transcript
“Pretty shitty how baseline human activities like singing, dancing, and making art got turned into skills instead of being seen as behaviors, so now it’s like ‘the point of doing them is to get good at them’ and not ‘this is a thing humans do, the way birds sing and bees make hives.’”
I don’t think that’s right. What portion of these activities actually is for sale, though?
I sing songs with my kids, and maybe to pass the time alone in a car, but nobody would ever be able to pay me enough to want to do that in public. Nor should anyone want to pay to see my mediocrity on display.
I played different sports when I was younger, mostly playing in unorganized pickup games with no formal teams or uniforms or referees or schedules. I still run and bike, and I still lift weights, but have no desire to enter any formal competitions with any of those activities. But I still work on the skills and the progressions on those activities, and track my performance in my notes/logs.
None of this is commodified. It’s not for sale, and someone else’s experience doing these things can’t be traded for what I get out of doing them myself. Even if there are people who do all of these things professionally, full time, the “commoditized” product has basically nothing to do with what I’m doing. Nor does the fact that people do those things professionally somehow detract from the enjoyment I get out of doing those things myself.
One of the most fundamental human experiences, of cooking food for people to eat, is actually a full time job I’ve had in the past. But the fact that I have cooked many meals for strangers for money doesn’t actually detract from my ability to still cook meals at home for my family, or host dinner parties where I cook for my friends. The value of that activity is more than what can simply be purchased with money, even if I personally have done it for money in the past.
Human experience is for experiencing, and nobody can take that away from me.
It’s commodified in terms of social media. Either “for sale” literally, if indirectly, through monetization (which is increasingly the goal for many people) or not-quite-literally in the sense of likes/social media attention. The act of dancing in this context, for instance, is no longer done as an expression of genuine emotion or to connect with people or express oneself, but instead being traded for clicks, monetized or not.
In that regard, even if not personally affected, I think that consumer culture can and has taken the purpose of human experience away from many and twisted it from experience as experience to experience as performance.
Edit: to expand on a dance being commodified: a TikTok dance has to be learned by consuming TikTok. That is the product: the content around the dance. Then the user further contributes to the commodification by entering their own content into the marketplace (TikTok). Whether the user makes money or not does not change the fact that this content is for sale by TikTok. TikTok gets more viewers and trades viewership for advertising revenue.