YOLO. Live While We're Young. Die Young. Forever Young. Young Money, many more and something like that.
You've heard it before, and I'm sure, to your chagrin, these statements continue to be repeated and sold out to as many crowds as possible. Via retweets, FB likes and heart stamps on an instagram photo, the complete absolution in the value of today and disregard of tomorrow has become the definition of action for my generation.
With confession I admit that I'm guilty of it too. More often than I'd be proud of I've permitted to do things under the guise and wisdom of YOLO - you only live once. Using this as my motivator, it became enough to commit any action I wanted to. Which is an unfortunate thing to confess.
Although I think YOLO has it's contexts within audacious and precocious settings, as a motto it stands on pretty shaky ground. It's use and entire atmos is wrapped in irony. That one would use the logic of living once to perform erratic acts is paradoxical because the risk of loss is high: living once is all you have, and yet that you'd engage in preposterous gains because of it is skewed logic.
The unfortunate thing, is that whether we're attempting to escape it or not, the motto of an impermanent youth is deriding our every outlet. Look at your top ten selling singles and you'll see songs about living, dying and being young, and using that as a platform for living, dying, and being whoever you want to in all it's blissful, short sighted, mediocrity.
This, is what my generation will be remembered for.
If living once became the call to deliberate action then I too, would be promulgating it's catchy phrase success. If taking stock of the one life you have meant waking up every morning with a promise to do better and a heart to love more was what YOLO meant then I'd too yell it out into the dark late at night. I get that it's cool to not care but I also get that it's shallow too. I've experienced waking up and pretending like nothing matters and it's always ended with me falling asleep in melancholy because it is who you are, not what it is, that makes the life you lead. The person I want to be lives in a bigger story than "all that matters is now and that's all I need to care about cos, YOLO".
Living young is not pretending to be in love for the sake of the day's end but it's living young at heart, wise in soul, truth in mind. Living once is not any justification for insolence, intolerance, or stupidity. Living once is definitely not justification for whatever hook up, break up, or smash up that life could bring you.
I'd prefer to live once and live well. It beguiles me that the identity for a good life is found in the pits and pastures of rookie mistakes and drunken shenanigans, not in the visions of a deliberate humanity or edifying existence.
Life in it's youth can be just as wholly fulfilled without going "crazy crazy crazy till we see the sun" (thank you One Direction), although I'm sure bemused behaviour till sunrise is a great way to spend the night it doesn't dignify your life's definition.
Defining your life will hopefully revolve around a larger vision than the end of today; because you really do only live once. And living once is legitimate grounds for living deliberately, with conviction and with high regard for the breaths you've been given.
Who knows, maybe I'm getting old (so old), or maybe I'm becoming wise (so wise). Either way, I'm taking my being off the road of youthful belligerence and granting myself the dignity of a truthful, honest attempt at the one gorgeous life I've been given.
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