In Defense of Coldplay

(or, The Imagine Dragonification of the Modern Pop Rock Movement, Vanessa Bayer, and a Look Into Critical Media Timing)

I maintain that it is one of the most insane pop culture juxtapositions society at large has ever witnessed: Coldplay is one of the most widely known bands in the world. Somehow, nobody really knows their music.

People definitely think they do, though. Viva la Vida has played enough times–on the radio during every road trip, in every grocery store or mall anyone has ever been to–that they can recognize the opening measures without remembering to listen to the words. There are at least three covers of The Scientist on any given season of The Voice. My middle school youth group leader once put Clocks as a backing track to a year-in-review video, and Sky Full of Stars still trends each New Year’s Eve. In that sense, yes, Coldplay is a very heavily defined band. They’re universal–Chris Martin’s melancholy croon can be picked out of a crowd in an instant. It is, in fact, this very reason, the nostalgia and melancholy, that I began listening to the band: their music sounded like being very young in the fall, which meant that in some capacity, at some point in time, my father must have played them.

During my freshman year of high school, I rescued my father’s old CD collection from a donation bin and still today it sits in my storage containers as an odd relic of my childhood, one of the very few I have. Out of bored curiosity last winter, I took it down and flipped through: my father owned A Rush of Blood to the Head. Upon prompting, I learned he played it frequently for a few years after its release, though often skipping most tracks excluding Clocks. Why? “I didn’t want to become one of those guys that listens to Coldplay.”

As much as I have tried, I cannot contextualize this well. My father may be more outdoorsy as of late, but he has not ever been macho.

If you lived anywhere in the United States in the mid to late 2010’s, you know that it was impossible to escape the iron grasp Imagine Dragons had on society. They were everywhere, the pinnacle of modern pop rock band success, more years than not boasting a song that reached the US top 100. Today, however, they’ve seemed to lose their hold. As with anything that is popular for a long enough period of time, eventually the people turned. Tiktok users mocked fans as well as the music itself, calling it “bland” and “vanilla,” and the band a one trick pony. Indeed, however, there might be a sprinkle of truth to their harshness. I will know an Imagine Dragons song intuitively if it plays, even if I have never heard it before. And though I’ve never listened to an album of theirs in full, to an extent I do feel as though I know their entire discography. I have no thoughts on this band–I don’t choose to listen to them nor do I choose not to. When they play, however, I can tell immediately and that in itself is a feat for any musician, though there is a fine line between it being a positive or negative one.

In recent years, Coldplay has explored the pop side of pop rock far more than they did at their offset, with more recent radio charters categorized nearly identically to those of Imagine Dragons. However, both objectively and technically, Coldplay is the better band. Their music is more refined, more polished. They sound cleaner, more like “music” as a concept rather than the aestheticized “pop music” genre label Imagine Dragons seemed to fulfill. At risk of getting too pretentious too early, what I mean by this is that pop-rock seems like, through its very existence, it should be genre defying. By boxing it into a genre, that purpose is defeated entirely. When we begin calculating to such an exact, algorithmic degree, we lose the ability to find or even recognize anything that withstands it. Coldplay, on the other hand, doesn’t fit into the pop rock box, nor really any other one. They lack the algorithm that Imagine Dragons completely built their brand off of. But more on that later. The point is, Coldplay is looked upon quite neutrally by the public while people have proven to have strong feelings about Imagine Dragons one way or another. So…why? Why are these bands so similar in familiarity and rankings, and even further, why are each of their respective perceptions so lackluster despite being some of the most iconic sounds of the 2000s and 2010s? My theory is that it all comes down to their audiences themselves: their defined strictness, or perhaps their defined lack thereof.

Imagine Dragons was a ticking time bomb and there is a part of me that very firmly believes they had to know that. One of their very first radio hits was 2012’s Radioactive, a song popularized by middle school boys because of its hard rhythm and angst. It was emo for people who were only pretty sure they knew what emo was, and my freshly teenaged neighbor once played it for four hours straight on a Sunday afternoon while he practiced free throws in his driveway. After the success of Radioactive, Imagine Dragons’ audience grew a sizable amount, primarily with people in their middle and early high school years.

