#also yes i know i've been extremely fortunate and privileged

[idontknowwhatiwantworld]

Can There Be Both Destiny and Free Will? If Not, Which Do You Believe to Be True?

 

  This question has me stumped! I've been coming back to it every other day to try to answer it. I've decided to just write and see where it takes me. This is a tricky topic because I don't think there is a yes or no answer for me, which is exciting. There's so much to discuss.

  Destiny is defined as 'the events that will necessarily happen to a particular person or thing in the future' or 'the hidden power believed to control what will happen in the future; fate.' If those are the two definitions I get to choose from, I'd say I believe in the first one. I believe that humans need something to believe in, whether it's religion, astrology, family values, etc. It gives life a purpose and makes you want to do good things. Also, 'to a particular person or thing' makes me think about predator vs prey; some things just aren't meant to live very long. Predators need to hunt, and the prey are destined to be hunted. What I don't believe is that destiny is always to blame for why things happen; actions have consequences, and I don't think it was my destiny to end up in corporate banking or to end up in shitty relationships in the past. I have the free will to change those things in my life.

  Free will is defined as 'the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one's own discretion. I get extremely overwhelmed by free will; I believe in it more than I believe in destiny. The reason I find it so overwhelming is because for the past few years I have not acted on it. Truly if I wanted to today I could quit my job and move to another country. Would it be hard? Of course but it is possible, I could buy a one way ticket to anywhere in the world. I don’t need to work a 9-5, that’s what I choose to do with my free will because I love comfortability and consistency. I use to give myself the grace to dream and dream BIG. That has diminished over the years, but I know I will get it back at some point.

  I use to act on my free will more often when i was younger. I am fortunate enough to lead a privileged life in most aspects. I was born into a family that would be defined as poor; my mother lived off the government due to mental health issues. Despite this, my mom still did her best to give us a childhood that I'd say was good. Of course, my mom did things that had a lasting effect on me, but I don't think it was ever intentional; she loved us. We moved from apartment to apartment as we were dependent on section 8 for housing. I've probably lived in six different apartment complexes and went to seven different schools; my childhood lacked consistency (which is why consistency is so important to me now). Sometimes we'd have food, and sometimes we'd have to wait a week for the food stamps to come in before we could eat a proper meal. However, I always went to bed with food in my stomach, laid my head down on a pillow, under a roof. My mom always figured it out.

 One thing that triggered me from living with my mother was the state of our apartments. They were always messy; I'd say my mom had a slight hoarding issue. There was always just stuff all around, always trash everywhere. In order to take a shower, I'd have to climb over what felt like a mountain of clothes on the floor or step on razors, old shampoo bottles, dried up soap before I was able to reach the shower knob. My mother was always home, and she didn't have many friends. The ones she did have were not great. We also didn't have a car, it was hard to get around, we always had to depend on someone.

  I love my mother, but I did not want to end up like her. She wasn't my role model. I wanted a clean space, I wanted a job, and I wanted a car. So I made the choice to work. From the age of 16, I got my first job serving chicken. It was life-changing to finally have money. I got my driver's license and soon after got my first car. I graduated from high school, which was something I didn't think I was able to do. I worked two jobs and was able to move out by 20. Somehow, I ended up in banking and worked my way up. I make more money than my mom would know what to do with. That doesn't mean I don't still struggle I do, but that’s the beauty of free will, I can do anything that I want. I made the decision with my free will to do better. I knew I didn't want to live a life like the one I lived growing up. I wanted to be able to order pizza any day of the week!

  Now, I understand that some people are born into a life that doesn't give them these opportunities. I know there are deep traumas that lead you down a dark path. I am not blind to that. That's why I find this question so hard to answer. That is why I believe in destiny, every deserves a chance to hope for more or hope that there is more to life. My human experience is not the same as yours and it never will be. I do know that we make choices throughout our lives, and we have the power to make those choices because of our free will. I also believe some people are destined to be life's prey. Apologies if this post seems all over the place. I just always have a lot to say!

