What I Learned at a
Bon Jovi Concert
Bon Jovi Concert
Before we start, if you prefer to listen to this info rather than read it, check out episode 6 of my podcast "Stillness of Heart".
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On the 9th of September this year, I finally got to see one of my favorite rock bands, Bon Jovi, live at Wembley Stadium, and apart from being a truly seminal experience in itself, the concert left me thinking about quite a few things that had very little to do with music and quite a lot to do with life.
Bon Jovi happened to play quite a significant role in the soundtrack of my childhood and teenage years. I remember moving to Moscow in 1993 when I was 9 years old, and having a family friend who was a couple of years older than me and a diehard Bon Jovi fan. She had Bon Jovi posters all over her walls, and since I was quite young and therefore very impressionable, she was naturally the person who introduced me to their music.
Spotify | Apple | YouTube
On the 9th of September this year, I finally got to see one of my favorite rock bands, Bon Jovi, live at Wembley Stadium, and apart from being a truly seminal experience in itself, the concert left me thinking about quite a few things that had very little to do with music and quite a lot to do with life.
Bon Jovi happened to play quite a significant role in the soundtrack of my childhood and teenage years. I remember moving to Moscow in 1993 when I was 9 years old, and having a family friend who was a couple of years older than me and a diehard Bon Jovi fan. She had Bon Jovi posters all over her walls, and since I was quite young and therefore very impressionable, she was naturally the person who introduced me to their music.
And then, of course, a couple of years later, there was Always, with that beautiful, beautiful video, the beautiful woman, and all that drama unfolding like a mini movie. I am pretty sure that even if you are not a Bon Jovi fan and don't know many of their songs, you definitely know Always. I am fairly certain that even my dad, who basically stopped following the music scene sometime in the 1980s because he was so in love with his job that only work seemed to exist, knows this song because it was absolutely everywhere. And if you ever watched MTV in your youth, you definitely know exactly which video I am talking about.
That being said, I honestly didn't think I would ever get to see Bon Jovi live.
I actually came very close back in 2007, when I was living in London, and Bon Jovi was performing there, but unfortunately I already had tickets to see Aerosmith, who were headlining a music festival in Hyde Park. It ended up being probably the worst concert I have ever been to, so apparently my intuition was very much on point when it was screaming at me beforehand to forget about Aerosmith and go see Bon Jovi instead. But listen, this was 2007; we didn't have all the platforms we have today where you can easily resell your tickets if you change your mind or can't make it. Going to Bon Jovi would have meant simply giving up the Aerosmith tickets and buying another set, so as a student, I ignored my intuition and followed my bank balance instead.
Years later, Jon Bon Jovi started having serious problems with his voice, and one of my closest friends, who is also a Bon Jovi fan and had actually lent me one of his cousin’s CDs back in 1997 or 1998, told me to give up any hope of ever hearing Jon sing "Always” live. His voice simply wasn't what it used to be, and the last time my friend had seen him perform, Always wasn't even on the setlist.
So I more or less made peace with it, even though whenever I wrote down my 100 wishes as part of my 100 Wishes gratitude technique, seeing Bon Jovi live somehow kept making the list. There are, obviously, a few other performers and concerts I dream of seeing live, but that's another story.
Then, sometime in late 2025 or early 2026, I saw an announcement that Bon Jovi would be coming to London in September to play several concerts at Wembley Stadium, and obviously I got excited. But then the war started, everything became uncertain, and the concert completely slipped my mind. I wasn't even sure whether I would be going to London this year, even though somehow it has become a yearly tradition for me since 2022, because we didn't know what would happen by September, whether the war would be over, whether flights would resume normally, or what travelling would even look like.
However, we had already booked our tickets for Joe Dispenza's retreat in Basel almost a year earlier, and since my best friend lives in London, we have developed our own little tradition where I come to London, we have some fun there, and then we travel somewhere together. Eventually I decided that I was going anyway, and when I started booking everything in late March, I suddenly realized that Bon Jovi was performing at Wembley just a couple of days before we were due to leave for Basel.
At that point, I knew we had to go.
Luckily, even though the shows were almost sold out by March, we managed to get tickets, and on September 9th, more than thirty years after that nine-year-old girl first discovered Bon Jovi in Moscow, there I was at Wembley Stadium.