It feels necessary to add here, briefly, a phenomenon present in much radio pop music from this era that I like to categorize as “adventure movie montage music.” It is exactly what it sounds like: rather generic, upbeat songs, most often sung by white guys with beards and skinny jeans, that you can put over a montage without having to think too hard about the lyrics or message. The only things these songs have ever pushed are to have fun and maybe, occasionally, be yourself. And while this musical concept may seem rather timeless in nature, it is very very (and I cannot stress this enough) very “of” the 2010s. Arguably, this was the era of the digital media renaissance, with movie and music streaming platforms becoming prevalent, the rise of youtube and other social media influencers, and constant new ways to push original content into a freshly computerized world (yearly youth group recap videos for example.)

As an added bonus of content getting easier and easier to produce, this was also a time of really bad (or, every once in a while, solidly mediocre) mostly children’s action and adventure movies. I cannot think of these films without thinking of Imagine Dragons. The band may as well have been listed with the cast too, because in the sea of too-similar trailers and journey scenes and animated talking animals and single men, there was, with near certainty, an Imagine Dragons song playing somewhere in the distance. Of all these jumbled up and unmemorable films, that’s what I remember, that’s what I can count on if I am ever inclined to attempt to watch one again.

So what exactly am I getting at here? Most simply put, this social collide was ultimately not a beneficial one. At least for Imagine Dragons’ social standing, it was all a very ill-fated mix. Middle schoolers inevitably grow up, and they often grow up to cringe pretty heavily at the ages they were when they made Imagine Dragons famous. I have a visceral reaction to zentangle art and colored skinny jeans and ukulele backing tracks–all very innocent things that I will never miss an opportunity to hate on simply because the version of myself that liked these things was, for lack of better phrasing…rough. In the case of Imagine Dragons, this mass exodus into cringe territory coupled with hazy recollections of movies that hit well below the bar was a death sentence, an almost instant downfall. And when the people who turn on you are the kids who grew up online, there is nowhere to hide and reinvent while the hate train runs its course.

The case of Coldplay is similar in an opposite way. While Imagine Dragons’ audience was defined enough to be the creation of their detriment, Coldplay’s is…really not. For a band this well known, that fact is alarming. Think about it though, have you ever met a viciously public Coldplay superfan? (However, if you have, can you give them my number?) Should you have? Is fan behavior something their listeners would even participate in? But every good essay is a circle, right–who the hell are their listeners anyway?

Coldplay falls into a weird genre rut. Yes, they are majority pop-rock, and arguably, when they do that, they do it quite well. However, are they only defined as pop rock because there’s nowhere else to sensibly categorize them? Sure, their music explores much of the same themes as those of Imagine Dragons, but in a much more mature, palatable way. There is angst, but it is earnest and carefully placed. An emotional maturity is displayed prominently throughout Coldplay’s discography that ages its listeners. I wouldn’t have listened to this in middle school. I don’t even think I’d have listened to it in high school. Its appreciation requires a certain capacity that is grown into and takes much longer to adopt than blatant unease. This is where the paradox begins.

Coldplay’s catalog is angsty and emotional enough, despite its maturity, to earn the label of “boy band” by adults. They write it off. While Coldplay is veridically a band of males, they don’t quite fit into the typical boy band genre. Stan culture writes it off. I don’t see their music appealing to youth (my preteen and teenage siblings had no idea who they were until I played the opening lines of Viva la Vida.) It isn’t “teen music” at all in the way that it’s marketed. Their poppiest songs are what chart and subsequently play on the radio. If radio enjoyers hear these songs and enjoy them enough to give their respective albums a try, the song they heard was one off. They won’t find what they are looking for and even if they somewhat like what they’re listening to, because it wasn’t what they were craving to hear, they most likely won’t stay with it for very long. In the same vein, rock fans will hear their radio songs and find nothing special in them–they don’t go looking for more. Furthermore, Coldplay albums vary drastically from each other in sound, some taking on a more indie vibe, or more experimental, you get the gist. But even in each album itself there is a huge range of variation. A few instrumental pieces are placed throughout each album, many taking heavy influence from classical music, some taking substantial influence from more modern EDM. Everyday Life, their most recent album, features spoken language prominently. In fact, Coldplay takes an almost Zuckerkandlic approach to each album, as much as it pains me to write that. Each album is themed, yes, but even further than that, there is always a measure that is repeated throughout the album as a body. It is a sort of “one,” introduced in the beginning and often acting as an end. Because of its many influences, including this, there is no genre I–or anyone–could ever comfortably put this band in because, to put it quite simply, they are only really ever like themselves. You can’t really base your opinion on them off of one song, as each album is intended to be taken as a whole–it is one piece of art, an individual exhibit in their museum. If you were handed just the base colors used to paint a masterpiece, it wouldn’t look like much at all. You can’t know if you’d like the painting until you saw it in full. Likewise, in the case of Coldplay, you can only know you like them if you already know you like them.