Photo Link: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/1070941986372239789/

[epiphenomenal]

hi guys. sorry for the long absence. i've had various r/l things going on, including a new job -- but tbh i’ve also found it hard to have fannish feelings about anything except the end of the band of my life, kent. the following is an incredibly tl;dr explanation. please don't feel obliged to read it; i think i wrote this mainly for myself.

i. origins

there are two stories, i guess. one begins in 2003 with teenage!jan discovering a curiously-labelled song on file-sharing software. someone had frontloaded the filename with familiar bands: REM, radiohead, the smashing pumpkins, etc. so i downloaded what turned out to be the english version of kent's 747, and realised i had to listen to more of their work.

i soon discovered they were a swedish band, and that their english experiment had been short-lived. but their swedish songs were fantastic (both before and after i looked up the lyrics), so i kept listening.

and they say the town's become silent and ugly and deserted, darling that it's going to be a long cold winter i've learnt that longing is worst when one's slept like a child through an ice-cold winter

you're my hero for you dare to be honest you're my hero for you're just as weak as me come and help me, i need you -- again, again, again (x)

i ordered all their albums online -- you know it's love when you stop pirating. for most music loves, it might have stopped there. except for the other story, which starts in the late 1980s (or officially in 1990).

i read about the band's origins, and there was something compelling about that, too. how they grew up in a small grey industrial ghost town, where music was an escape. how they had lofty dreams and moved to stockholm and tried and failed and kept trying for years, until they got their big break. how they went from strength to strength after that, winning awards and a devoted fanbase, and eventually being called "sweden's biggest rock band". (but also how, after two english-language albums and gruelling international tours, they had to give up on that front.)

i loved them with the intensity teenagers are capable of. i read all i could find in english, and then (back when machine translation was poor and google translate didn't even exist yet) read more with the help of a swedish-english dictionary and what grammar i managed to learn.

kent also had a close relationship with their fans. their frontman, joakim berg, frequently hung out on their official forum. ahead of each album release, the band took questions directly from fans and answered them (often hilariously) on their website -- which, incidentally, was a fansite that the band noticed and asked to become their official website.

in 2005, they released their first new album since i'd started listening to them: du & jag döden or 'you & i, death', a masterpiece from the irresistible opening track all the way till the magnificent album closer, which remains my favourite song ever. i pre-ordered the album online and played it on loop for days and have never recovered.

do you remember our blood-oath, our law? our stupid crusade against an equally foolish town i remember everything like nails against glass but you just laugh at me, reduce everything to a joke yet i see in your anxious posture, your hunted gaze that it feels that it's a long way home (x)

ii. journeys

in the autumn of 2007, kent released their next album, tillbaka till samtiden; i went to the UK for university, on a scholarship. that december, i went to sweden and saw kent live for the first time -- something i'd never imagined would be possible, back when i first discovered their music. it was magical. they were magical. that energy, those songs i'd loved for years, the crowd roaring along on all the classic lines -- singing but darling we’ll all die someday with thousands of other fans, not in sadness but in triumph. but also: jocke's incredibly dorky dancing, the band's camaraderie on stage, how they connected with the crowd. i fell a little in love with their guitarist, sami sirviö, and his dramatic guitar-playing -- something from which i have never recovered either.

the next spring, i travelled alone to sweden to see them again, three times.

kent wasn’t just the soundtrack to my ~formative years; they’re linked inextricably to the start of my uni-era travels, and to trips i’ve taken since. they were also a constant, of sorts: one could always expect another album within a couple of years. there was always something to look forward to.

and the thing about kent -- and being a kent fan over the years -- is that they have always moved forward. unlike some bands which retread the same sonic territory, kent saw each new album as a musical departure from the next (often to their fans’ dismay; but kent always said that they made music for themselves, and i admired that kind of integrity, too). their lyrics also evolved: from adolescent anxiety and desperation, to urban isolation and middle-aged middle-class angst (not least given their working-class origins), protesting against a society that seemed to be losing its old ideals of solidarity and kindness.

in late 2009, during my final undergraduate year, they released the album röd. in the easter vacation before my final exams, i went to sweden and norway for four concerts. i didn't know when i would get to see them again.

