Most people don’t need art: what’s that like?

I’ve come to learn that I have a need for art, or the creative, or a certain lifestyle–whatever you want to call it–that lot of people, like my mother for instance, do not need. I’ve always wondered what that’s like. My mother is a relatively messy and cheap person. In our recent move to Los Angeles, I was purchasing some print frames to adorn my bedroom walls (all white) with, and I thought to myself, she would never buy these. This woman would rather save the extra money and live in a room that I would consider to be basically an asylum. How does one live like that?

Don’t get me wrong, my mother is a smart woman, she has made more money in her career with a masters degree than my father, who holds a PhD from McGill University–though that’s not really saying much working in Bay Area tech. In her youth, she performed well enough on her Gao Kao–the Chinese university entrance exam–to secure a spot at the number one university in China: Peking University or the “Harvard of China”. She didn’t end up going because she didn’t want to travel that far, so she went to the “Stanford of China”, Nanjing University. As smart as my mother is, however, she doesn’t strike me as a particularly ambitious person. In fact, in her youth, I think she relied on her natural intelligence to get into university and started partying once she got there and settling down with a husband and a child (me) in her mid- to late-twenties. That was what most women did at that time, and she certainly wasn’t about to buck the trend.

But back to the art thing, I can’t understand how someone as seemingly “intelligent” as my mother could live in such a way as to be reminiscent of living like a beaver. I think my only explanation for this is that intelligence is a very multifaceted thing. Human beings possess many skills, or intelligences, that are not measurable with a standardized exam, which has sort of been glorified for the better or for the worse by modern society. That’s not to say that standardized exams have no use or should be gotten rid of. No, certainly not. But the glorification of it is easy for most people because it reduces the human ability to think and reason, a complex process, into a single number. This sort of almost absurd simplification makes intelligence across individuals capable of being juxtaposed–like a sport–and makes it tangible for the average Joe.