 Something else to chew on while looking at this scenario, perhaps, would be a comparison between Coldplay and Maroon Five, another similarly ranked, popular “pop rock” band in the 2010s. Maroon Five’s audience never seemed as undefined as Coldplay’s, though it did undergo a rather strange evolution throughout their different musical eras. While Maroon Five Started with a more indie rock vibe in the mid to late 2000s, accumulating a large college aged, older young adult following, their 2010 switch to mainstream pop happened to collide with their original audience’s feeling of “growing out” of the exact music this band was now beginning to produce. Maroon Five had a lucky break here–their songs “Love Somebody” and “Payphone” charted nationally and new fans were gained. As the band delved further into the pop rock scene, coupled with lead singer Adam Levine’s long stint as a bad-boy persona judge on The Voice, a younger following was amassed and the band took on a new role as a sort of older boy band hybrid. Young people came to expect them on the radio, would buy their records, but in a similar vein as Coldplay, I’ve found very few dedicated fans. What Maroon Five did and continues to do well, however, is market themselves to whatever following they have grown into. Little girls want Adam Levine on Justin Bieber-esque merchandise? Hell or high water, they’ve got it.

There is an ironically comical sort of tragedy in all of this. Coldplay’s albums are, in my humble opinion, some of the most original and groundbreaking musical works in recent years. I will go to war and die on the hill defending that Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends is the most technically perfect album of our generation. What’s comical, then? Well, it’s the fact that, upon choosing to get off their high horse of pretenses and defined genre lines and just explore their music, most people will agree with me.

Out of curiosity, after my discovery of the album, I went to look at the Amazon review page for Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends. I am well aware that this may be among the worst ways to tell whether or not an album is actually technically any good, but my agenda was mainly just to see whether or not my experience with the album was original. Maybe I’d unearthed a gem, right? Or maybe I’d been living under a rock, or maybe I just have awful music taste. Maybe it was just some album I listened to on a balcony in the summertime after my friend convinced me not to jump off. Either way, needless to say, I was not in the minority. Death and All His Friends scored near unanimous perfect ratings. Every review had the same beat: I bought this album because I liked Viva la Vida when I heard it on the radio. (it feels notable, by the way, that most of these reviews were pre-Spotify. We’re talking physical CDs, and we’ll come back to this detail later so remember it.) I didn’t know what to expect from the rest of it and to be honest it was very different but…this album is my new favorite. I knew nothing about the band but this changed my life.

All of the reviews. Every. Single. Fucking. One.

Since this realization, I’ve checked the ratings for every other album and EP Coldplay has put out. The reviews could be templated. Nearly everyone didn’t know much about the band, didn’t have expectations, heard a few songs on the radio but didn’t consider themselves a fan. Nearly everyone always loved the album. Like, a lot.

Perhaps the most interesting part in all of this, however, is the fact that while reading these reviews, I came across no semblance of a solid fanbase. I’m not looking for Swifties by any means here, but at least someone who anticipated any of the albums’ releases, who did have expectations, who did know the band. I found nothing. No diehards, not even diehard adjacents. For how big Coldplay is, they have not marketed themselves to any sort of audience. They aren’t making music for any certain group–and while you may think looking at Imagine Dragons’ case that may not be the worst decision, it actually is a nearly identical decision, just on the opposite, equally intense end of the spectrum.

It feels imperative to wonder whether they chose this intentionally, though. While never receiving nearly as many laughs or criticisms as Imagine Dragons, it is not difficult to find content jeering at the anonymity of Coldplay–people coming to the realization that no, they actually can’t name the drummer or the bassist or really any member besides Chris Martin, and in a post-Taylor Swift world, where an artist’s fandom seems to hold as much value as their music, that level of anonymity is unfathomable. I find a certain poise to the privacy of Coldplay, though. The fact that people have to realize that they don’t know the band as people is proof of this. Thinking about it, many people would ultimately deem the band members as some of the luckiest celebrities–I’m reminded of the memory of Marilyn Monroe changing nothing but her demeanor to “turn into herself.” Even Miley Cyrus had to put on a wig to become Hannah Montana, but I could walk past any of the members of Coldplay (save for maybe Chris Martin) anywhere without realizing it, and I say that as a fan.

