trying to get ts tickets
the journey, not the destination
Wednesday November 13th. The day before Taylor Swift’s first show in Toronto.
Everywhere I go, I see the posters. “Let’s make the whole place shimmer.” “The Eras Tour is here.” Rogers, RBC, Hotels.com… every company had a piece of the sponsorship. And I get it. It’s the event of the year.
But being one of the millions of people who never got a code, seeing these ads everywhere kind of sucked.
Theoretically, I should have tickets. Back in summer of 2023, I joined the pre-sale line with six different accounts. Three of them had different phone numbers. I did everything I was supposed to. And yet, waitlisted across all of ‘em.
In retrospect, maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised. Reading the news a few days later, I learned that **30 million** people (or at least accounts) had joined the lottery in the hopes of getting a ticket.
Even with my six accounts, that put my odds at fewer than 1/10.
So, on that November day, I open Instagram during my lunch break and see that Rogers is driving around the city handing out last minute tickets. My anxiety fills up - I really really want it.
As soon as the workday ends, away I go. During the elevator ride down to the lobby, I make a mental map of the route I am going to take. Up Simcoe to Richmond, East to Bay, North to Dundas, East to Yonge, South to Front, then West to the Rogers Centre. Along the way, I’d hit almost every point of interest - City Hall, Eaton Center, Union Station, and of course the Rogers Centre. Surely they had to be at one of those sites. Surely.
I dash out the front door, hop on a Bikeshare, and away I go. I WILL find the Rogers man, and get these tickets.
As I’m going, I’m scanning the horizon, looking for anyone wearing a bright red sparkly outfit (what they were wearing on the Instagram post). I had a few false alarms where I thought I saw them, but really, it was just some rando.
Each destination I pass with still no sighting, I die a little bit more inside. I knew this was going to be a longshot, so maybe, it (once again) wasn’t that surprising that I wasn’t having any luck.
And then, I arrive at the Rogers Centre, and right in front of me stand the red Rogers banners, complete with photographers and all. “Maybe today is my lucky day,” I think to myself.
I run into line, not even bothering to dock my bike. The security guard approaches me.
“We’re done for the day.”
“Will there be more?” I reply.
“No.”
There’s a famous saying that goes, “enjoy the journey, not the destination.”
Ok, maybe not quite famous. But the car commercials use it a lot. So that has to count for something.
And to an extent, I always thought that this was kinda bs. After all - if the purpose of the journey was to get Taylor Swift tickets, but I was unsuccessful, doesn’t that just make the journey a failure? How could I enjoy a failed journey?
Besides, I had just wasted a few hours running aimlessly around the city. What a shame.
But looking back on this experience, it codes as relatively positive in my mind.
Not just the act of biking around, but the whole fiasco of trying to get tickets. From registering for codes on six different accounts, to creating a sob video on TikTok begging Avion, to cold-emailing the partnerships department at work to see if they had any extras.
It was… fun?
I’m not quite sure how to describe it, but the adrenaline rush I got every time the Twitter account that tracked the TicketMaster queue tweeted out the words “GO” made it almost all worth it.
The act of trying to find these tickets felt almost like scavenger hunt, where I had to plot my next steps out very carefully.
After all, what other reason would I get to hop on a bike and whiz across downtown, trying to trace down a man in a red suit? It was like a maze for grown ups, except this one had a clear and defined purpose. And that made me very happy.
Plus, it’s a cool topic to yap with people about.
In fact, at a networking event, I was talking to my SVP and spent 20 mins complaining about my lack of tickets.
In a cringy way, the mass of Torontoians who had lost the Ticketmaster war began to feel like a community. Both in conversations I had with friends and random posts I saw online, I began to feel a sense of validation that I in fact was not the only one.
All of this is to say, although I may not have reached the destination, I still enjoyed the journey.
And it seems as if this isn’t the only case that this thinking applies to.
Take travel. Sure, the trip itself is a lot of fun, but you know what else is? Tracking flight prices every day, seeing if they’ll drop. Daydreaming about different destinations, imagining myself at each of them. Browsing Expedia for hours on end, trying to find affordable hotels in one of the most expensive cities in the world.
And of course, for me there’s also the literal connotation of the words “journey” and “destination.” I like trains. So the physical journey of getting someplace is sorta cool too.
It’s about the journey; not the destination.
But back to Taylor Swift now. And as I sit here, thinking about ways I could make this Substack stretch out longer, another thought occurred to me.
“I don’t really like Taylor Swift’s music.”
I’m surprised I didn’t notice this sooner. Like every time TTPD (or most of her other albums save for a few), came on my Spotify, I would press skip.
I’m not sure if this makes it better or worse, but this wasn’t intentional. I was never consciously *aware* of the fact that I in fact wasn’t a big fan of her music.
So… then why was I so passionate about her tour anyway?
It took a while for me to figure that out. But eventually, I think I settled on a few factors.
The first is the experience. Not necessarily the songs, but the environment - everything from light up friendship bracelets, to stadiums of 50,000+ singing at the top of their lungs, to whimsical dancers and their massive flower petals towering above the stage.
It’s not just “a concert,” as one person on Tiktok described it. It’s a “sensory experience.” And to me, that’s really freaking cool.
But the second, more important reason, was because everyone else was.
Ok. Maybe not everyone. But within the context of my social circles, a lot of people were. This was amplified especially by TikTok, whose algorithm one day decided that it was going to make me into an Eras Tour diehard. And so it fed me a plethora of related content.
And you know what, it worked. I became hooked.
The security guards dancing along to Shake It Off.
