Waiting for Jagger.

Stop interviewing your life.

“We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.” ~ George Bernard Shaw

The interviewer had waited decades to ask the question.

Since 1994, when he saw the Rolling Stones as a teenager, David Marchese had wondered about a lyric from the song Sway—“destroyed your notion of circular time.” What did it mean? Where did it come from? What philosophical rupture, what dark night of the soul, had produced it? He finally got Mick Jagger in a chair and asked him.

Jagger’s answer: he made it up on the spot. Keith was late to the session. Everyone was standing around waiting. So he started singing whatever came out. “That’s why it’s a bit random.”

Decades of wondering, dissolved in ten seconds.

And here’s the thing—that exchange wasn’t an anomaly. It was the whole interview. Marchese, a thoughtful and skilled interviewer, kept extending invitations for Mick to go deep. How do you inhabit a song differently now than at 32? “I don’t really think about it very much.” What wisdom has aging brought you? “You don’t get wisdom, you forget everything.” How has your relationship to sex evolved philosophically? “I don’t know the answer, honestly.” What’s the last thing you wanted but couldn’t get, only to find you got what you needed? “I can’t recall one that stands out.”

Again and again, the interviewer held up a mirror of meaning and asked the rock star to admire himself in it. Again and again, Jagger set it down.

It would be easy to read this as evasion. A canny celebrity deflecting. Or worse, shallowness—the pretty frontman who never had much going on upstairs. But that reading misses what was actually happening in that room. Because the interviewer wasn’t wrong to sense something profound in Jagger. He was just looking for it in the wrong place. He was looking for it in Jagger’s thoughts about his life, when it lives entirely in Jagger’s contact with it.

Listen to what happens when the conversation turns from meaning to making. Jagger lights up. He describes sitting alone at a piano before a show, doodling. No agenda. No audience in his head. “Your mind is not really being serious. It’s playful. Playful is a better word than fun.” He describes letting the mind go this way, that way. And then the line that should be tattooed on the forearm of every anxious creator alive: “Don’t be worried if nothing happens, nothing happens. Something will happen later or tomorrow.”

That’s not a man without a philosophy. That’s a man whose philosophy is so complete he doesn’t need to hold it as one.

We do this to people all the time—what Marchese did. We meet someone whose life works, whose work sings, and we demand they hand over the theory. The blueprint. The ten principles. We assume that behind every graceful act sits a graceful idea, and that if we can just extract the idea, we can skip the living and go straight to the grace.

But watch a mother soothe a crying infant at three in the morning. Ask her afterward what technique she used, what attachment theory informed her touch. She’ll look at you blankly. She wasn’t using anything. She was responding. Watch a World Cup soccer player one-touch a pass into space no one else saw. There’s no philosophy guiding his foot. No formula, no narrator. The seeing and the doing are one motion. Watch a jazz drummer lock into a groove. If he starts thinking about the groove, he’s already fallen out of it.

The meaning isn’t behind the act. The meaning is the act.

Jagger understands this in his bones, which is precisely why he can’t articulate it—and why his inability to articulate it is the most articulate answer he could give. When Marchese asked what performing means to him, Jagger didn’t offer a manifesto. He described a process. You walk out. You get the adrenaline. You control it. You read the crowd—are they cold, are they tired, have they been waiting too long? And then your job, your whole job, is to give them two hours where their mortgages and their problems and little Danny’s hurt tooth disappear. To make a temporary community out of eighty thousand strangers. He learned it from watching Little Richard do it in tiny rooms sixty years ago.

That’s not the absence of meaning. That’s meaning with the packaging removed.

Here’s what struck me hardest, though. The interviewer’s questions all shared a hidden assumption: that the real Jagger is the one who reflects, and the performing Jagger is the mask. Get past the persona, the strut, the characters, and you’ll find the true self underneath, presumably sitting in an armchair with considered opinions about mortality and desire. Jagger gently dismantled this too. He’s the character on stage, the character in the interview, the character writing the song. “Songs are pretty direct in a way,” he offered. Meaning: if you want to know me, don’t ask me about the songs. Listen to the songs.

The self the interviewer was searching for—the archival self, the one with a curated inner museum of insights—doesn’t run the show. It never has. It shows up afterward, like a critic arriving when the paint is dry, and writes the wall text.

And we believe the wall text. That’s our mistake. We spend our lives polishing explanations of ourselves while the actual self—the responsive, improvising, doodling self—waits at the piano in the quiet room.

So here’s the lesson, and it cuts against everything the culture of intentionality is selling you. You don’t need a philosophy of your work before you work. You don’t need to know what your life means in order to live it fully. The demand for meaning, held too tightly, is just another way of standing outside the moment, arms crossed, taking notes.

The interviewer asked about wisdom. Jagger said he’d forgotten his.

Maybe that’s the wisdom.

Stop narrating. Sit down at the piano. Doodle. Let the mind go this way, that way. Don’t worry if nothing happens.

Something will happen later. Or tomorrow.

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Stay passionate!