The internet is a completely wonderful tool for exceptionally rapid personal growth. I’ve always known the internet was great, but I realized something new about it just the other day, when a song got stuck in my head. The specific details aren’t too important to the point about the internet, so I’ll leave most of them out.
The other day, I was thinking about the topic of relationships and the song “Angeles” by Elliott Smith got stuck in my head. Lately, I’ve been learning to explore things like this, because my head rarely does things randomly or by accident. Even when it seems like a random accident at first, I can usually get something useful out of it in the long run. So this song was playing in my head at top volume. I’m not sure if everybody’s brain radio has a volume, but for me sometimes songs in my head seem louder or clearer than others. The song was in my head for quite a while in this way, so I decided to explore it. My subconscious most often likes to give me information based on words or stories with metaphors and themes, rather than symbols like some people get. With than knowledge, I decided to give the song a listen.
It should be noted that I was only able to explore the music of Elliott Smith in detail because of the internet. I was able to hear his entire recording history online in order to decide what I wanted to buy (which turned out to be most of it). I only found his music in the first place because of related artist searches at allmusic.com. I queued up “Angeles” on my iPod and gave it a listen. I was washed over with feelings of sadness. I tried to stick with the sadness and find out what it was trying to tell me, but I couldn’t figure it out, so I looked up the lyrics. Without the internet, I would have had to find my CD book and hope the lyrics were written in it. If they weren’t, maybe I could ask a friend or find them at the library somehow. With the internet, I had the lyrics in front of me in five seconds.
I must confess, I don’t really understand the lyrics of this song. Even after hours (cumulative) of direct involvement with this song through listening, learning to play it on guitar and sing it, and talking about it here and other places, I still don’t fully understand it. It seems to me that on the surface it’s about Las Vegas being happy to take in and corrupt, swindle, and give syphilis to people from Los Angeles. Deeper down, it seems to be about toxic relationships to people and places. Because I don’t feel like I understand the lyrics, I checked the entry for the song on songmeanings.net. It’s a website where people can comment on song lyrics with their interpretations. Sometimes it’s helpful. Often, everybody in the comments is just saying the song is about drugs. Unfortunately, this is the case with “Angeles,” so I had to move on.
I remember a specific instance of trying to figure out song lyric meanings from ten years ago. I discussed the lyrics for “Disarm” by the Smashing Pumpkins with several of my friends over the course of a couple months. We were unable to come to any consensus about how we felt about the lyrics, let alone what they were supposed to mean, so we took them to our English teacher, who was equally baffled, and had nothing new to add. If people are going to have nothing useful to add, it’s best to find out sooner rather than later. Instead of spending hours over the course of a month, I spent five minutes reading interpretations of the song lyrics and went on to the next thing. If I couldn’t consciously understand the lyrics to any satisfying degree, and couldn’t find anything that resonated with me in other peoples’ interpretations, then there’s a really good chance that my brain wasn’t playing me this song because of its meaning or lyrics.
I checked my last.fm account to see if there are specific times I tend to listen to “Angeles,” thinking maybe I had something to gain by knowing my usual context while listening to the song. I couldn’t find very much that seemed useful, except that I have listened to this song more than most other songs I own.
The next thing I thought of was that this song was featured in the move Good Will Hunting. I could remember that the song was played in full during a particularly crucial scene in the movie, but couldn’t remember which one for the life of me. Ten or even five years ago, I would have had a tough time figuring this out. I would have tried asking my movie buff friends if they remembered the circumstances. I might have had to buy or borrow the movie and watch it to find the exact scene. This would all have taken lots of time, but a three word search brought up the tiny segment on YouTube.
When I watched the video, the emotions re-flooded my body, and I eventually realized something profound about my patterns around relationships which had a direct corollary to the scene from Good Will Hunting. I’ve gotten a lot out of this, and I’m glad I went through exploring why this song was in my head. Like I said, the specifics aren’t too important to the point I want to make here, which is that the internet made this all possible. It took me fifteen minutes to get to a truth that would have taken me hours to figure out over the course of a month or two if I had tried to five or ten years ago. That kind of barrier to a possible epiphany would very likely have been enough for me to not explore in detail the feeling caused by having this song in my head. In fact, I might possibly have gotten irritated (as people often do) that “this stupid song won’t get out of my head! LOL.”
The nearly instant availability of information and media make the internet an amazingly valuable tool for this type of personal exploration. I think the web gets a bad reputation for all its time wasters (of which there is no shortage). It’s taking me a lot of work to convert it over from a distraction tool to a time-saving tool, and realizing things like this is incredibly helpful, so I thought I’d share it here.
My brain knew I could get to this realization in fifteen minutes, because it knows the internet exists. Your brain knows this too. The instant access to this kind of content not only gives us conscious control over an amazing library of human thought and resources, it also gives our subconscious an astoundingly swift and accurate tool to lead us down the right path when exploring our mental patterns. The implications for the capacity of human growth and change thanks to immense time savers like this are just staggering to me.
Red Pill Rx 