a wake-up call

Do you ever get the feeling that you’re wasting your life?

You wake up at 6. You get on the bus at 6:45 and ride until you get to school at 7:15, then you go to class and learn things (sometimes) and are handed busy work and told to complete it in the next two days. Then you go to three more classes and eat lunch and go home and go to your activities and do your homework and go to bed and sleep for a couple hours until you repeat it again the next day and the day after that and the day after that. The things you want to be doing are pushed off another day, and you spend your limited hours in a classroom or in bed. The days feel so long but yet there’s still never enough hours in a day. How is this possible?

Sometimes you get a taste of change, say you go to a friend’s house after school, or your mom makes your favorite meal for dinner, or your favorite band releases a new album, and your daily routine is shaken up a tiny bit. You enjoy it, because this opportunity doesn’t always appear. But once the moment is over, all you want to do is experience another change, which is unfortunate because your routine begins again the next morning and another repetitive day has come and gone and you find yourself going insane until you get to the point of breaking, where if you have to wake up and do the same things one more time you will start screaming.

The problem is that when you’re going through life like this, you usually know what you want. You have this list—whether it’s physical or mental—of things you want to do before you die, and as each day passed, the thin dust layer on top of it gets thicker and thicker. Slumped in a desk at 8:23 in the morning, feeling as if you haven’t slept in weeks, you think to yourself, “I wish I could be road tripping up and down the west coast, not sitting here watching this boring geography movie” or coming home from practice late at night thinking, “I wish I could have time to see my friends during the day”.  I think it’s harder knowing what you want and knowing you’re so far away from the physical possibility of accomplishing that. All you want is to reach out your hand and start steering the direction your life the way you want to, and you can’t.

the map of a person who's travelled everywhere

Humans have made life so complicated. The mere purpose for life is to go to college so you can get a good paying job so you can have a lot of money. Yikes, right? People give up values of family and friendship and work themselves until they are bitter and coldhearted—and for what? Aren’t there more important things than financial stability? Money is a necessity but it is not everything. Life should be much simpler than what everyone has made it out to be; do you really have to scream and stomp your foot if the barista accidentally messed up your order? Do you really have to complain about what that girl is wearing behind her back or how it’s not snowing as much as you’d like it to be? Humanity has grown to be hard and mean and we need to stop pretending like we’re going to live forever. 

Maybe I opened up your horizons a bit. If not, that’s alright. Maybe you are perfectly content with your life, and if that’s so, then good for you; I aspire to reach that point someday. All I hope, for my sake, is that someday I will be able to accomplish that dusted-over list imprinted in the back of my mind and begin to live the way I know I deserve to.