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Here’s a dilemma for you: when you grow old, what stories will you tell your kids? This is no youth anymore to tell about; we spend our youth chasing wealth and our wealth chasing youth—so what do we tell our kids? Our grade point average? Instead of going to a school to fulfill requirements to move up, we should come to learn—to think—to experience. Looking around, I see kids toiling away—but at what? Is that class so important as to waste your life on it? How about taking the risk of living? Not completely dropping out of the work-toil systems, but taking a break every once in a while. Not going to a friend’s house or to the mall; I mean just walking out one day on all your standards and expectations and familiarity and looking somewhere else for a change. Like that A+ student who got up one day in the middle of class and left; “this isn’t worth it” he said.(1) By our standards, he had his whole future in front of him, but what kind of future is that, laid out and served to us? That’s painting without paints—not even a bad knockoff someone Else's vision, not a black and white limited perspective world, but a relatively clean slate scratched up by a dry brush—so much potential wasted for no reason other than ignorance.
Or maybe I’m just ranting. Experiencing the “in our hey-day” syndrome. But it is my hey-day, so to speak—I’m just hating our generation. And here comes the part where you shake your head, my hand, and your eyes at me and answer “alright, whatever, this is getting silly now”; what is rebellion today? Marketing your soul away? Crying your life away? Every generation has had its leaders, visionaries, movers and shakers, ideas influencing en masse—we only have whiners and profiteers. I’m not humoring myself—we have become a nation of daydream consumers, dreams molded by executives in corner offices overlooking other corner offices and executive they entrap. REM cycles are lost crying over a nostalgia we don’t have. Tyler was right—the best way to die is in a field of beautiful flowers: the wind picks up and in one ghastly flurry, everything is in the air for a few seconds; and in one suffocating moment of beauty… (you are allergic)…(2) And that’s most important—that’s what you tell others—stories of strange twins (one takes acid and the other takes flashbacks), faraway lands and their trains, and of flowers passionately suffocating you in green and yellow and red bursts across the field, and of moments against a current that goes in every way except your own. Isn’t that life, connected?
Nevertheless, they tell us, they teach us, they warn us and they point us away; They say that magic is something that "something that happens to someone else, someplace else". Why wont they tell us the truth? This is our magic. This is our life. Right now, right here, soak it up while you can because its a one time deal.(3) We're trapped on a line, constantly moving forward, always in one point. That line is called time, and that point is us. Every part of that line will be around once and only once-- no continuous loop-- And by the time you reach the end with your goals and your money and your status, you realise that the best part of life has already gone by and you missed it, you nose in materialism, patriotic to someone else's ideas. We are taught not to think, but to act. Not to act upon your own will, but upon the will of others-- Cloning does exist-- We are molded into each other until the only discernible things about us are our credit card numbers. What are you going to buy? The only truth I've ever heard is that money doesn't buy happiness-- but then why are we all in the pursuit of materialism, including the wise men that taught us this? We are looking for our wrong mothers (mater Latin for mother). We are patriotic to the wrong fathers (pater Latin for father). We pledge with closed hearts when they should be kept open. Where is choice?(4) Choice is a prefabricated house, just like your neighbor's, your cousins', smaller than your boss's but larger than your parents. We have mistaken momentum for progress.
I'm not proposing a solution. I'm proclaiming a problem.
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(1)This is fake. This never happened.
(2)"Shampoo Planet" by Douglas Coupland
(3)"Life After God" by Douglas Coupland
(4)",said the shotgun to the head" by Saul Williams
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