Never Right Now

Music piracy is fundamentally a generational issue. Polls have consistently shown that teenagers and young adults are the most likely to acquire music online illegally. They naturally prefer music made by people of their own age (such as Ms Allen), who write about the sort of things they experience. So the young steal from the young, while middle-aged fans continue to buy CDs put out by middle-aged musicians.

One of the most important lessons I’ve learned in over ten years of playing music is this: When you’re up, you’re up. When you’re down, you’re down. You can never hold on to or extend the moments when you’re up. The last moment of a show, the moment when the band and I are taking a bow, that moment cannot be made longer no matter how much I may want it to. It will pass, and my memory of it will be all there is. If you can learn to appreciate the good moments while they’re happening, to you (even to the point of writing them down in your goals notebook while the aura of victory is still fresh) you can more easily let others appreciate their own victories without being as jealous.
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Watch two dogs fighting over a bowl of food. What do you see? One dog has control of the food, while the other dog wants control of it. Neither dog is necessarily interested in eating the food, but they are fearful of not having it. The dog defending the bowl isn’t eating from it, and the dog who wants the food can’t get at it. Meanwhile the food sits there, and neither one enjoys it. Anyone who has watched two dogs fight over a bowl of food knows that jealousy is hardwired into our brains at such a deep level we’ll never get at it. As such, it’s impossible to correct. We feel jealousy, and that’s that.
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Just make sure that as you’re forgiving yourself for your irrational envies, that you’re doing the work you’ve set for yourself in order to live up to your own goals.