You wake to the sound of birds chirping. Not real birds; that’s just what you set your alarm to in order to remind yourself what life is like thirteen floors below you. You walk across your house, snooze the alarm, climb into bed for five minutes, and repeat the cycle three more times before brushing your teeth, dressing, grabbing lunch from the fridge, and rushing out the door. You just make it outside as a fifteen-year-old black chevy equinox pulls up right next to you. “Good morning!” you say to your coworker as you climb in. You check the maps app on your phone. “Fifty three minutes. There’s a crash near Jameson.” “Lakeshore?” “No, it’s about the same.”
Ten hours later, you’re dropped off two intersections away from your apartment. You don’t mind the walk, especially since taking transit would steal an extra two hours of your day. You make dinner and eat while watching a show with your girlfriend, dismissing the “Exercise!” alarm as you start the next episode. Reluctantly, the both of you clean up after dinner and start on your respective chores.
It’s still an hour till bedtime, so you catch up on some educational youtube videos. You watch a chemist struggle to make a cup of coffee starting from a frozen batch of coffee cherries. It must be fun to mess around with chemistry equipment in a lab. You remember an older school friend of yours telling you that this same chemist was his TA many years ago. That means you went to the same school as this man on screen. You are watching him make coffee from scratch. Why? Are you ever going to do this? Of course not, you just enjoy watching people make stuff. But don’t you enjoy creating things as well? Isn’t that why you have 3D printers and toolboxes filled with electronics? Of course it is, but making things takes effort, and you are tired from work and from chores. Even if you weren’t, you already have so many other things you should be working on. You’ll start when everything else is no longer a problem. Yeah. Maybe some day, when you’re not yawning mid-thought. Oh, right. You need to be up in five hours again.
Why does art exist?
I’m sure you just had a few thoughts pop into your head. If you didn’t, that’s fine; we’re going to ignore those thoughts for now anyways and consider an oversimplified evolutionary approach, because it’s interesting and because it’s wrong.