“Yolo” has become a slang term which means you only live once. It is the carpe diem of the millennial generation. Carpe diem, for those not fluent in latin means seize the day. This mentality has been force fed to my age group since our birth. We have always been told to go out and make the most of every second.
While I think this a cute idea I’d love for someone to explain to me how it is possible to seize the day when I spend eight hours a day sitting in a classroom. It is really tough to live in a society that advocates breaking free from constraint and independence, while at the same time restricting true independence to only those affluent enough to pay for it.
The reason I can’t go out and “seize the day” is because I have to follow a forced curriculum in school because I don’t have the luxury of just quitting school and pursuing whatever I decide. It is a complete paradox. To seize the day you have to be daring and be presented with the opportunity and most people never even are given the chance.
We spend weeks in the English class studying and praising the works of the transcendentalists; yet I have been unable to understand why. While it is great that they praise an ability to transcend society and rely solely on oneself, these are nearly impossible things to do in modern society.
I couldn’t go spend years at Walden pond like Thoreau because the entire job market would have changed by the time I returned (and I would have 500,000,000 Facebook updates and emails waiting for me when I returned). The world has changed quite a good deal since these authors wrote their famous works and I think its time to reevaluate our emphasis on them.
We can’t go out and tell our youth that we want them to be smart and successful, while maintaining that they should seize the day because those things don’t necessarily coincide. Spending hours in the library studying for a final is certainly not seizing the day.
While I maintain an appreciation and love for nature more than most it has become to impractical to try to escape like that. No company is going to hire a guy who says he just spent a year in the woods, when it takes 10 years of prior experience pushing a broom and a bachelors degree in sanitation to get a job as a janitor, they would likely call a psychologist.
So why keep instilling false hope in the youth? I’m a junior in high school and I’ve already figured out that it sadly is impossible to seize the day everyday (Even if you could it would be exhausting). A little bit of reality would go a far way with the millennial so I think its time to break the truth to us because we are already inheriting the world’s weight onto our shoulders and all the problems that come with that. We are about to become grown ups and it is time to treat us as such.
Against a Mad World 