What would your life be like without music?

This is an older prompt that I had originally started typing out my answer to before I got distracted at work.

I had given it a fair amount of thought (maybe a couple minutes worth) because it just caught me off guard and I knew exactly how I would try to answer.

Do you ever watch a movie or tv show and notice the colors are either washed out or in a sort of grayscale? Maybe a day or two before this question came up I had watched the first episode of the anime “Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead”. When I read this prompt, that first episode was immediately what came to mind. If you haven’t seen it and are planning to watch it soon then you might stop reading here to avoid those juicy episode one spoilers.

Still with me? Cool.

When I read this prompt I had an immediate reaction and knew exactly how to portray my answer purely because of the aforementioned anime. In the first episode you watch the protagonist remember the events of their life leading up to the present. They got an office job in the city and were following their dream. They had a great first day at work and everyone in the office was jovial and welcoming. After work they all got together for dinner and drinks to celebrate. Great start! Then shit drops. You realize with horror that it was all a facade but the protagonist is trying to maintain a positive outlook and work hard. Years go by at this job filled with verbal abuse, gaslighting, and manipulation. Friendships seemingly fall apart, every day is filled with overtime to the point that everyone in the office is basically pulling all nighters all the time (with two people bragging and one upping each other for putting in 100+ hours a previous week) and it becomes quickly apparent the protagonist’s life is devoid of happiness and pleasure. Always chasing the clock, burning out to the point that one day you see them struggling to wake up in their apartment while surrounded with bags of trash that they haven’t taken to the time to take out because they’re always working. If you weren’t noticing it right away you might have missed it but at some point the world around the protagonist lost color.

Nearing the later part of this episode is when we learn about the world going to shit outside the apartment, with zombies and death and destruction. The protagonist is leaving their apartment, resigned to their fate to go to work and they encounter their first zombie. Over the next minute or so realization slowly dawns on the protagonist that they’re free. No more work. No more deadlines. No more boss yelling and belittling them. As they’re running and their memories are flashing before them they eventually see color again for the first time in years! This is when the visual aesthetic explodes with color and pushes out the grayscale reality they had been living in for so long. This moment is what came to mind so vividly when I first read the prompt “what would life be like without music” because it left such a strong impression on my mind and I had been noticing a similar feeling whenever I would put on music at work.

So, maybe not to the same explosive degree as in Zom 100, because work for me isn’t anywhere near that suffocating or all consuming, but whenever I put on music the world around me seems brighter and clearer. Perhaps that’s just me, but that’s what I think of when I think about a life without music.