Music.

Sound travels along a wave, and a waveform kind of looks like a key. A key works by aligning tumblers in a specific way. This sounds like a shitty analogy, but, bear with me a bit. Or, as the young ones say, "let me cook".

Your mental health is like a lock, and each of the tumblers are a problem. You go looking for a solution to each of the problems, but each ideal solution will only fit one tumbler. It won't open the lock.

Finding a song that turns the lock should be one of your goals with music. The world throws a lot of popular music your way, and some popular music can work. I think that's why it's popular, it appeals to the most people. I grew up with rock and metal, but right now, Taylor Swift's latest album is one of my favourites. I never thought I'd say that, but I just love that album, especially the first half. *Opalite *in particular really makes me wanna move, but I'm not a dancer. Starting with popular music is fine, but you should dig deeper. Full disclosure, I run a music comm on the instance I'm on, and I've posted over 100 songs that all meant something to me.

There's a music community here on lemmy.world, too, but I'm not involved with it. Like me, they post songs of the day. I'm not sure why they pick what they pick. I kinda focus on mine, but I do try to listen to new music as it comes across my feed. Not all the time, but some of the time. In the last year alone, I started listening to Norwegian singer Aurora, and I just discovered the (coincidentally similarly sounding named) Spanish singer Au/Ra. The former is like faerie pop; the latter, quite the opposite. Not quite "demon pop" but she definitely has a darkness around her that I dig.

Right now my favourite song is a Japanese idol (pop with multiple singers in harmony and/or duet) song called Hyacinth by 22/7. If you've seen Kpop Demon Hunters, you have a basic idea of what 22/7 actually is. They're a cartoon band that was made for an anime series. The series never got translated to English, and it wasn't picked up for a second season. However, the girls stayed together, continued to make music, and now they make music for other anime series, as well as just release music just because. So like, if HUNTR/X were a real band that released music outside of the film. The song is absolutely insane with all the overlapping vocals, and they went and mastered it in Dolby Atmos, so it sounds incredible on AirPods Pro (or, really, I'd imagine, anything else that can do spatial audio). As someone who doesn't know more than 50-60 words in Japanese (which does sound like a lot, but I'm not conversational, nowhere near fluent, and I can't read kanji), the song feels more like a tech demo for spatial audio and what can be done with it, but I'm all about the engineering of the sound

But going back to the lock. It's not real. Or maybe it is, but music as a key isn't real. Music won't actually solve your problems, unless your biggest problem is how to expand your music library. That would be an interesting problem to have. It just makes you feel better for a while. Which is sometimes all we really need to focus on what's important.