I went looking for that quote about wants and needs again. Found this tribute that led with these lines:

All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. If we don’t, our lives get made up for us by other people.

—Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind, 2004.

Here is the article by Nick Paumgarten.

These sentences got me thinking:

“…invites solipsistic dissolution masquerading as self-actualization. Or perhaps it’s the other way around.”

Am I lost in myself, dreaming, playing music for my own good, my own ego, my own failures and lost dreams? Or am I slowly, surely, in my own way, making some little art each night that makes me a little bit better as a person? Maybe that art will leave the third floor, maybe it won’t. Does it matter?

The other response, of course, is that at least I’m not smoking crack. As a public-school teacher who is getting rich very slowly, if I want to devote some small portion of my income after I’ve paid for both kids to go to college and ensured that our house isn’t falling down, why not music?

You can feel the tension, too, within this article. Yeah, go see a bunch of guitars. Anyone who can play even a little bit knows the deal: you walk into a music store and play six or seven guitars and there will be one that is magic to you. I wish this exhibit had players hanging out there — much like the videos they publish at Norman’s Rare Guitars — where someone would be sitting on a couch waiting for you to come in so that they could show you what the guitar sounds like.