Taylor’s mother greeting the fans along the walkway.
The lighting strike hitting during We Are Never Getting Back Together.
The marriage proposals during Love Story.
The breakdowns and catharsis during Gracie’s opener That’s So True.
I think that this is very similar to the whole “the Eras Tour is an experience” thing I talked about previously. Perhaps the best way to put it is that TikTok showed me what this experience really is. As I went further and further down this rabbit hole, I fell in love.
But TikTok wasn’t the only influence. It was also my friends.
There are a few people in particular who I knew have been massive, diehard Swifties from day one.
And as much as I wanted tickets for myself, arguably an even bigger motivator was I wanted to find tickets for them.
I knew how happy they would be if they could get to go (alas, most of them lost the Ticketmaster war just as I had); so in a way that’s also what kept me searching.
And similar to how this process brought me from being mostly apathetic about Taylor Swift to literally selling my soul in an attempt to get tickets, I think this is a powerful example of how things we think are fixed are actually quite malleable.
The same way my interests ended up being shaped by external forces, so can so many other things.
From the food I enjoy.
To the careers I want to pursue.
To the hobbies I have.
And while some people may say that’s a bad thing, I think in many contexts it’s okay.
If I had let my thoughts of Taylor’s music being mediocre prevent me from going down this path, I would have missed out on all I was able to get out of it.
At the end of the day, we exist in a society. We care about the thoughts, feelings, and desires of those around us. And to an extent, for those we really care about, we internalize them as our own. That’s good - it’s what makes us human.
So by extension of that, it shouldn’t be frowned upon to let that influence our decision making.
And… because of the online world we live in, perhaps we can even apply the same logic to those whom we interact with on the internet. Of course, it may be at a much weaker scale, but given the amount of time we spend living the lives of strangers online these days, an agglomeration of what we see could also be considered quite proximal.
Of course, this doesn’t mean I just let myself be influenced and consumed by every little external influence that exists. That would, needless to say, not end well.
But sometimes, it’s okay to submit to things that I know are benevolent, or are unsure about.
That’s how I discover new things. How I move outside my comfort zones, and how I grow.
Thinking about this, it kind of makes sense. If I refuse to allow myself to be subject to external influences, then all the growth needs to come from within.
And as great of an inspirational quote this is, it just doesn’t seem to be viable. Self-guided change is difficult. Absent a mad scientist rewiring my brain chemistry, I just don’t see how feasible that is.
In this case, the growth for me was the social pressure that moved the journey forward.
The journey that turned me into a Swiftie.
Maybe then, the journey is not just important by its own merits. It is the journey that makes the destination that much more interesting.
The journey makes the destination.
Continuing down this thought train, I realized that there’s nothing about Taylor Swift concerts (or, really anything else for that matter) that is intrinsically satisfying. Rather, it is our brains that go, “ah. This combination of soundwaves will trigger the happiness neurons.” Or, “seeing this person dance will make me feel excited.”
Did I mention I had no idea how the brain actually works? But I think you get the point.
Then if this is the case, it also stands that we can probably change the way our brains assign these positive emotions. In fact, when we work hard on something, it gains a special status in our memories. So when we actually achieve it, our brain assigns additional happiness-neuron-firing to it.
Maybe this is evolution’s way of incentivizing us to work towards more difficult to obtain things. Mother nature knows that if we aren’t properly rewarded for this, then we would simply not do it. And in the context of surviving in the Savannah, I can’t imagine simply “not doing” things that are hard will end well.
Going back to the travel example, we can see the same thing again.
I can ask myself - what do I do on vacation? Sure, there’s some cool sights, but a lot of it is also things like shopping, eating, relaxing, or walking.
You mean to tell me I couldn’t have done that in my home city? That there isn’t a single restaurant in Toronto that has the quality of pasta I headed to Milan to eat?
There probably is.
What’s different is the *experience.* When I get on a plane or hop on a train and travel to somewhere far away, my brain goes, “aha, this is special. This isn’t something I do every day.”
So it cherishes more.
Again, the journey makes the destination that much more meaningful.
So, it’s now late December. The Eras Tour is over.
And I did not get tickets.
Quite disappointing, I know.
And I’m not going to sit here and postulate about how because I had a “good journey,” that that is somehow able to compensate for not being able to go.
Because that’s just not true.
But I will say, it’s certainly softened the blow.
I wrote a Substack a while back about how we should focus on the things we can control, not the things we can’t.
In this case, a similar line of thinking applies. I couldn’t control the destination. Whether or not I got tickets ultimately came down to raw luck. But the journey… that I had much more say over.
The fact that I decided to go on that crazy bike scavenger hunt.
The fact that I spent a lot of time talking to friends about this.
The fact that I turned on post notifications for all those tickets X accounts.
This is not unique to Taylor Swift.
I can’t control if I get the job or not, but I can control the amount that I put into the application.
I can’t control if my friends think I’m a cool person, but I can control how I choose to treat them.
I can’t control if it’s -20 degrees for my entire vacation, but I can control the planning that goes into the trip.
After all this then, I realized that appreciating the journey is valuable not just because it brings happiness. It’s also because that’s just what I have far more control over.
So if I’m more sure that something will have a positive outcome, then that’s what I should lean into.
In a way, this is coping. But if there is no other choice, nothing else that can be done…
Although I didn’t get Eras Tour tickets, I did my best.
And that’s all I can really do.
Image sources: tiktok.com/discover/not-having-tickets-meme-eras-tour, reddit.com/r/memes/comments/db2o8l/the_road_less_traveled/?rdt=48859