Perhaps controversially, I don’t know if I can think of a singular other musical act that could keep their anonymity in the way that Coldplay has while still maintaining and growing their success as artists at the same rate. At risk of sounding obvious, humans love human interest. The scandals and messy public behavior that come with traditional bands may seem to the general public like poor taste, but the fact is that they garner all the more media coverage and curiosity from fans and non fans alike that directly aids in sales and popularity. The more a band’s name is on your lips, the more likely you’ll be to remember them when it’s your turn with the aux.

In recent years, the phenomena around parasocial relationships has grown exponentially. Some attribute this to the rise of youtubers and the ability to consume easy content, videos that feel like facetime calls, some say the ease at which we can instantly access any form of media is making us more socially inept, some will take the easy road and blame the pandemic. No matter what the cause, the way in which people develop one sided relationships with the creators and media they consume has changed drastically in the past decade alone. It is not uncommon to see young people online call certain musicians their “best friends,” despite never having interacted in any way. With Coldplay, that element is completely absent. The lack of knowledge about Coldplay’s members and their vague, unpredictable style of marketing sets the clear boundary between creator and listener. They don’t even appear on their album covers.

This may account for the bit of hate they do get, primarily in the United States, a country where influencer and stan culture thrives, and subsequently parasocial relationships do too. For a period in the late 2010s Coldplay went through a period of putting out radio hit after radio hit, to the point where it became seen as basic to like them–much like what had happened with Taylor Swift several years prior, people began to hate. However, unlike with Taylor Swift, who has a huge fan presence and is the subject of billions of parasocial relationships, Coldplay listeners had very little to hold onto. The feeling of guilt for hating on a real person was lost to the trolls, as nothing was really known about the band members, and for the fans, there was not a big sense of community to throw themselves into. The nobody-ness of Coldplay was, and continues to be, both a blessing and a curse.

I’d be remiss, however, if I didn’t mention the fact that this is coupled with some of the biggest technical advances in performance witnessed thus far in the twenty-first century. For example, Coldplay was the first musical artist to ever use interactive light up wristbands at their concerts. This was not a coincidence. It was completely their idea, now used by most major touring artists including Beyonce, Taylor Swift, and Harry Styles. On their most recent tour, with a promise to make attending concerts a more eco-friendly and sustainable experience and lower their carbon footprint, they came up with a way to use stationary bikes to help power the stage lights and other electricity. Coldplay is constantly reinventing what a live show can look like, and hardly anyone even knows it’s them.

Pop rock, especially that of the 2010s, is an interesting concept. I (along with the entire internet, it seems) am not exactly sure whether to categorize it as a genre or subgenre. It feels like both. It also feels like neither. When I ask people what kind of music they enjoy, I most frequently get a broad answer–an “oh, I like jazz.” Sometimes a subgenre is listed, most commonly as of late midwest emo or dad rock. Either way, with all of these, you know what you’re getting into. Even if you’ve never heard a band from any of these sub/genres, there is a very vivid vibe associated with each specific sound. You know what it will be like because in a sense, you can picture it. You understand that it will be like the rest of its kind; subsequently, you will have a near perfect idea already on whether or not you will like it. Finding music thus becomes easier. To an extent, you can do this with pop and with rock respectively. Pop rock, on the other hand, lacks this cohesivity. The only logical explanation to this fallacy is that the idea of pop rock music plays with broad and undefined genre lines in a subjective way. There is no pop to rock ratio in this music, rather it seems to be in the eye of the beholder–it may be categorized so employees know where to put albums on store shelves, but ultimately it seems to be the visual representation of an aestheticized gray area. Humans like genres, we like to put things in boxes. Here is the box for the outcast table, the black sheep. More ironically, instead of viewing this as a conglomerate pile, we very often categorize it all as unexciting. It is not genre-defying, it’s just too loud to be pop and too boring to be rock. Another thing about humans, I’ve found, is we love to be a little pessimistic.

In this realization I hope it comes across blatantly clear that as a society, we’ve done this to ourselves. As the 2010s climaxed and internet stars gained traction, so did the act of aestheticizing every facet of our lives. I mean sure, this has always existed in a sense: look at lunchroom clique scenes in movies like Mean Girls, or the ideas of nerds vs. jocks. We like to have a defined sense of social belonging. In fact, it’s primal for us to desire a sense of community. But the way this idea has evolved in the past ten years may in fact be to our detriment. While many alternative subcultures are founded or largely based upon different styles of music, even those walls have narrowed in recent years. It is not uncommon to open tiktok or twitter and see arguments about what or who is or is not part of a certain subculture. In the day of personalized for you pages and niche memes, I understand the desire to curate your world down to a T. But is that possible? And if it is, is it really a positive decision?