And I honestly cannot properly explain the atmosphere of being in a stadium where tens of thousands of people know the same songs and sing the same lyrics together. Bon Jovi fans seem to be a group of their own; there is something incredibly loyal about them, and standing there surrounded by people who had clearly carried this music with them through decades of their lives was truly a seminal experience.
And somewhere between singing along, watching Jon perform, and finally hearing Always live, I found myself thinking about a few things.
1. Gratitude goes a long way
One of the strongest things I felt throughout the concert was how genuinely grateful Jon Bon Jovi seemed to be to his audience and fans for waiting for him to recover and return.
I don't know every detail of what his recovery process looked like, but it was clearly long and difficult, and I cannot imagine many things being more devastating for a singer than losing his voice, because that is literally his instrument. He founded the band, he has always been its lead singer and frontman, and without him being able to sing, the whole thing, in many ways, ceases to exist.
He spoke about being grateful to people for waiting for him, for continuing to support him, and also, in a way, for allowing him to be imperfect, because of course he wasn't perfect. How could he possibly be? The fact that he can sing at all after everything his voice has been through is remarkable, and thankfully, whenever he struggled, there were tens of thousands of people at Wembley ready to sing with him.
People had travelled from all over the world, including the US and many other countries, specifically to see him perform again, and you could hear different accents everywhere around you. Whenever he needed the audience, the audience was there.
But what struck me was that the gratitude very clearly went both ways.
I obviously cannot speak on behalf of an entire fandom, but I personally felt enormous gratitude towards him for coming back at all, for putting the band back together, for performing three nights in London, and for already talking about touring again in 2027.
And most of all, I was grateful that he sang Always.
I had gone into that concert fully prepared for the possibility that I would never hear one of my top ten favorite songs performed live. I used to joke that I wanted Always played at my funeral, so yes, we are talking about that level of attachment. And even though I am one of those nerds who checks the setlist beforehand and therefore knew that he had been singing it, until the very last moment I was managing my expectations because you simply never know. It was the third London show; he could have been exhausted, he could have decided not to risk it that night, or something could simply have changed.
So when he actually sang it, I felt an extraordinary amount of gratitude towards this man for putting himself through everything required to come back, get on that stage, and allow me to finally hear Always live!
Sometimes gratitude really is that simple: thank you for showing up, even if you cannot show up in exactly the same way you once did.
2. Groundbreaking realization: surprise, surprise — I am not 16 anymore
I know this sounds silly, but seeing one of the sexiest rock frontmen of my youth standing on that stage and, well, not being that young anymore suddenly made me acutely aware that I am not 16 anymore either (to put it mildly).
Don't get me wrong, Jon is still in fantastic shape, and perhaps I have been spoiled by Lenny Kravitz because I have managed to see him live three years in a row in three different places and countries, and, oh my God, that man still rocks. Maybe the wrinkles around his eyes give his age away? Actually, not even those, to be honest with you. He somehow does not give away his 60-plus age in almost any capacity.
Jon Bon Jovi is also in very good shape, although perhaps not quite Lenny Kravitz shape, and I am certainly not trying to start a competition here or offend anyone. But watching him, and particularly watching him struggle through parts of Always as it was the last song of the show, made me suddenly realize that an era is passing.
And pretty soon, many of those rock legends who formed the soundtrack of our childhood and youth simply aren't going to be around anymore, and that realization made me really, really sad.
Maybe it also hit particularly hard because I am turning 42 in a couple of weeks, and while I cannot say that I am going through some dramatic midlife crisis, there are definitely questions that occupy my mind every now and then. I am perfectly fine with getting older; I am considerably less comfortable with getting old.
And since we are being raw and honest here, another thought crossed my mind that evening and made me unexpectedly sad. I have been practically single for ten years now, and standing there listening to all those songs about dramatic, all-consuming, larger-than-life love, I suddenly caught myself wondering: what if I have already had my fair share of that kind of love? What if the love that makes your heart ache, that makes you want to listen to sad songs and associate certain lyrics with one particular person, the kind of love that feels so intense that songs like Always suddenly make perfect sense — what if I have already experienced it, and it simply isn't going to happen to me again?
What if this is it?
I know that sounds rather dramatic, and perhaps slightly ironic considering that my very next realization was about how songs like Always may have programmed us to believe that love needs to be dramatic in the first place. But I think both things can be true at the same time. Intellectually AND professionally, I may understand that safe, stable, peaceful love is considerably healthier than the kind that sends your nervous system into overdrive, while another part of me can still wonder whether I will ever experience that extraordinary intensity again. And perhaps there was something about watching this man, who had been such an embodiment of romance and sex appeal when I was a teenager, singing the same songs more than thirty years later that suddenly brought that question to the surface.
