A Meaningful Life Is Written Without Intention
Only when I felt lost in my life did I try to record and savor moments that happened every day, but here’s one exception. Music tracks catch a person’s attention even while they are engaging with their life, and, serendipitously, become fragments of my vanishing time even without their notice. When I compose my own music, it then becomes the key to retrieve the memories, and that makes my life meaningful.
When talking about memory retrieval, music is a perfect medium to demonstrate this. Janata’s experiment with 329 students and 1515 pop tracks showed that about 30% of music excerpts successfully evoked autobiographical memories, often with strong positive effects (Janata et al. 845–860). This was because most of the students had listened to those pop music tracks frequently in their teenage years, as they played the role of a background without intention. Sedikides extended this further and stated that music-evoked nostalgia “strengthens meaning in life and augments self-continuity” across social, self-oriented, and existential domains (Sedikides et al. 2044). Both resources suggest that music behaves as a passive archive to record the experiences of people without their awareness, and this also directly reflects the concept of pointless.
Although listening to music already provides such a strong effect, composing music has the same mechanism with stronger memory, since when a person is composing music, he has already listened to it thousands of times progressively when adding new elements. Brian Eno wrote in his 1995 diary that “The big surprise for me when I work like that is discovering myself capable of an almost ‘automatic writing’ way of working. I cease to evaluate much, instead just letting something carry me along. Listening back later, I think, ‘How on earth did I get an idea like that?’” (Eno 18), and although he did not write the diary for a recording or memory purpose, the document became a complete record of his life retrospectively. The metaphor “automatic writing” would be an illustration of unintentional, and he would treat his work as a stranger later. This retrieval is helpful because the person is always changing, and those work records show how this person was before. In other words, it becomes an archive of a self that no longer exists without consciousness. McAdams also calls this narrative identity, “an internalized and evolving life story that integrates the reconstructed past and the imagined future to provide life with some degree of unity and purpose” (McAdams and McLean 233). Therefore, creation is the most direct component of this narrative.
This is further supported by Eagleton. In The Meaning of Life, he argues that “what we need is a form of life which is completely pointless, just as the jazz performance is pointless. Rather than serve some utilitarian purpose or earnest metaphysical end, it is a delight in itself” (Eagleton 100). He argues that meaning only exists while the activity is intrinsic, while it won’t appear when people are pursuing it. This comes together with music composition as intentionally composing music to record life would make the work all about recording itself and lose the perception of “stranger” and won’t generate a nostalgic feeling. The pointlessness is the condition of the meaning, which is a philosophical way to convert the intrinsic recording process into the meaning of life.
In conclusion, it points to a mechanism that composes music records time without trying to do so. Narrative identity will then retrieve those works and convert them into a continuous story, and that continuity is the foundation of meaning. Therefore, a person should live meaningfully by making things. This should not be a task of recording legacy, and certainly does not make people feel meaningful in the present. But since it is a reliable way to spend spare time, it is valuable, especially when reflecting on the moments afterward.
Works Cited
Eagleton, Terry. The Meaning of Life: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford UP, 2008.
Eno, Brian. A Year with Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno’s Diary. Faber and Faber, 1996.
Janata, Petr, Stefan T. Tomic, and Sonja K. Rakowski. “Characterisation of Music-Evoked Autobiographical Memories.” Memory, vol. 15, no. 8, 2007, pp. 845–860.
McAdams, Dan P., and Kate C. McLean. “Narrative Identity.” Current Directions in Psychological Science, vol. 22, no. 3, 2013, pp. 233–238.
Sedikides, Constantine, Joost Leunissen, and Tim Wildschut. “The Psychological Benefits of Music-Evoked Nostalgia.” Psychology of Music, vol. 50, no. 6, 2022, pp. 2044–2062.