Dreaming and Doubting

My phone announces a new message with a lingering "bing". Not that I wasn't already glued to the screen anyway, guiltily killing time on my Instagram feed. It's a forwarded post from the university newspaper announcing the main topic of the next issue: it's to be called "Future Music". My girlfriend is behind the message; she probably wants to subtly remind me of my resolution to focus on writing. I briefly indulge in thoughts of what it would be like to actually write something that doesn't disappear into the depths of my hard drive. To get just a little bit closer to the dream of being a writer. To not get stuck in "what if" for once.

There it is – that tingling sensation that rescues me from my social media couch potato downward spiral and pulls me in front of a sheet of paper to organise and write down my thoughts. Frantically I scribble the word "Future Music" in the middle of the page, draw a crooked circle around it and begin eagerly connecting strands of ideas. But this very tingling sensation that has put me into this euphoric writing flow comes with unwelcome company – it is self-doubt that quietly whispers the devastating words into my ear: "What do you have to say to the world?". And as quickly as it began, both my ideas and my pencil in my hand come to a standstill again.

What do I have to say to the world anyway? Haven't all the more intelligent, experienced or profound writers before me already said everything I might have to say? Do I even have the right, in my young years, to tell anyone anything about the world? And am I even sure that I would still say what I want to say to the world in the same way in three years' time?

It almost feels like déjà vu. My thoughts make a U-turn, away from the future in which my name appears under an article I have written myself, towards the past in which I have lived through the same situation, only with small variations, many times before. And suddenly it becomes clear to me that I know what I have to say.

Everyone who dreams of something hears it: their future music. Whether it's a trip to distant lands, the dream job or simply a safe and carefree life somewhere in the countryside. The longer this playlist runs, the more often DJ Self-Doubt throws in his greatest hits and drives away the audience – us.

And so adventurous world explorers become sleepy suburban homeowners and creative idealists become stressed workaholics whose future music plays so far away that, even after their three evening glasses of dry red wine, they evasively tell themselves and the world that they have simply grown up and got to know the "real world". But the real world is, with few exceptions, the one we make of it.

It depends on whether we mute the potential opinion of other people who are dissatisfied with their own world, or whether we let it play in our future music mix. Whether we lock our own killjoy away in a dark and soundproof basement and turn distant dreams into a somewhat closer reality. And even if it's just a short contribution in a small magazine – perhaps the future music will become just a little bit more rousing.

Mathias Thiemel