Watching Jon struggle with a song that, in my mind, still belongs to that impossibly young man from the music video I watched as a teenager was painful in a way I hadn't expected. It suddenly made the passing of time tangible, because while I was still probably on the younger side compared to the average fan in that stadium, I am also very much not in my twenties anymore, let alone 16, when I was really, really into listening to Bon Jovi.
And perhaps one of the strange things about music is that the songs don't age with us. The recording remains exactly the same, the video remains exactly the same, and in our heads the people singing them somehow remain exactly the same too, until one day you see them standing in front of you and realize that more than thirty years have passed.
3. Songs are incredibly powerful programming tools
This is certainly not a groundbreaking discovery for me because I talk about subconscious programming all the time, but standing there singing those songs made me think again about just how powerful music is.
Songs go straight into our subconscious mind, which is why so many of us can still remember every word of songs we haven't consciously listened to in years. But just like movies, stories, and especially our favorite childhood fairy tales, songs can also create certain templates in our subconscious mind, shaping the frameworks and patterns through which we understand life.
And then you start looking at all those rock ballads — Always, I'll Be There for You, and countless others, not necessarily only by Bon Jovi, although Bon Jovi is certainly among the leaders when it comes to incredibly emotionally charged, sometimes perhaps overly cheesy songs about love and romance — and you suddenly hear the lyrics slightly differently.
I will love you always. I’ll be there forever and a day.
In hypnotherapy, we would call something like this a postulate, essentially a statement carrying an enormous amount of emotional charge. In regression work, we often specifically look for vows, oaths, curses, and even self-curses that a person may have created in a moment of intense emotion. Someone may experience enormous guilt or shame about something they did and form a belief such as "I don't deserve to be happy," or make an internal vow that becomes programming. If you believe in past lives, this can also be viewed through the framework of programming carried from one incarnation into another.
And here we are, voluntarily singing “love you 'til the end of time if you were in these arms tonight”, or “when you breathe, I wanna be the air for you” at the top of our lungs.
Even Livin' on a Prayer becomes interesting when you look at it through that lens. On the one hand, there is something beautiful about surrendering a little, trusting the Creator, trusting the Universe, believing that somehow you will make it because you have each other, and allowing yourself to enjoy life while trusting the process. Of course, surrender doesn't mean sitting back and doing absolutely nothing, because action is still required.
On the other hand, you could interpret exactly the same message as: “It's fine, we can just survive, we can just get by, as long as we have each other and live on a prayer".
Which interpretation is correct? I don't think I need to impose one. Maybe you have a completely different interpretation, and I would genuinely love to know how you hear this song.
One of my favorite funny Instagram videos that I saw last year was actually about exactly this: how powerful songs can be because of their programming effect. Just as we need to be mindful of our thoughts and the words we repeatedly say out loud because they shape our beliefs and, ultimately, our lives (we reap what we sow), perhaps we should occasionally pay attention to what we are happily singing on repeat as well.
If you wake up every morning jokingly singing, Lonely, I'm Mr. Lonely, I have nobody for my own..., perhaps don't be entirely surprised if loneliness becomes a recurring theme. Maybe choose something a little more cheerful for your morning soundtrack :)
And while listening through the Bon Jovi playlist before the concert, I realized that quite a few of those lyrics could be considered somewhat harmful taken literally, so perhaps they should be enjoyed with a grain of salt.
I remember having a conversation with colleagues of Indian heritage about how Bollywood can shape people's understanding of romantic love, particularly this idea that love has to be dramatic, overwhelming, and somehow forever intertwined with suffering, and it suddenly occurred to me that songs like Always may have done something very similar to many of us.
Perhaps some of us are still struggling to find the right partner partly because somewhere in our understanding of love, love is supposed to be dramatic. There should be grand, dramatic gestures; somebody should suffer, somebody should desperately miss someone else, and, ideally, there should be a heartbreaking soundtrack playing in the background.
We end up looking for something toe-curling rather than something stable and safe, which activates our parasympathetic nervous system instead of constantly stimulating our sympathetic nervous system and the fight-or-flight response.
I was discussing this with a friend, who jokingly told me that he simply refuses to accept that love isn't supposed to be groundbreaking and romantic, as Bon Jovi describes in their famous ballads.
