http://www.hulu.com/watch/874562

I loved this skit from SNL from a couple of weeks back. It features Matthew McConaughey as a yuppie who used to work in tech, somehow playing in a blues band somewhere in the South. He wants to sing along but he can’t fit in – mostly because he doesn’t have any really sad or hard things going on in his life (except that he missed out on being a Facebook billionaire).

Like all great pieces of humor, it has an undercurrent of a somewhat uncomfortable truth. One reference is that yeah, most of the ‘problems’ that yuppies have aren’t really problems by many people’s standards. I think many of us yuppies already know that. The second thought is that at least for some kinds of art (like the blues), maybe you can’t really perform it, experience it, be a part of it unless you have known some hardship. There’s nothing wrong with avoiding pain – to seek it after all would be masochistic and unnatural. But maybe there’s a cost too of an easy life – definitely a cost to our empathy and probably to our ability to generate and immerse in some of the deepest art.