You may recall a bit ago, where I mentioned that the people writing reviews about “discovering” Coldplay were doing so because they had purchased CDs. I’m not saying that music streaming has ruined us–far from it–but, as with Imagine Dragons and bad adventure movies, this technological advance doesn’t add well to Coldplay’s situation. If to own the one song someone knows they enjoyed on the radio, they have to buy the entire album (and pay for shipping and wait for it for like a week because amazon didn’t invent prime yet) then chances are, they’re listening to the whole album all the way through at least once. People want their money’s worth. My friend Sophia buys her lizard live food so he doesn’t get too domesticated. In an opposite vein, we’ve built ourselves microwave meals for music. If the chance encounter with a CD was the way such a substantial amount of Coldplay enjoyers were born, then the ability to pay five dollars a month for Spotify premium and saving any singular song you want without added pressure to listen to the album it came from may be working against them. Coldplay’s work is a prime example of just letting art be art–each album tells a story through a variety of musical mediums–and letting that art speak for and often market for itself. You listen and you decide. Though there was no way to know this in 1999 when the band debuted, and though I’m obliged to think they wouldn’t care much even if they did know what was to come, this method was not an economical way to grow. This brings us to a theory I like to call critical media timing.

Vanessa Bayer joined Saturday Night Live in a very transitory stage for the female talent on the show. Her entrance was overshadowed by the slow end of the Amy Poehler/Maya Rudolph/Tina Fey renaissance, leaving Kristen Wiig as the only contracted cast member for Vanessa’s first few seasons. Sure, Bayer wasn’t the only other woman around–this was also the era of Leslie Jones, Nasim Pedrad, and Abby Elliot. However, their newness led to uneven female role distribution and the short yet significant Wiig domination period that lasted through a few seasons, those that, in other circumstances, would have been likely been Bayer’s prime.

When Kristen Wiig did not renew her contract and SNL creator and producer Lorne Michaels came to terms with the fact that he needed to find replacements for his last round of female greats, the show happened to strike gold, finding Cecily Strong, Aidy Bryant, and Kate McKinnon within the same auditions cycle. At this point, Abby Elliot had been fired and Nasim Pedrad didn’t renew her contract. Leslie Jones was coming towards the end of her contract as well, and with success from other projects, she had no plans to renew. A new female comedy renaissance had begun, leaving Vanessa Bayer as an outcast and, subsequently, in the shadows.

It’s the same problem we laid out before: nobody exactly knew how to categorize Bayer, which era to stick her in, because really, she didn’t exactly fit into either. Her entrance was untimely (and it’s a damn shame because she’s hilarious) and it messed up her audience perception entirely. By the time she quietly made her exit, people were so infatuated with what has since been deemed a new golden age of SNL (for context, Pete Davidson started around this time) that she was able to very easily slip from anyone’s radar.

That isn’t to say she’s had no success. After all, she is known. She’s been in a few movies and has sold out her own comedy shows and specials. Comparatively, though, there is no reason she couldn’t have done much better, as did her predecessors and successors both, many out of those groups becoming household names. This is just one of a million possible examples I could have used just to attempt to prove that critical media timing is very real: equally talented people will not have equal success in the same field, under the same circumstances, and it is solely because of the timing at which they present themselves.

At the end of the day, why does this all matter? Luck is luck, right? Fate is fate and no attempted celebrity is exempt from experiencing it. Well, yes, but I would argue that fate had no hand in this, and whether or not I believe fate exists conceptually is irrelevant. By definition, fate is Imagine Dragons coming up with the lyrics to Radioactive, Coldplay’s members each committing to the same university in the same year, Vanessa Bayer taking the call inviting her to audition for SNL. Critical media timing is more simply an incredibly unfortunate social calculation, and it is often due to ignorance over the need for a calculation at all.

I think we as people often forget that everything always comes back to a mathematical basis, or, more simply put, history as well as human behavior repeats itself in patterns. This even dates back to several religious and historic texts, including the Bible: Exodus describes seven years of prosper and  I’m realizing how lengthy this…paper? Drugride? Whatever it is, it’s getting really long so I’ll hold off from all my fun little examples of this one, but I will also tell you it dates back to the Bible in multiple locations, originally and perhaps most notably Exodus describes seven years of prosper and seven of famine to follow–also in Exodus, human behavior is repeated to the exact same consequences time and time over. Had the Israelites taken social calculation into account, maybe they wouldn’t have had all that added strife. But this is already long; I’ll spare you the tangent.