I cried and I cried
There were nights that I died for you baby
I tried and I tried to deny your love drove me crazy, baby
If the love that I've got for you is gone
And if the river I've cried ain't that long
Then I'm wrong, yeah I'm wrong, this ain't a love song.
So there we go. At least one confirmed victim of the programming.
4. The lower the expectations, the higher the thrill
Another thing this concert reminded me of was how much expectations influence our experience of absolutely everything.
A friend of mine had attended the first London show and told me that the sound was terrible, so before I even arrived at Wembley I had already adjusted my expectations. I knew Jon was struggling with his voice, so I wasn't expecting him to sound exactly as he did on an album recorded decades ago, because that would have been ridiculous. And even though I knew Always was on the setlist, I wasn't entirely sure that I would actually hear it that night or how good, average, or difficult the performance might be.
And paradoxically, having those relatively low expectations allowed me to experience so much more thrill when reality exceeded them.
The higher our expectations are, the greater the potential disappointment when they aren't met. I sometimes think about it like diving: the higher the diving platform, the deeper you can go when you hit the water. Expectations work similarly, because the higher we build them, the deeper and more profound the disappointment can feel when reality doesn't match the picture we've created in our heads.
And obviously, a Bon Jovi concert is just an example, because we do this everywhere in life, particularly with other people. We decide that somebody should behave in a particular way because that is what we would do, or because that is what we believe a partner, friend, parent, child, or colleague is supposed to do, and then when they don't behave according to the script we wrote for them without their participation, we feel disappointed.
Perhaps sometimes lowering expectations doesn't mean becoming cynical or expecting the worst; it simply means leaving enough room for reality to surprise you.
5. Loyalty matters, especially when someone is no longer perfect
And last but definitely not least, loyalty.
In many ways, I think loyalty and gratitude are deeply interconnected, because just because your favorite performer can no longer be as perfect as he or she once was doesn't mean you automatically write them off.
They are human too. They make mistakes, they age, they get sick, and they go through hurdles regardless of how rich, famous, or successful they may be.
I was discussing this with a friend after the concert and saying that, as somebody who loves Bon Jovi and appreciates how much their music has given us over the years, I felt there was something meaningful about showing up now. Even if Jon wasn't going to be perfect, even if the concert wasn't going to sound exactly like those records, if we consider ourselves true fans, perhaps this is precisely when we should be there.
My friend disagreed and essentially said, "Why would I need to support him? He is rich enough. My £100 isn't going to make any difference to his wealth".
But I don't think it is about the money at all.
No matter how much money you have, health remains the most important asset you possess, and we know perfectly well that no amount of success, fame or wealth exempts anyone from certain universal human experiences, with illness certainly being one of them.
So for me, being there was partly an act of loyalty and gratitude towards a performer whose music had enriched my life and helped create so many memories throughout my teenage years, twenties, thirties and now forties.
And looking around Wembley, you could see that I was certainly not alone in feeling that way. For many people in that stadium, Bon Jovi wasn't simply a band; it was their youth. There were people walking with canes, people using wheelchairs, people who looked as though they were well into their seventies, and yet there they were, singing the same songs they had probably been singing for decades.
And perhaps that is where this stopped being a thought about fandom and became a thought about loyalty in general.
People change. We all do.
We may marry somebody in our twenties or thirties when they look a certain way, have a younger body, more hair, more energy, more ambition, or a completely different life ahead of them. Then life happens. Women give birth, bodies change, people experience health problems, careers collapse, businesses fail, fortunes change, and none of us remains as fresh, young, and beautiful as we once were.
Perhaps that is exactly why Lana Del Rey's question, Will you still love me when I'm no longer young and beautiful?, hits such a nerve. It touches something incredibly real underneath all our romantic ideas about unconditional love: will you still choose me when I am no longer able to offer you exactly what I offered you when you first chose me?
I remember having a conversation in one of my previous relationships in which the person told me, very openly, that if I became seriously ill — with cancer, for example — he wasn't sure he would be able to stay and be there for me.
And, to be honest with you, that was everything I needed to know about that person, that relationship, and our potential future together.
At the same time, perhaps it was an honest answer, and there is something to be said for honesty. At least he wasn't pretending that I could unquestionably rely on him or that he would necessarily have my back if, God forbid, something terrible happened, as I believed I would have his (should have reminded him of “in sickness and in health” vows, but I digress).
