(music: “Layered”, a soon-to-be released track from my solo project whirm. photo: Jon Wohl.)
The other night while I was out for drinks, I was introduced to a friend-of-a-friend. He was a loud, obnoxious sort of guy — a classic stereotype of a young lawyer, which he turned out to be — and after several minutes of lewd and sometimes-witty comments, he popped the question.
“So, Jonathan, what do you do?”
It’s a question that falls towards the beginning of almost any conversation with a new acquaintance. What a person “does” is such an integral part of his life; it’s his driving force, the thing that pulls him from one moment to the next, the reason he gets up in the morning.
Or is it? For someone like me — a post-college, no-career-track kind of person, a person with boat-loads of interests, dozens of projects, but no specific direction — answering this question can be uncomfortable. What do you mean, “what do I do?”
We’ve all been promised (in America, anyway) from very early on that if we just follow our dreams we’re bound to live happy and fruitful lives. And in many ways, despite my (perhaps somewhat contrived) distaste for the capitalist culture in which I’ve grown up, I actually still believe it. So why is it that so many of us spend the better portion of our waking hours doing work that we don’t love, or worse, that we truly can’t stand?
I’ve been lucky so far to have largely avoided that trap. Nevertheless, questions like “what do you do?” which usually mean “how do you make money?” corner us into identifying with the means by which we earn a living. For some lucky few, the answers to those two very different questions is the same… for the rest of us it isn’t.
For me, The Notion Collective is an attempt to simplify my answer to that awkward question. And, if things go well, I’ll be able to give an answer that, though perhaps a bit vague, does indeed represent my daily motivations while at the same time hinting at how I pay my rent. What do I do? “I think about things.” And if this answer isn’t satisfactory, I’ll be happy to continue.
“Sometimes I write the things down, and other times the things I think about turn into music! Occasionally they become websites or drawings or industrial machines. Often they demonstrate solutions to problems, but sometimes they just end up generating more questions! It’s very fun.”
But, the other night, when asked “what do you do?” I gave an equally honest response. “I’m a musician,” I said. And, well, I am a musician. I’ve been a musician for as long as I can remember. Do I make money as a musician? No. But that’s not the question I was answering.
—Jon
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