There are moments in life that you can’t re-create. The way the lights caught your eyes, the exact decibel of the noise that blanketed you, the intensity of your heart beat, they’re all unique to that specific piece of time. Concerts are an experience unmatched by any other form of entertainment. For one night, you become part of an event that is bigger than yourself. You are at once the small singular being in a sea of people hanging onto every word and feeling every beat in your bones, and the larger organism, the crowd, a pulsing field of energy. The performer enters the stage and the world around you explodes, because everyone knows what’s about to happen. This is why we buy concert tickets.

I’ve heard the phrase “money can’t buy happiness” a million times, but I really think that you can purchase the ingredients for happiness. Spending $50 on a ticket to a band I’ve already seen doesn’t equal happiness immediately, but as the events of the night unfold and I’m really enjoying my life and the moment and my friends beside me I have to thank myself for buying that ticket. I look back and think, “man am I glad I made this decision”, because a concert ticket is a purchase that gives back a value worth 100 times what you spent. You never experience a concert the same way twice, even if it’s the same band in the same venue for the fifth time there will always be something new that you’ve never encountered. I don’t think that ever in my life I have thought “I really regret buying that ticket”, and maybe I’ve just been lucky and have gotten to see some amazing concerts, but I’ll forever stand by my support for the purchase of concert tickets.

Not all concerts are wallet destroyers either, music can be found anywhere. Maybe it’s a man on the corner with some bucket drums and a plastic jar. Maybe it’s your school band at a football game. Maybe it’s your favorite singer in a sold-out arena. Point is, concerts can be created wherever there is music, and it doesn’t have to be a TicketMaster event. Live music is one of life’s truly beautiful phenomena, and we should take advantage of it.

So to all of my fellow concert junkies, and concert junkies in training, I say we continue to buy these tickets, these ingredients to our happiness. Let us buy them, not for the Instagram posts we will eventually make or to say we saw so-and-so before they were famous, but for the camaraderie of a crowd. Buy them for the complete and absolute bliss of the bass flooding through your veins while you dance and sing until day breaks. Buy them for the anticipation, the tension rising and boiling as the concert’s beginning approaches and you hear those first few chords. Buy them for the sweat and the screams and the life that the performer gives you, their life is in your reaching hands for the duration of the experience. You are their link to the life they’ve dreamed of. When you buy a concert ticket you are actively supporting the goals of another human being, you are making someone’s dream come alive. Buy concert tickets to be human, to dance and to cry and to stare in awe at all of the humanity before you. Money might not buy happiness, but it can buy concert tickets, and that’s a start.