And the truth is that none of us really knows exactly how we would behave until life puts us in that position.
It is very easy to imagine ourselves being endlessly loyal, gracious, and virtuous when everything is fine. It is much harder when the person beside us is no longer who they used to be, whether because their health, appearance, financial circumstances, or their ability to succeed has changed, or life has simply changed them.
And this doesn't apply only to romantic relationships. It can be your spouse, your sibling, your parent, your friend, or perhaps even the rock star whose posters once covered your childhood bedroom walls.
Maybe loyalty isn't about pretending that nothing has changed.
Maybe it is about recognizing that everything has changed and deciding that what this person has meant to you still matters.
And perhaps that is ultimately what I felt standing at Wembley, listening to a 64-year-old Jon Bon Jovi struggle through parts of a song that his younger self could once sing effortlessly, while tens of thousands of people sang every word with him.
He wasn't the same.
Neither were we.
But we were all still there.
And I am incredibly grateful that I finally got to hear Always live.
That being said, I honestly didn't think I would ever get to see Bon Jovi live.
I actually came very close back in 2007, when I was living in London, and Bon Jovi was performing there, but unfortunately I already had tickets to see Aerosmith, who were headlining a music festival in Hyde Park. It ended up being probably the worst concert I have ever been to, so apparently my intuition was very much on point when it was screaming at me beforehand to forget about Aerosmith and go see Bon Jovi instead. But listen, this was 2007; we didn't have all the platforms we have today where you can easily resell your tickets if you change your mind or can't make it. Going to Bon Jovi would have meant simply giving up the Aerosmith tickets and buying another set, so as a student, I ignored my intuition and followed my bank balance instead.
Years later, Jon Bon Jovi started having serious problems with his voice, and one of my closest friends, who is also a Bon Jovi fan and had actually lent me one of his cousin’s CDs back in 1997 or 1998, told me to give up any hope of ever hearing Jon sing "Always” live. His voice simply wasn't what it used to be, and the last time my friend had seen him perform, Always wasn't even on the setlist.
So I more or less made peace with it, even though whenever I wrote down my 100 wishes as part of my 100 Wishes gratitude technique, seeing Bon Jovi live somehow kept making the list. There are, obviously, a few other performers and concerts I dream of seeing live, but that's another story.
Then, sometime in late 2025 or early 2026, I saw an announcement that Bon Jovi would be coming to London in September to play several concerts at Wembley Stadium, and obviously I got excited. But then the war started, everything became uncertain, and the concert completely slipped my mind. I wasn't even sure whether I would be going to London this year, even though somehow it has become a yearly tradition for me since 2022, because we didn't know what would happen by September, whether the war would be over, whether flights would resume normally, or what travelling would even look like.
However, we had already booked our tickets for Joe Dispenza's retreat in Basel almost a year earlier, and since my best friend lives in London, we have developed our own little tradition where I come to London, we have some fun there, and then we travel somewhere together. Eventually I decided that I was going anyway, and when I started booking everything in late March, I suddenly realized that Bon Jovi was performing at Wembley just a couple of days before we were due to leave for Basel.
At that point, I knew we had to go.
Luckily, even though the shows were almost sold out by March, we managed to get tickets, and on September 9th, more than thirty years after that nine-year-old girl first discovered Bon Jovi in Moscow, there I was at Wembley Stadium.
And I honestly cannot properly explain the atmosphere of being in a stadium where tens of thousands of people know the same songs and sing the same lyrics together. Bon Jovi fans seem to be a group of their own; there is something incredibly loyal about them, and standing there surrounded by people who had clearly carried this music with them through decades of their lives was truly a seminal experience.
And somewhere between singing along, watching Jon perform, and finally hearing Always live, I found myself thinking about a few things.
1. Gratitude goes a long way
One of the strongest things I felt throughout the concert was how genuinely grateful Jon Bon Jovi seemed to be to his audience and fans for waiting for him to recover and return.
I don't know every detail of what his recovery process looked like, but it was clearly long and difficult, and I cannot imagine many things being more devastating for a singer than losing his voice, because that is literally his instrument. He founded the band, he has always been its lead singer and frontman, and without him being able to sing, the whole thing, in many ways, ceases to exist.
He spoke about being grateful to people for waiting for him, for continuing to support him, and also, in a way, for allowing him to be imperfect, because of course he wasn't perfect. How could he possibly be? The fact that he can sing at all after everything his voice has been through is remarkable, and thankfully, whenever he struggled, there were tens of thousands of people at Wembley ready to sing with him.