(just half a year after röd, they casually released another album, en plats i solen. other things they’ve done: released songs for charity, from a quietly devastating song about domestic violence for Save the Children, to one for the National Organisation for Women's and Girls' Shelters in Sweden; released a song for free online as a christmas present for fans, without the knowledge of their record label, and laughed with fans on the forum about that; taken shoe-selfies on a couch together.)

darling, that we want most of all is something that can never be ours november is a wall of wet concrete where a naive dream of escape is born to crash and then die but heroes and heroines stay standing they spit hard into the wind and they warm our hands so we don't lose our grip on the love we have a right to (x)

i returned from the UK and started work in 2011. in 2012, kent released jag är inte rädd för mörkret, which opens with one of their most beautiful songs. (instead of doing promotional interviews, they held a press conference and invited fans and forum regulars and bloggers, not just the media.) i flew alone to stockholm that summer, for a concert on a sprawling green lawn. the setlist was incredible and included one of my favourite songs, which i'd hoped for years to hear live. there were fireworks at the end. the forty-minute walk back towards town, amongst other fans, felt like it took no time at all.

2014 started out tough for me for various reasons, and kent's new album tigerdrottningen was very welcome, though i didn't manage to see them live that tour. they were more political than ever before. their first single was a blistering critique of sweden today; at a summer festival they held (yes, they held their own festival, and invited artistes they loved -- mostly women, incidentally, something the media noticed but the band themselves never pointed out), they exhorted the crowd to vote the right-wing SD party out of parliament. my favourite track off the album describes stockholm as a "guaranteed solidarity-free New Moderate desert" -- but also contains a verse that gains a lot of poignancy in retrospect:

i hear the bass from the car at the red lights, i know that song like a knife to the heart -- i wrote it 200 summers ago i stand as if frozen at the crossing, and regret (x)

iii. endings

on 13 march 2016, kent posted a video full of references to previous albums and songs.

after 26 years together, they were calling it a day.

their final album, då som nu för alltid, was a summary and a farewell. they said goodbye with a final tour: 28 gigs in four months across four countries.

i used half my annual leave to catch five concerts in october. each one was amazing. from the breathtaking introduction and epic visuals, to the setlist, to -- of course -- the band themselves. how much energy they poured into their music. the smiles they traded on stage, how they’d play while facing each other. how jocke presented his fellow band members to the audience, night after night, and told stories from their earliest days together; how, night after night, he told them he loved them.

the band members' love for each other, how they call themselves a family and have always felt it was them against the world -- that's one of my favourite things about them. and i have a lot of feelings about the stories jocke told: how he and sami went from disliking each other at first sight to sharing a rockstar dream; how he and bassist martin sköld spent hours talking about everything in life; how important their drummer, markus mustonen, was in making them feel like they were finally a real band.

the farewell tour was also filled with love between the band and the fans. how jocke bantered with fans near the front. how, in setlist staple jag ser dig ('i see you'), the fans got their moment on the big screen. how the fans have always taken jocke's cue during set-ender 747, turning stadiums into seas of waving arms, right after jocke sings to us, repeatedly, you keep us alive -- additional lyrics only present in live renditions of the song. how, after each concert, the band came down and gave out roses to fans in the front row.

in december, i flew out again for their last three concerts in stockholm. during the first two, for which i had standing tickets, there was just such a pure joy and euphoria at being there, in the moment, with fellow fans, amid their music. they performed a completely new song, because kent is the sort of band which does that sort of thing during their last three concerts ever.

at their final concert, on dec 17, i had a seated ticket for the only time this tour. i watched their farewell from a distance, but that also allowed me to grasp the scale of this: being there amongst 38,300 fans, saying goodbye together. during the ironic political ballad sverige we held up our phones, as we'd done throughout the tour, and the arena was full of stars.

the day after, the band released a final video, a beautiful summary of the farewell tour which included the voices of fans. it was a music video for the song which ends their last album, and which also closed every concert that tour: den sista sången or 'the last song'. just to make the message perfectly clear, the song (and by extension, every farewell concert) ends on these lines:

this is the last time, the last time we're meeting the last song, the last song i'm giving you (x)

iv. epilogue

on dec 26 and 27, a two-part documentary on the band's final years was released. it's a very well-made documentary, from cinematography to its on-point song choices, filled with interviews and amusing moments, giving a summary of the band's history and a look at the long farewell stretch. the documentary also contained some sad revelations about why the band had chosen to call it a day, and i spent january and february processing this, basically.

on feb 28, kent won their final two swedish grammy awards. they gave cute thank-you speeches and joked around in the backstage interviews. it provided a kinder sort of closure, compared to the documentary's bittersweet ending.

i still have far too many feelings about these guys and their journey. but it's now been a year since the farewell announcement, and though i'll never get over this band, i should really move forward too.