Human Value and One-Hit Wonders
If I were a musician, I don’t know how I would feel if I became a one-hit- wonder. On the one hand, you had that moment in time when everyone loved you, and you will probably have at least royalties and likely some staying power on tour for a long time. I went to see Toto last year, and while I don’t think they necessarily qualify as a one-hit wonder as they had arguably three popular songs, without “Africa,” I don’t know that they would still be touring today. There is something to be said for even having one incredibly popular number.
On the other hand, it must be frustrating when you try different things afterward, and they simply don’t seem to stick like your more popular work. As I was watching the new Beach Boys documentary on Disney Plus, Brian Wilson had such a hard time with the reality that American audiences did not connect to his album Pet Sounds. While the Beach Boys were not a one-hit wonder, they did experience a great deal of early success that they had a harder time matching in later, yet arguably artistically superior, releases.
Most of us might not be musicians, but we worry about becoming one-hit wonders. We worry about becoming the real-life version of Bruce Springsteen’s “Glory Days.” We fear that our best days are behind us, and we wonder why the new things we are trying to do don’t seem to have as much impact as what we did in the past. We might still benefit from our past successes, but we wonder why they don’t seem to continue in the same way.
A friend and I were talking on X the other day, and she mentioned how strong your writing can be when you are in the midst of an academic program where you are writing all the time. Just like any muscle, when you exercise, it grows stronger. As you all know, if you follow my website, I do not write as much as I should. I push myself to publish my monthly newsletter so that something is forcing me to be accountable. Also, I have a section in my newsletter where I highlight things I have written that month, so I try to put something on my website to have an item to put in that section. Even with my self-imposed production quotas, my writing output is a fraction of what it used to be, and it is tempting to fall into the trap of wondering if my output, or the quality of my output, will ever approach what it used to.
It would be a terrifying world if my life were only valuable because of my output. You can define output however you want to, but if humans are not intrinsically valuable for what we are, then the one-hit wonders of the world are walking on eggshells. If the only question of value boils down to what we have done lately, the pressure to perform is nearly unbearable. The longer we go without our next breakthrough, the more we panic that we haven’t broken through again. The more we panic that we haven’t broken through, the less likely we are to have that breakthrough. If we don’t have that breakthrough, if our worth as humans is based on output, we ought to be very afraid of what the judges will do to us.
Human value is far too deep and beautiful to diminish to a measurement of output. After all, we are also much more than whatever you define our output as. If you are tempted to reduce yourself or others to a matter of output, perhaps reflect on your favorite one-hit wonder. If you would be sad if “Come On Eileen” were never played again because Dexy’s Midnight Runners no longer had value and wasn’t producing any more output, how much worse would it be if a similar metric determined human value?