Comment by chickensong
19 hours ago
> how could we possibly predict what works well 20 years from now?
Being proficient in reading, at least one instrument, and one additional language is always welcome, regardless of the timeline.
19 hours ago
> how could we possibly predict what works well 20 years from now?
Being proficient in reading, at least one instrument, and one additional language is always welcome, regardless of the timeline.
Not many people get paid for musical or linguistic talents, actually.
"Passion" is a luxury. We all have to choose from what the market demands.
There is more to life than earning money, and not all skills need to be in service of that.
Regardless, both of those talents have the potential to open doors and set the stage for opportunity, nor are they mutually exclusive to whatever economic skills might be viable in the future.
If you have rent or a mortgage, there is little more important than paying it. Everything else comes after. Everyone alive in the developed world today grew up in a wondrous period of history where the middle class had many luxuries previously only afforded to those with inherited wealth. There are signs that period is ending.
I'm not against things like learning to play an instrument, but if you're going to major in Music Theory, you better have a solid plan for a career on the other end. It can be a risky plan, but it has to be real with non-zero odds of success. It can't be just because you love playing the violin.
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People should prepare their kids to be happy adults, not just employed adults.
I recall reading of studies that found that a significant majority of adults who did not learn to play an instrument when they were young wish that they had.
Only a small minority of adults who did learn to play an instrument when young wish that they hadn't.
I was often really frustrated with my parents pushing me to learn at least some basics on the piano. Why do I have to practice, I want to watch Dragonball Z. Practicing is sooooo boring. Ugh.
I'm still not amazing at piano. But having a basic understanding of musical theory, understanding how a lot of these concepts of harmonics and tones and waves are related, have really unlocked a lot of neat things throughout my life. Their push for me to learn an instrument drove me to performing for family events including a couple of weddings, with my involvement in their day still quite a powerful shared memory between us. It led me to learn additional musical instruments, which I enjoyed a lot more than piano. It helped me in other artistic endeavors like theater. It helped me understand music production, something I moonlight in as a volunteer. It gave me instant connections with lots of people who were important people in my life but probably would have forever been passing strangers. It has given me something else to share with my children, as they routinely ask me to play for them and show them how instruments work. A basic understanding of waves and harmonics and what not even helped me understand a lot of more complicated EE topics.
Learning an instrument early in my life was definitely a powerful and deeply impactful thing in my life journey, almost entirely positively outside of many afternoons where I had to catch up on DBZ later.
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If you can read and have any sort of curiosity (or you help teach curiosity) it’s a pretty solid foundation to learn just about anything.
The music bit is mostly things you’d want to impart on your kids if you care about that sort of thing. (Which I do!) The public versions of it are not great where I am but individually you can do a lot.
Proficiency in reading and writing is clearly useful.
Proficiency in musical instrumemts is not necessarily useful by itself, but it's a path towards mastery of something hard that typically involves a lot of intentional practice. Having been able to master something hard once makes it easier to master other hard things, because you can reuse the learning skills. Music has a little bit of applied fractions and what not, too.
The same thing learning to learn journey happens with learning a second language. But also, learning a second language helps develop skills and understanding of your first language, and helps develop communication skills for situations where there's a limited mutual understandable vocabulary.
Some languages have market value too. Better communication with employers, customers, and suppliers is valuable.
Self-expression is a fundamental human need. Ignore to your own detriment.
Not musical, but definitely linguistic. There are many jobs for people to work as translators or to provide customer service in languages other than the dominant one.
> Not many people get paid for musical or linguistic talents, actually.
And yet the highest earning people I know who didn’t come from affluent backgrounds are musically and linguistically talented.
Focusing on what the market demands is chasing a moving target and if you miss the boat you might just end up a low-level peon holding a wrench.
"Highest earning people who didn't come from affluent backgrounds" is entirely consistent with "not many people".
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Maybe it comes down to whether you advocate for live-to-work or work-to-live.
Music and linguistics have often been considered amongst the "liberal arts" - none of which are arguably "useful" but all of which are terribly worthwhile.
Reading is a life skill. Proficiency in it makes you understand things. Weren't there plenty of news articles this year about how high schoolers didn't have proficient reading capabilities? Maybe teaching your kids how to properly read a text is a good thing.
"Hey, Muse, read me this article". Voila, your kids know how to read. Deciphering marks on paper can be as obsolete as lightning a fire without matches, with the advent of technology.
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> "Passion" is a luxury. We all have to choose from what the market demands.
See it that way, having a normal social life requires other skills than your job.
There won’t be a labor market any more, unless there’s some technological barrier for AIs and robots that has not appeared yet.
It’s either some form of socialism or mass starvation.
> socialism or mass starvation
From what history shows, there's not much difference between the two.
Most of the major mass starvation events in modern history were caused by some form of socialism.
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