People had travelled from all over the world, including the US and many other countries, specifically to see him perform again, and you could hear different accents everywhere around you. Whenever he needed the audience, the audience was there.
But what struck me was that the gratitude very clearly went both ways.
I obviously cannot speak on behalf of an entire fandom, but I personally felt enormous gratitude towards him for coming back at all, for putting the band back together, for performing three nights in London, and for already talking about touring again in 2027.
And most of all, I was grateful that he sang Always.
I had gone into that concert fully prepared for the possibility that I would never hear one of my top ten favorite songs performed live. I used to joke that I wanted Always played at my funeral, so yes, we are talking about that level of attachment. And even though I am one of those nerds who checks the setlist beforehand and therefore knew that he had been singing it, until the very last moment I was managing my expectations because you simply never know. It was the third London show; he could have been exhausted, he could have decided not to risk it that night, or something could simply have changed.
So when he actually sang it, I felt an extraordinary amount of gratitude towards this man for putting himself through everything required to come back, get on that stage, and allow me to finally hear Always live!
Sometimes gratitude really is that simple: thank you for showing up, even if you cannot show up in exactly the same way you once did.
2. Groundbreaking realization: surprise, surprise — I am not 16 anymore
I know this sounds silly, but seeing one of the sexiest rock frontmen of my youth standing on that stage and, well, not being that young anymore suddenly made me acutely aware that I am not 16 anymore either (to put it mildly).
Don't get me wrong, Jon is still in fantastic shape, and perhaps I have been spoiled by Lenny Kravitz because I have managed to see him live three years in a row in three different places and countries, and, oh my God, that man still rocks. Maybe the wrinkles around his eyes give his age away? Actually, not even those, to be honest with you. He somehow does not give away his 60-plus age in almost any capacity.
Jon Bon Jovi is also in very good shape, although perhaps not quite Lenny Kravitz shape, and I am certainly not trying to start a competition here or offend anyone. But watching him, and particularly watching him struggle through parts of Always as it was the last song of the show, made me suddenly realize that an era is passing.
And pretty soon, many of those rock legends who formed the soundtrack of our childhood and youth simply aren't going to be around anymore, and that realization made me really, really sad.
Maybe it also hit particularly hard because I am turning 42 in a couple of weeks, and while I cannot say that I am going through some dramatic midlife crisis, there are definitely questions that occupy my mind every now and then. I am perfectly fine with getting older; I am considerably less comfortable with getting old.
And since we are being raw and honest here, another thought crossed my mind that evening and made me unexpectedly sad. I have been practically single for ten years now, and standing there listening to all those songs about dramatic, all-consuming, larger-than-life love, I suddenly caught myself wondering: what if I have already had my fair share of that kind of love? What if the love that makes your heart ache, that makes you want to listen to sad songs and associate certain lyrics with one particular person, the kind of love that feels so intense that songs like Always suddenly make perfect sense — what if I have already experienced it, and it simply isn't going to happen to me again?
What if this is it?
I know that sounds rather dramatic, and perhaps slightly ironic considering that my very next realization was about how songs like Always may have programmed us to believe that love needs to be dramatic in the first place. But I think both things can be true at the same time. Intellectually AND professionally, I may understand that safe, stable, peaceful love is considerably healthier than the kind that sends your nervous system into overdrive, while another part of me can still wonder whether I will ever experience that extraordinary intensity again. And perhaps there was something about watching this man, who had been such an embodiment of romance and sex appeal when I was a teenager, singing the same songs more than thirty years later that suddenly brought that question to the surface.
Watching Jon struggle with a song that, in my mind, still belongs to that impossibly young man from the music video I watched as a teenager was painful in a way I hadn't expected. It suddenly made the passing of time tangible, because while I was still probably on the younger side compared to the average fan in that stadium, I am also very much not in my twenties anymore, let alone 16, when I was really, really into listening to Bon Jovi.
And perhaps one of the strange things about music is that the songs don't age with us. The recording remains exactly the same, the video remains exactly the same, and in our heads the people singing them somehow remain exactly the same too, until one day you see them standing in front of you and realize that more than thirty years have passed.
3. Songs are incredibly powerful programming tools
This is certainly not a groundbreaking discovery for me because I talk about subconscious programming all the time, but standing there singing those songs made me think again about just how powerful music is.
