Work As Play/Play As Work

 

In composition, listening becomes work. 

Composing music in the flow of everyday life requires a constant listening--including AI-generated music. While requiring almost no work to create, AI-generated music requires constant listening to results, which becomes a form of work because you have to curate the results. If everyone generated music in order to play it, everyone would be listening, but not for enjoyment. When I write lyrics, I enjoy the iterative process, but it requires more work than it ever did historically. In the typical songwriting team in the past, the roles of the composer and lyricist didn't overlap. It is the PC that made us all multitaskers beginning in the early 1990s. We do everything ourselves because we can. Perhaps we should strive for more of a division of labor, but we might prefer to play all the roles and wear all the hats. The benefits of music are that the more we create, the more we have to listen to in a sequential fashion, which keeps our attention focused just on the music, as it once had when we would sit down and listen to an entire album. But if we're making music videos as well, it creates more work to make them, but in the process, we're doing more looking and observing as well as listening. you actually might want your play to be work because it takes you out of passivity. But it begs the question of doing versus being: Do we need to always be doing something in order to be something? It depends on the quality of the "something" and the duration. Is 30 minutes of something passive (like passive listening) the same as 30 minutes of engaged activity requiring effort? 

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• You become most powerful in what you do when the action is performed for its own sake rather than as a means to enhance a role identity.
• Those who function from the deeper core of their Being are described as "bringers of the new consciousness". Their mere presence has a transformational effect that goes far beyond their specific functions.
• The Process over the Product: Creating a life is not about the final product (the "doing" achieved), but about the enjoyment of the process (the "being" in the moment). 

Excerpt Library (Religion and Spirituality)" "Discuss doing versus being"