No, Your Tech Job Doesn’t Matter More Than Shakespeare

Why you need art in a world obsessed with STEM

Many of my friends don’t think of me as an artist.

If you’re reading this, you probably know me exclusively as an artist—or a writer at the very least—and might have done a double take. Yes—you heard me correctly. There is a subset of “Liza Libes Friends” who do not follow my literary rants on Instagram, who do not celebrate with me when I release a new poetry book, and have never heard of Substack in their lives.

Typically, we call such friends “STEM People.”

I jest, but lately, I’ve found my artistic temperament increasingly at odds with my surroundings. Because I gravitate towards people who share my values—tradition, stability, ambition, and family—the majority of my close friends a) lean conservative b) see themselves in long-term relationships with monogamous¹ partners and c) hold high-paying jobs typically in finance, engineering, medicine, or tech.

And many of them just don’t get art.

If you’re a writer yourself, you might chortle in solidarity. If you possess an artistic temperament of any sort, you’ve probably encountered someone at least once in your life who just could not care less about art. And the more you try to convince them otherwise, the more they push back with their insistence that art has no “practical” use—or that the ability to quote Shakespeare will not put bread on the dinner table. They’ll show you statistics about the dangers of obtaining a humanities degree and argue that the doctor is more valuable than the artist because the former saves lives and the latter engages exclusively in intellectual masturbation.² They might even scold you for “wasting your time” reading fiction when you ought to be learning about financial derivatives.

While not all STEM people are complicit in the dissemination of these unpleasant musings, there is undeniably a certain subset of “STEM People”—typically those with more “normie” jobs, as my editor will put it—who can’t tell a Rembrandt from a Monet or will even brag about never having read a work of fiction in their lives.

These people are, unfortunately, more ubiquitous than either you or I would like to admit.

But why should we care what they think? And, more importantly, why should they care about art?

The answer to the first question is, perhaps, that we shouldn’t. If someone adamantly turns a blind eye to art in all its forms, then perhaps nothing I say or write today will convince them otherwise. But if I do manage to sway just one person with my words, then the world will become a better place for all of us because human beings who appreciate art lead fuller lives.

At its core, art forces us to wrestle with ideas. Think about the last time you read a poem or walked into a museum to see a famous painting. Beyond making you feel a certain way, that piece of art probably inspired you to consider an idea that might not have previously crossed your mind. The first time I read Shelley’s Ozymandias in the 10th grade, for instance, I was forced to see the world as something larger than myself. Humbled, I jumped down the rabbit hole of Romantic poetry and found parallels to Ozymandias in Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn, whose message about the preservation of beauty through time is almost diametrically opposed to that of Shelley’s sonnet. After reading a broad array of poems on the nature of time, I had synthesized my own worldview on ephemerality and, by the end of high school, was inspired to create my own art so that my words would always be remembered even after I leave this earth. Reading poetry quite literally led me to find my purpose on this planet, inspiring me to look for meaning wherever I go.

While words are my personal preferred artistic medium, visual art and music move me in the same way. Listening to Bach’s Art of the Fugue at my friend’s college recital got me interested in learning more about the Fibonacci sequence, while seeing Raphael’s School of Athens on the walls of the Vatican Museum had me thinking about the harmony between idealistic versus earthly philosophizing for weeks on end. Every time I have interacted with a great work of art, I’ve been forced to consider ideas that move and shape our world, inspiring us to become better citizens of the universe.

But bigger-picture thinking aside, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve impressed a mathematician or other at a party by expressing that I learned about Fibonacci numbers from Bach. At the very least, therefore, art makes us culturally informed citizens, and culturally informed citizens always make better conversationalists. To answer our first question, then, inspiring someone to care about art will make your own life better because that person will become not only more self-aware but also more interesting.

But really. Why should they—or you, for that matter—care about art?

We have already said that art forces us to wrestle with ideas that we might never have encountered otherwise, leading both to self-discovery and a broader understanding of our world. In the abstract, these ideas might sharpen our thinking patterns, but on a more practical level, engaging with a wide variety of ideas allow us to connect to a wider variety of people. There is a reason that in my high school Spanish classes, for instance, we studied not only the grammar of the Spanish language but also the culture of Spanish and Latin American people through art. I learned about Guernica not through an art class but through a Spanish class because studying Guernica fulfilled the same function as studying the imperfecto—it was a broader vehicle through which we could connect to a particular set of people. Similarly, my college German classes included a foray into the art of Oskar Kokoschka and the music of Richard Wagner because art was the medium through which we gained cultural understanding.

