What you say? Yet another rant from a teenager frustrated with his life and where it's going? Well, You don't say!
But seriously, sometimes you just gotta give up. Fuck your job and your career, they don't mean shit. But I kid of course, because after all, you have a meaningful life, and it's not my right to rain on your parade.
But no one says that I can't rain on my own parade, and rain on it I surely will. So let me say it here and now: God is dead. Oops, that was Nietzsche...so now for the task of coming up with something more original...right...
And therein lies the rub, so the saying goes: lack of original ideas. It feels like everyone is treading like goddamn hamsters in this wheel of a world. It just goes on and on, circle after circle, faster and faster till it's all a blur. We are just treading ground we already know. Sure, there are those of you who will come up with the cure for cancer, hopefully. And there will be those of you that will undoubtedly come up with the REAL NEXT BEST THING SINCE SLICED BREAD. But what about the rest of us?
Should we all just adopt a defeatist approach, buy ourselves a nice little plot of land and dig a hole--in other words buying a house and settling down? Or should we, as the saying goes, to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them? Either way, there's not much to look forward to. Let's say you take the stereotypically romantic approach and be defiant, live the life of the eternal rebel, the persistent youth, and in the process gets laid a whole bunch of times fo your "poseur" rebellion. What then? What have you accomplished? Aren't you then just hawking that attitude and exploiting the romantic notions associated with rebellion and defiance for your own benefit?
Or if you take the defeatist approach and settle down, buy yourself a house, and end up dying in some home, somewhere, nowhere. But you know you can't accept it, no one really does; they just pretend they do. Deep down everyone wants to do something, anything at all to say that they made a difference. Why? I don't know, but I suspect strongly that it has something to do with personal ego, because you don't want to be forgotten. We are, to some extent, all narcissits. And why shouldn't we? The word "I" inherently implies narcissim. So you are going to take all the shit lying down? Maybe, and you probably will, but maybe it's not such a bad thing after all. But you can't never truly and genuinely accept that fact; you can only rationalize.
And if neither way of life offers anything substantial, anything remotely approaching meaningful, then what the fuck is there left to do? To me, that's the real BIG QUESTION, the most important philosophical question one can ask himself: what am I to do in a world full of mediocrity, when the chance and opportunity for excellence and legacy is seemingly unattainable, and how am I going to deal with what is most likely my own mediocrity?
But you don't want to deal with that, because everyone who ever gave a fuck about you, who really loved you with their hearts and not their mouths, they all said that you could do something. They all said, John/Jane/Bobby/Laura/Whoever, you could be a real contender! But yet sometimes, and maybe this is all the time, you are here saying to yourself under your breath, "man, I coulda been a contender." Everyone said everyone else could become the president, an astronaut, or someone famous. But the undeniable fact is that not a whole bunch of people have become those people.
But there isn't necessarily any glory associated with being the Hero. Like F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, "Give me a hero, and I'll write you a tragedy." I have no answers, because I'm trying to deal with this myself. And by now you must surely be fed up with my liberal use of the second-person "you", because I've assumed so many things without evidence that it would literally make any rhetoric major/grammarian/philosopher instantaneously combast into oblivion. And I've thrown in a whole bunch of cliched, trite, overused expressions that would do something very similar to any literary critic.
Have you ever heard of the saying "live everyday as if it's your last." Well, if you happen to believe in that maxim, then one day you would certainly be right. But I hope you are not allergic to death like I am.
Posted by humanflyz at July 9, 2005 10:59 PM | TrackBack