Songs go straight into our subconscious mind, which is why so many of us can still remember every word of songs we haven't consciously listened to in years. But just like movies, stories, and especially our favorite childhood fairy tales, songs can also create certain templates in our subconscious mind, shaping the frameworks and patterns through which we understand life.
And then you start looking at all those rock ballads — Always, I'll Be There for You, and countless others, not necessarily only by Bon Jovi, although Bon Jovi is certainly among the leaders when it comes to incredibly emotionally charged, sometimes perhaps overly cheesy songs about love and romance — and you suddenly hear the lyrics slightly differently.
I will love you always. I’ll be there forever and a day.
In hypnotherapy, we would call something like this a postulate, essentially a statement carrying an enormous amount of emotional charge. In regression work, we often specifically look for vows, oaths, curses, and even self-curses that a person may have created in a moment of intense emotion. Someone may experience enormous guilt or shame about something they did and form a belief such as "I don't deserve to be happy," or make an internal vow that becomes programming. If you believe in past lives, this can also be viewed through the framework of programming carried from one incarnation into another.
And here we are, voluntarily singing “love you 'til the end of time if you were in these arms tonight”, or “when you breathe, I wanna be the air for you” at the top of our lungs.
Even Livin' on a Prayer becomes interesting when you look at it through that lens. On the one hand, there is something beautiful about surrendering a little, trusting the Creator, trusting the Universe, believing that somehow you will make it because you have each other, and allowing yourself to enjoy life while trusting the process. Of course, surrender doesn't mean sitting back and doing absolutely nothing, because action is still required.
On the other hand, you could interpret exactly the same message as: “It's fine, we can just survive, we can just get by, as long as we have each other and live on a prayer".
Which interpretation is correct? I don't think I need to impose one. Maybe you have a completely different interpretation, and I would genuinely love to know how you hear this song.
One of my favorite funny Instagram videos that I saw last year was actually about exactly this: how powerful songs can be because of their programming effect. Just as we need to be mindful of our thoughts and the words we repeatedly say out loud because they shape our beliefs and, ultimately, our lives (we reap what we sow), perhaps we should occasionally pay attention to what we are happily singing on repeat as well.
If you wake up every morning jokingly singing, Lonely, I'm Mr. Lonely, I have nobody for my own..., perhaps don't be entirely surprised if loneliness becomes a recurring theme. Maybe choose something a little more cheerful for your morning soundtrack :)
And while listening through the Bon Jovi playlist before the concert, I realized that quite a few of those lyrics could be considered somewhat harmful taken literally, so perhaps they should be enjoyed with a grain of salt.
I remember having a conversation with colleagues of Indian heritage about how Bollywood can shape people's understanding of romantic love, particularly this idea that love has to be dramatic, overwhelming, and somehow forever intertwined with suffering, and it suddenly occurred to me that songs like Always may have done something very similar to many of us.
Perhaps some of us are still struggling to find the right partner partly because somewhere in our understanding of love, love is supposed to be dramatic. There should be grand, dramatic gestures; somebody should suffer, somebody should desperately miss someone else, and, ideally, there should be a heartbreaking soundtrack playing in the background.
We end up looking for something toe-curling rather than something stable and safe, which activates our parasympathetic nervous system instead of constantly stimulating our sympathetic nervous system and the fight-or-flight response.
I was discussing this with a friend, who jokingly told me that he simply refuses to accept that love isn't supposed to be groundbreaking and romantic, as Bon Jovi describes in their famous ballads.
I cried and I cried
There were nights that I died for you baby
I tried and I tried to deny your love drove me crazy, baby
If the love that I've got for you is gone
And if the river I've cried ain't that long
Then I'm wrong, yeah I'm wrong, this ain't a love song.
So there we go. At least one confirmed victim of the programming.
4. The lower the expectations, the higher the thrill
Another thing this concert reminded me of was how much expectations influence our experience of absolutely everything.
A friend of mine had attended the first London show and told me that the sound was terrible, so before I even arrived at Wembley I had already adjusted my expectations. I knew Jon was struggling with his voice, so I wasn't expecting him to sound exactly as he did on an album recorded decades ago, because that would have been ridiculous. And even though I knew Always was on the setlist, I wasn't entirely sure that I would actually hear it that night or how good, average, or difficult the performance might be.
And paradoxically, having those relatively low expectations allowed me to experience so much more thrill when reality exceeded them.