The argument that is typically given at this stage is that art makes us more “empathetic,” and while that may be true, art’s overall effect on the psyche transcends empathy.³ Art certainly makes us more empathetic in the sense that we can better understand the people around us, but beyond that, art reshapes our interactions with both the world and the people around us.

Let’s revisit our friend old King Ozymandias, whose legacy (or lack thereof) tells us that even the mightiest of rulers perish at the hands of time. Ozymandias urges us to consider our own egos, inspiring us to evince greater humility in our everyday interactions. Similarly, listening to Mahler’s famous Adagietto symphony in a moment of panic causes us to ease up, leading to an overall increase in situational awareness and mental health. Yes—listeners of classical music have been shown to have higher mental processing speeds, resulting in an overall aptitude for decision-making. We need not even restrict ourselves to classical music: Benny Goodman’s jazz riffs invite us to embrace unpredictability, while The Beatles’ “A Day in the Life” causes us to grapple with the banality of daily life in the face of mortality.⁴

All of that is to say that art provides us with a model for leading better lives. In the modern world, we have unfortunately done away with the idea that the purpose of art is to teach us something, but nothing could be closer to the truth. To borrow an idea from literary critic Irving Babbitt, art is instrumental in the development of moral character. In reading Anna Karenina, for instance, we are faced with the consequences of abandoning the sacred tenets of family and monogamy. Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment similarly demonstrates how rational superiority collapses in the face of guilt—and how atonement can set us on the path to redemption. The reason that Russian literature, for instance, is so powerful is that it causes us to consider what is right and what is wrong.

In that way, art helps us make sense of the world around us. Before significant advancements in science and technology, human beings explained the world through written and visual depictions of stories. As Keats reminds us, the Greeks painted myths on decorative urns; similarly, the Chinese illustrated cave walls with Buddhist parables and cosmologies. Thousands of years later, after developments in science helped us to explain the phenomena around us, artists turned inward, using art to explore and subdue personal turmoil—such as in the case of Sylvia Plath, whose confessional poems continue to resonate with young women today.

Art has even spurred the very scientific discoveries that have advanced our society and made such introspective poetry possible. Leonardo da Vinci’s anatomical drawings directly influenced the development of modern medicine, and the invention of linear perspective in Renaissance-era art studios helped shape fields such as architecture and geometry. For centuries, great scientists have enriched their intellectual lives by basking in the power of artistic understanding: Einstein—an accomplished violinist—claimed that music guided his scientific intuition, and Richard Feynman—an adept painter and drummer—believed that creative play in the arts sharpened his insights about quantum mechanics. As my editor put it, “creative thinking helps with scientific and mathematical reasoning—it’s difficult to have a world-class mind without artistic talent.”

So, yes, STEM people. Art is important to what you do—at least if you want to be the best of the best. Analytical thinking might get you far in the workforce, but only the sort of creative thinking spurred by art fuels meaningful advancements in our society.

But above all, art gives life meaning. It is true—a doctor can save a life while an artist can only enhance it, but is there really a point in saving a life that life is meaningless to begin with? Art, then, provides a reason for life to go on—it inspires us to ask questions that are bigger than ourselves, to connect with people who come from different backgrounds and worldviews, and to think critically about our day-to-day decisions. Art provides solace in moments of despair and imbues our cruel world with a touch of beauty. It moves us in ways that no scientific formula can ever capture, urging us to always reach towards the infinite.

We live only once on this planet, and we owe it to ourselves to learn as much as possible about the development of different civilizations, cultures, ideas, and worldviews. We owe it to ourselves to consider why we’re here and how we got to this day. Science might hold some of those answers, but only art can truly teach us something about what it’s like to be human. And that, my friends—the unique facets that make us all so fundamentally different yet at once so stunningly similar—is the most important lesson of them all.

Want more Liza thoughts? Pre-order my latest poetry collection, Girl Soldier.

1. The fact that I have to specify this makes me sad about the state of our society.

2. An actual quote from a Liza Libes Friend.

3. I also don’t like the word “empathetic” because, in today’s world at least, it suggests that I am supposed to empathize with murderers who want to kill Jews, for one.

4. “A Day in the Life” carries the same message as T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. This might be why it’s my favorite Beatles song.