I miss scarcity

"...For some of us, music is attached to a moment, a place, a person...."

When hormones are raging when we are young we are far more emotional and establish incredibly strong connections with music... as well as people and places. So, it seems almost universal that folks keep this connection their whole life. But the tendency to make these connections fades as we get older and live much fuller and wider lives. Some folks just stay with the music they grew up with and never move on or feel connected to other music. 

For some of us the universe of music we know and love just gets bigger and bigger.  While most of the deepest connections with music for me was from age 12 or so  through 30. I established others later through most of the countries I lived and worked in.

@soix 

I think there might be a bit of nostalgia/rose-colored glasses involved here.  I for one could never imagine going back to just listening to the CDs I own. 

That's why I said "not trying to weigh it all out." The line you quoted.

The challenge of questioning technology is not to try to put issues into an "either/or" framing but to see what is gained and lost, specifically. The gains of exploring new music and easy access to entire catalogs is, well, pretty obvious by now. This is the easier thing to talk about. This is a post about thinking about what is also lost.

The challenge of questioning technology is not to try to put issues into an "either/or" framing but to see what is gained and lost, specifically. The gains of exploring new music and easy access to entire catalogs is, well, pretty obvious by now. This is the easier thing to talk about. This is a post about thinking about what is also lost.

Yeah I get it, but you still have to consider both sides and not just what we’ve lost.  Would you give up what you have today to get back the things you’ve lost?  If the answer is no then you’ve gained more than you’ve lost, and even though we can certainly lament some of the things we’ve lost along the way we’re still overall better off than before.  It is sad on some ways, but that’s progress — it rarely if ever comes free.  But I too struggle with the sheer amount of info coming at us from all different directions in many different forms and being able to even keep up with it all much less appreciate things on a deeper and more appreciative level.  In that way I feel sorry for my kids that they’ve grown up on their devices just “keeping up” and not sure they’ve learned how to appreciate and savor taking time to enjoy things to the deeper levels as we did growing up.  I try to hope that maybe it’s not better or worse and maybe just a different type of enjoyment and fulfillment and that maybe I’m just old and don’t get it, but I have my doubts.  Anyway, here we are. 

I love streaming, especially this time of year with all the Best Of lists coming out...still do lots of CD and some LP ... but something has absolutely been lost...can't compare or measure or rate...