A gift that I couldn't recognize
maybe it's a gift that i couldn't recognize
maybe i don't really need to feel satisfied
—Porter Robinson, "Trying to Feel Alive", Nurture, 2021
This song, "Trying to Feel Alive", is the last song on Porter Robinson's album Nurture, which came out April 23, 2021. I have written about Robinson's music three times on this blog before: check out my posts about "Shelter", "Fresh Static Snow", and "Look at the Sky". It has since grown to be among my top two favorite songs from Nurture. (It is quite possibly my favorite song from Nurture. I can't decide between this and "Look at the Sky".)
In addition to being the last song on the track list, "Trying to Feel Alive" is also chronologically the last song that Robinson wrote for Nurture. For Robinson, Nurture was an immense effort that took seven years of creative struggle to materialize. (See my post on "Look at the Sky" for additional context.) In the track commentary for "Trying to Feel Alive", Robinson explains:
This song was me trying to make sense of the whole journey, trying to figure out what has changed. What did I learn? Am I any better? Am I satisfied? It was enormously difficult to write, but ultimately, the answer I came to is that satisfaction isn’t the real goal. If you accomplish everything you’re striving for, you’ll stop looking forward. There’s nowhere to go. This is another one where I was crying while writing it because I guess it was sort of a personal epiphany. Here I am on the other side of this, still struggling with making music, still not necessarily feeling whole, but beginning to understand that maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe making music is my way of trying to feel alive, over and over again.
It is remarkable to me how applicable this sentiment is to other kinds of personal struggles. For example, last month, I graduated college. Getting a bachelor's degree should be a pretty momentous occasion in one's life—it marks the completion of an exhilarating albeit stressful period of one's life—but when all was said and done, I didn't really feel any different. Here I am, still trying to figure out what it is I want to do with my life. Maybe that's a good thing. Maybe all that means is that I still have room to grow and to evolve and to experience—that there is still something I can look forward to in life.
Importantly, the song seems to end unfinished, cutting off at what feels like the middle of a beat. This has to be by design. Porter Robinson intentionally ends the album at an unresolved place in order to instill in the listener the same feeling of dissatisfaction that he claims is a gift he couldn’t recognize. It is a deliberate imperfection.
I am also reminded of the Pixar movie Soul, about which I wrote a blog post back in January. I also compared "Look at the Sky" to Soul in my blog post about that song. In my view, the fundamental themes of Nurture and Soul are remarkably similar: both ask us to appreciate that there is beauty in everyday life. In Soul, there is a moment in particular where the main character Joe Gardner accomplishes something that he had been dreaming of doing his entire life, but after he accomplishes said thing, he is struck by how unsatisfactory the feeling of accomplishment is: "It's just, I've been waiting on this day for my entire life—I thought I'd feel different." In response, another character replies with a "story about a fish":
He swims up to this older fish and says, "I'm trying to find this thing they call the ocean."
"The ocean?" says the older fish. "That's what you're in right now."
"This?" says the young fish. "This is water. What I want is the ocean."
All of our lives, we navigate the world in search for something that will give meaning to our lives, but oftentimes we fail to recognize that what we are searching for is right in front of us and all around us. It just requires a different perspective and perhaps a little wisdom from an older fish. In this case, that older fish is Mr. Porter Robinson, attempting desperately to convince himself that maybe he has a gift he couldn't recognize: maybe he doesn't need to feel satisfied.