I definitely get the emptiness... In many ways it's totally rational to feel like this because there is no global meaning out there. Meaning only makes sense at the local level and within the confines of a project/goal. That elusive transcendent purpose can only be found within religion, which is functionally just a different kind of project.
For me, accepting this reality has been therapeutic but it doesn't help you work out what to do with your time. The search for meaning seems to be baked in to human nature so my advice would be to just choose some projects and embrace those localised meaning structures. I use the term "project" here very loosely - it could be building a game, being a better partner, travelling, improving your health, raising a child, watching all the films of Agnes Varda. Whatever!
You might ask, well what criteria should I use to choose which projects to focus on? Unfortunately there is no good answer here. If there are things you like doing or feel you want to achieve, start there. Don't take it too seriously and avoid over-analysis because humans aren't actually very good at working out what they desire anyway.
Life really is just choosing projects that resonate and focusing on them for a while. That might not feel like enough but in my experience, anyone offering more than this is probably trying to sell you something. Freedom and emptiness are just two sides of the same coin unfortunately.
Thanks! Glad you've found it useful :). The algo is quite simple but a little bit hard to explain so I'll do my best...
The aim is to find similar artists to the ones you have selected based on genre (every artist on Spotify is associated with multiple genres).
1. The tool pre-calculates the number of artists from your playlists that are associated with each genre (e.g. "jazztronica: 3" indicates that there are 3 artists in your playlists in the genre jazztronica).
2. We compute a threshold called artist_thresh which is a function of the total number of artists across all your imported playlists and the "Similarity Threshold" set in the tool.
3. For each artist you select in the tool, we find all of their associated genres which have an artist count BELOW our artist_thresh.
4. For each of the genres selected in the previous step (as well as any genres manually selected in the tool), add all the associated artists to our output playlist.
5. Finally apply the "Release Years" and "Include Explicit Tracks?" filters and output the playlist.
The underlying assumption here is that rarer genres are more specific and therefore better indicators of similarity. E.g. I am more confident that two artists that share the genre "uk alternative hip hop" are similar than if they only share the genre "rap".
For me, accepting this reality has been therapeutic but it doesn't help you work out what to do with your time. The search for meaning seems to be baked in to human nature so my advice would be to just choose some projects and embrace those localised meaning structures. I use the term "project" here very loosely - it could be building a game, being a better partner, travelling, improving your health, raising a child, watching all the films of Agnes Varda. Whatever!
You might ask, well what criteria should I use to choose which projects to focus on? Unfortunately there is no good answer here. If there are things you like doing or feel you want to achieve, start there. Don't take it too seriously and avoid over-analysis because humans aren't actually very good at working out what they desire anyway.
Life really is just choosing projects that resonate and focusing on them for a while. That might not feel like enough but in my experience, anyone offering more than this is probably trying to sell you something. Freedom and emptiness are just two sides of the same coin unfortunately.