Art and Health: Throw out the whole fucking system

Art, and Health, the single two most important worlds to a healthy life. One needs the other, desperately. Art, it allows us to connect with others in a way more than speaking. It allows us to exist beyond the realm of what is in front of us, and give a beautiful gift to someone, a gift that they can feel and experience in ways that words cannot express. It allows us to get specific in what we are feeling, and transmit those specific feelings to another person. But the problem with many artists is their severe indulgence in addictive substances. Smoking weed and listening to music, getting blackout drunk after a concert. Rockstars dying from drug overdose.

Our society is made of systems, and these systems point us certain directions. Whether it be the education system to help us get jobs or the banking system to allow us to buy things we can't afford, like homes and cars. Our society is comprised of many systems to help us live our lives. The government often advocates for one system for everyone. Our system here in Canada points us towards death. 

Here in Canada, we actively point towards a stable working life, the 9-5. The problem with the 9-5 is that it consumes so much of someones life, that it is hard to sustain a relationship. Furthermore, the work here in Canada associated with that is often the trades, which is also associated with smoking (#1 cause of preventable death worldwide) and heavy alcohol and drug abuse. Anyone in or around the trades would admit these unfortunate realities of the general populace. But why? Why are so many people in the trades substance abusers? It's because the work is often too much, and too pointless for the average person. Don't fix your own car, fix everyone elses cars. But you don't just get to fix their cars, you have to be covered in PAH's (polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons) daily from used engine oil. Which is carcinogenic and cancer causing. Not to mention the red dust in your eyes and lungs from the rust belt that is Canada. But don't worry, you're stuck until after 5 o clock every day even if it's just mopping floors because the boss said so. You're not allowed to do anything more productive, like write, theorize, design, produce. You're stuck, usually emotionally stuck to that of a middle age burnout who just wants people he can have power over. So what do you do? You smoke, you drink, you go out friday night. You can't hold a relationship because no 18 year old girl wants to be around some guy thats not only out all day 9-5, but high all night 5-12. As a young man, it's understandable that is is our only way to cope. But these jobs also cap out at $80k a year, mostly due to the small share of work a tradesman actually has in a company. It's not enough to survive in the Canadian economy even, but the toll of just the job alone on that person is so high between the dangerous carcinogens or work environments (hanging off sides of buildings standing in a plastic bucket). According to our government, nothing in Canada could function without the trades. The actual reality, the counterargument to this is that 70-80 years ago everybody made their own things. Mothers made their own clothing for their children, they didn't need a sweatshop full of 16 year olds half way across the world in Thailand to make a t shirt for them. Men, all across this country built their own homes, they didn't need cokeheads to build it for them; and they didn't do coke, they got married and fatherhood was something honourable, not viewed as a trap or a horrible thing.

So if our government says that the number one thing we need is tradesman, what they are saying synonymously is two things:
1. We want more people to do the work we don't want to do,

2. We want our young people to indulge in the friday night scene and be stuck perpetually around dangerous chemicals and hazardous worksites.

These worksites are not hazardous, by the way, because of the work. They are hazardous because of the fucking drunk morons that work on them, that you are stuck working with.

What is the priority issue here? Health. Does this mean the art is unhealthy? No, the person behind it is. Good art does not require substances to be created, it can be created by anybody with the heart to reach into their inner feelings and pull something magical out, and put that to a canvas or write it, or belt it out loud. But the substances, the chemical toxins that allow someone to become intoxicated are what shorten the lives of so many beautiful people. And unfortunately they are a coping mechanism that is our goto in Canada just to make it through the day.

Alcohol is the fastest way for a person to kill neurons besides concussions. Those are the same neurons that help you emotionally regulate, that help you form healthy relationships, that help you to resolve your passive agression and anger issues, that help you have self control. Yet everyone around us now is an addict. Yet we still have no good art.

So does substance abuse create good art? Resoundingly, NO.

So what needs to happen? Throw out the whole fucking system. How can we continue supporting a system that leads to pre-mature death for the average person? We need to push people towards art, where they can resolve strong emotions. Art also creates products, which are the primary creator of jobs. But without letting them slip too far into their emotions, to where they drown themselves in alcohol and substance abuse, we need them to continue fourth in their lives as someone healthy. Then the quality of everything that person does and country does increases resoundingly. Healthy people create beautiful things. Healthy people create healthy people. We need to completely revamp everything that we know so that our country and our own lives are healthy again. Only when we revamp everything through this new lense, and pair these two very important things, we all will be increasingly happier.