that I haven’t been around music for the last few years, and it’s not like I haven’t tried to enjoy it. I’ve tried. I’ve sat and listened to dozens of albums. I’ve listened casually to the radio and mpeg streams online. But nothing worked, and I put music on a shelf somewhere in my mind like so many other things I used to enjoy.

It’s scary too, the slow erosion of my passions. It seems to be an inevitable movement towards what I don’t want to become. A dead developer, a yuppy, unartistic and uninterested. I saw it happen to my dad, and I’ve seen it happen to dozens of friends and developers. These jobs, the cubicles, and our damned machines kill us. We have to fight to survive, and there’s not much room left for our sanity.

It’s not like I haven’t enjoyed any music in the last few years. I just haven’t enjoyed it in that way that changes me. It used to be that I’d pop on a favorite album, put on the headphones, and find myself in a different universe. At the end it I would be a different person, excited about life again. Anything worth doing is like this in some way or another, like writing software, writing, painting, climbing to the top of something in nature: these things excite the mind.

So this morning I was listening to some mp3s at a reasonable volume in my office at work. I was uninspired. I was unmotivated. I was reading the same old emails, reading the same old shit news. The code in front of me was still the worst code I’ve ever had to work with, and I still don’t have the balls to rewrite it (damn the consequences).

Then I remembered the headphones hidden behind my monitor. I slid them on, pushed up the volume, and listened. No, I enjoyed. Music through crappy speakers at reasonable volumes is a fucking waste of oscillation. But, music through my studio style headphones at entirely unreasonable volumes, now that’s fun. It’s fucking brilliant.

Good, loud music has this extreme effect on me, like a sort of reset. It injects the artistry of another set of souls into my being. It interrupts my world, my train of thought, and can bump me out of my rut. It makes me think, “maybe I’ll paint tonight,” or, “you know, I think it’s time to go for a long hike.” It reminds me of possibility, shifting my focus from the stuff that gets in the way of my passion daily. It’s a good thing.

How does work become slavery? It isn’t: we choose it to be so. We let ourselves die. We forget what we love, and we forget to do more of it. Fuck this requirements document. Fuck this terrible code. Fuck the people who don’t have a clue. I can do amazing things when I remember that the shit is only a problem if I roll around and embrace it. So I’ll get off my ass, get out of this rut, and enjoy my time here.