Is 2016 the year the music died? How to find inspiration through loss

2016 seems to be the year that the music died. Prince, David Bowie, Merle Haggard, Lemmy Kilmister, Glenn Frey, George Martin, David Gest, and Phife Dawg have all passed away in the last 120 days. Widen the scope to notable people in general and you’d have to add Garry Shandling, Alan Rickman, Doris Roberts, Nancy Reagan and Antonin Scalia to that list.

We feel impacted by these celebrity deaths not only because of the work that these people have contributed but also because we grow up with them and their art is what helps develop our formative years. We feel connected to them through their music and live vicariously through them via the media.

Our fascination with the deaths of these celebrities is also partly a reflection into our own mortality. A reminder that the fabric of life is brittle and what can once be considered a mainstay or institution to us can quickly become relegated to memories of the past and a headline on a news page.

The music of Prince and David Bowie broke through not only their own musical genre’s, but even the notion of genre’s in general, to become part of the American zeitgeist and defined their places in time.

When you live your life through the perspective that you really only have one spin on this rock called Earth you will realize how wasted time can quickly become a wasted life. If we’re lucky we have about 30,000 days to create some sort of mark not only through our work but through the relationships that we form with the people around us. Prince took his 21,000 or so days and learned 27 different instruments and sold 100 million records worldwide becoming a cultural phenomenon.

We can’t all live up to the level of these icons, but we can live up to becoming the best version of ourselves. Putting off dreams or waiting for a tomorrow that may never come is not how these people carved out a place in history. While we mourn for their loss we should also feel inspired at what they were able to create and realize that we also have the same amount of days in our lives, if not sometimes more, to create something memorable.

Adi Raval is a digital marketing consultant, entrepreneur, and tech enthusiast in Baltimore, MD