Aside from our technologies themselves, very little about life in our universe really changes from era to era. Just as I believe Imagine Dragons could foresee their original downfall, I think they also realize this. They are still putting out music, of which I’ve heard none, but the other week my brother blared Radioactive in the shower. The world needs God still. My generation has passed the torch down and eventually, my brother’s generation will pass it down further with whatever angsty middle school boy music arises in the process.

Had Coldplay stepped back at any point during the first five years of their career and observed the direction the music market was going in, they may have been able to better prepare for the decently precedented times ahead. Their rise was parallel with Ok Computer and the rise of Napster, and later that of the ipod. Music was going in an obvious electronic route. The rate at which portable, nonphysical music technology was advancing was rapid, and had they seen this and taken it as a sign to cultivate one even slightly more basic, single genre collection, even just for the sake of future marketing, it ultimately could have aided them. That isn’t like Coldplay, though. They create what they want, and that wasn’t ever in their cards. I’m reminded of several years ago, after putting out their 2015 album A Head Full of Dreams, when the band announced that they would not be producing any more music as a group. Their exit from the music scene was left at that until they quietly dropped a live album in 2018 from a prior concert, then finally reemerged in 2019 with brand new album Everyday Life. They did almost the same thing again in 2021, coming out with Music of the Spheres. There was no grand re-entrance, no snakeposting or teasers that the band would be back. They simply had created new music, and they were proud enough to share it. This act had clearly very little to do with their audience. Coldplay could be famous or not, I’m near certain they’d be doing the exact same thing no matter what.

Still, I have to wonder if Vanessa Bayer knew she was coming into SNL on the tail end of a renaissance. Coldplay didn’t see the CD fanfare was over, for sure, but Saturday Night Live cast members are contracted. Seven years at a time. Sometimes social calculation is easier than others. All of the greats leaving at one time was unfortunate, maybe even unprecedented in the minds of those who hoped for contract renewal, but in the long run, it was never unlikely. In fact, I’m of the stance that due to their success and easy way into the mainstream film and television industry, it should have been assumed.

At the end of the day, maybe it doesn’t matter. I still don’t think it would have saved her. Maybe it wouldn’t have done much for Coldplay, either. Maybe it didn’t need to. They’re still selling out stadiums. You can’t defer your Saturday Night Live start date. It isn’t college. My point is, if our only measurable constant is change, maybe we should actually measure that when we want something big. After all, every good essay is a circle. Middle school boys grow up and help reproduce more middle school boys, many of whom will do the same. Maybe Imagine Dragons were the ones who really had it figured out. An even scarier thought than that: I bet you still can’t name more than five Coldplay songs.

As I wrap up, there is a set of lyrics that swirled around my mind as I wrote this hellish thing: from Coldplay’s O, “fly on/ride through/maybe one day I’ll fly next to you.” I first heard this song while experiencing astronomically proportioned grief, and since then, I’ve resolved that I do want to get those lyrics tattooed above my heart at some point. That isn’t important. What IS important is the idea that I can spew all of this about social calculation, but at the end of the day, all any of us do–all Imagine Dragons and Coldplay and Vanessa Bayer and everyone on earth has ever done–is follow these lyrics, in hopes that one day the timing will be right. Maybe one day I’ll fly next to you.

I had a teacher last year who told me once that “things will work out because they have to.” The world doesn’t stop for anyone. I think he said it to me because I am deeply frustrating and the essay he advised was too, but I do think about his words frequently. In each of these situations, things worked out a certain way because they had to. Could that have been altered? Sure. It would have worked out a different way, or it wouldn’t have. Either way, in every situation, we as people take what is handed to us by life or fate or God or whatever you want to believe in and we are faced with the options as to how to proceed with it. I have paused and stood and used social calculation and been absolutely correct for it. I have done the same and missed the mark. Maybe sometimes flying on isn’t ideal, but it’s necessary. Maybe retrospectively I should have calculated a plan for any one of my million regrets. What I’m saying is I find no fault in any situation but my own. Maybe things do happen for a reason. They definitely worked out because they had to.

So I leave you with this: look at your surroundings on a large scale when you want something from the world. Do not be hasty with time. Likewise, do not say yes or no because the time isn’t perfect. Nothing’s fucking perfect, that’s why I wrote this whole thing about a fallacy. Go watch Vanessa Bayer’s SNL seasons and look for her genuine smile as she performs. For the love of God, listen to some Coldplay–listen to more than what you’ve already heard a million times. And then, after all is said and done, go back and hear it.