The higher our expectations are, the greater the potential disappointment when they aren't met. I sometimes think about it like diving: the higher the diving platform, the deeper you can go when you hit the water. Expectations work similarly, because the higher we build them, the deeper and more profound the disappointment can feel when reality doesn't match the picture we've created in our heads.
And obviously, a Bon Jovi concert is just an example, because we do this everywhere in life, particularly with other people. We decide that somebody should behave in a particular way because that is what we would do, or because that is what we believe a partner, friend, parent, child, or colleague is supposed to do, and then when they don't behave according to the script we wrote for them without their participation, we feel disappointed.
Perhaps sometimes lowering expectations doesn't mean becoming cynical or expecting the worst; it simply means leaving enough room for reality to surprise you.
5. Loyalty matters, especially when someone is no longer perfect
And last but definitely not least, loyalty.
In many ways, I think loyalty and gratitude are deeply interconnected, because just because your favorite performer can no longer be as perfect as he or she once was doesn't mean you automatically write them off.
They are human too. They make mistakes, they age, they get sick, and they go through hurdles regardless of how rich, famous, or successful they may be.
I was discussing this with a friend after the concert and saying that, as somebody who loves Bon Jovi and appreciates how much their music has given us over the years, I felt there was something meaningful about showing up now. Even if Jon wasn't going to be perfect, even if the concert wasn't going to sound exactly like those records, if we consider ourselves true fans, perhaps this is precisely when we should be there.
My friend disagreed and essentially said, "Why would I need to support him? He is rich enough. My £100 isn't going to make any difference to his wealth".
But I don't think it is about the money at all.
No matter how much money you have, health remains the most important asset you possess, and we know perfectly well that no amount of success, fame or wealth exempts anyone from certain universal human experiences, with illness certainly being one of them.
So for me, being there was partly an act of loyalty and gratitude towards a performer whose music had enriched my life and helped create so many memories throughout my teenage years, twenties, thirties and now forties.
And looking around Wembley, you could see that I was certainly not alone in feeling that way. For many people in that stadium, Bon Jovi wasn't simply a band; it was their youth. There were people walking with canes, people using wheelchairs, people who looked as though they were well into their seventies, and yet there they were, singing the same songs they had probably been singing for decades.
And perhaps that is where this stopped being a thought about fandom and became a thought about loyalty in general.
People change. We all do.
We may marry somebody in our twenties or thirties when they look a certain way, have a younger body, more hair, more energy, more ambition, or a completely different life ahead of them. Then life happens. Women give birth, bodies change, people experience health problems, careers collapse, businesses fail, fortunes change, and none of us remains as fresh, young, and beautiful as we once were.
Perhaps that is exactly why Lana Del Rey's question, Will you still love me when I'm no longer young and beautiful?, hits such a nerve. It touches something incredibly real underneath all our romantic ideas about unconditional love: will you still choose me when I am no longer able to offer you exactly what I offered you when you first chose me?
I remember having a conversation in one of my previous relationships in which the person told me, very openly, that if I became seriously ill — with cancer, for example — he wasn't sure he would be able to stay and be there for me.
And, to be honest with you, that was everything I needed to know about that person, that relationship, and our potential future together.
At the same time, perhaps it was an honest answer, and there is something to be said for honesty. At least he wasn't pretending that I could unquestionably rely on him or that he would necessarily have my back if, God forbid, something terrible happened, as I believed I would have his (should have reminded him of “in sickness and in health” vows, but I digress).
And the truth is that none of us really knows exactly how we would behave until life puts us in that position.
It is very easy to imagine ourselves being endlessly loyal, gracious, and virtuous when everything is fine. It is much harder when the person beside us is no longer who they used to be, whether because their health, appearance, financial circumstances, or their ability to succeed has changed, or life has simply changed them.
And this doesn't apply only to romantic relationships. It can be your spouse, your sibling, your parent, your friend, or perhaps even the rock star whose posters once covered your childhood bedroom walls.
Maybe loyalty isn't about pretending that nothing has changed.
Maybe it is about recognizing that everything has changed and deciding that what this person has meant to you still matters.
And perhaps that is ultimately what I felt standing at Wembley, listening to a 64-year-old Jon Bon Jovi struggle through parts of a song that his younger self could once sing effortlessly, while tens of thousands of people sang every word with him.
He wasn't the same.
Neither were we.
But we were all still there.
And I am incredibly grateful that I finally got to hear Always live.
SEPTEMBER 2026