Unhinged rants are my sole jam
While it makes sense to implement a solution to the explore-exploit dilemma in life, you should also be prepared to handle a few duds along the way. The novelty of a new experience is an enticing factor, but some just leave a bad taste in your mouth and a hole in your wallet. This is to be expected, statistically speaking.
One such dud was an event called Soul Jam I attended on the 17th. It describes itself as "the ultimate destination for music lovers" that promised "an evening of relaxation, unwinding, and rejuvenation". It's basically a networking and performance event marketed as a wellness experience. Community-as-a-Service, anyone?
A Soul Jam sounds like the perfect third place. It's an event where people assemble and sing/jam for a few hours, but there's a ticket fee and an entry fee, and conversation is really not the focus of the event. So that disqualifies the event from being a real third place. While I could go on and on about the disappearance of third places, and the commercial non-places that have taken their stead, that's a story for a different time.
Now that I have some temporal distance between me and the event, I can honestly admit that to think of myself as being in the target demographic was a mistake. Another mistake was the organisers labelling this as a community event when there was zero sense of community in the crowd that had paid to be there. Camaraderie? Maybe. Community? No.
As an event, I have no qualms or issues with it. If it's for you, it's for you, and that's fine. The experience of being at this event would have been bearable if the sound system was calibrated, but of course, it wasn't. That I only got to hear 50% of the lyrics of each song, since the other half was sung by those in the audience, as part of a call-and-response, further added to my... misery? derealisation?
Given how much the hosts waxed poetic on the feelings of kindness and community, none of it felt authentic, and all of it felt transactional. This wasn't a community brought together through a shared mutual interest, this was a community manufactured through the algorithmic recommendation of a ticket-booking app, a gathering of people who had purchased a ticket and paid an entry fee to be present there. The cynical part of me couldn't help but notice that the expression of happiness/ecstacy/glibness on the faces of the hosts and performers was warranted since they were getting paid at the end of the day. Why was the audience so happy? Were they really feeling what was being advertised? Probably has to do with a shift in preferences, if you ask me.
A sign of cultural capital accrual is the shift from passive consumption of entertainment and media, to active consumption and participation. Also worth noting is the prevalence and growth of the experience economy, which expounds 'memories', 'authenticity', and 'experiences' over material goods. In this light, a three hour participatory jam session becomes a "soul-enriching" alternative to other weekend activities. For those with upward-trending social mobility, an event like this checks all the right boxes. Such events provide the illusion of a curated life, occurring in a non-place that is insulated and removed from the actual realities of the world outside. It is a form of escapism, however brief.
I feel there is something sinister lurking under the surface with events like these. The bourgeoisie, by rebranding a commercial transaction as a soulful community experience (held at non-places, of course) ensure that everyone is so distracted over the weekend that it prevents the formation of any type of class consciousness against them. Keep the masses busy, entertained, drunk - or get them to sing in groups, even - over the weekends and watch them go back to the mind-numbing routine of the workweek. Given the ground realities of 2026, escapism in this way may not be the best of ideas.