On YOLO

Do you know what's tired? No, not me (although that, too). Facebook, Twitter. Tired.

Granted this is mostly my fault because I'm following/subscribed to the wrong people apparently. It's very possible I'm also one of those "wrong people."

I'm not tired of you. I like you, because if I didn't, I wouldn't associate myself with you or put up with the amusing, sometimes inane, YouTube videos you post on a daily basis. Or read emo, plagiarized Tumblr posts.

Nope, nothing annoys me more than the fortune cookie tweet/status.* I really don't need you to tell me "it is what it is" or to "carpe diem" and "YOLO" the daylights out of my life with circadian, brainwashing regularity. I already know that you're "werkin" or "swaggin" because we're friends, and I love your swag. Or at the very least I know because you tweeted that last week. You don't need to tell the virtual world to treat others the way you would want to be treated because no one's going to openly admit to being a narcissistic despot. Also, my Sunday school teacher taught me that adage when I was two. And you definitely do not need to be posting "don't judge me" because you just updated your status on a different social network ranting about how you got no patience for fake-ass b*tches #karma. I don't know about you, but I am definitely someone else's fake-ass b*tch.

I don't need my twenty-something friends to sound like deranged eighty-year-olds. I don't need you to know everything, because I know everything. Right? Right.

The irony of growing up getting older: year by year, I realize how much I do think this and how much that minor egotistical oversight unfailingly fails me. I think I know everything. I thought I knew everything when I was five. My progress is a little disheartening.

But the progress: it's okay to not know. In fact, it's great to not know. Because when you don't know, there are no other "don't"s or "can't"s or "no"s. When you don't know if something won't work out for you or if you aren't going to make it, it means there's a possibility that it can, that you will. 

No one expects you to know anything about anything when you're twenty-something. They might expect you to know something about something when you become thirty-something. But you won't, or at least I won't, not at the rate I'm going.

And I refuse. I refuse for the rest of my life to be certain about things that don't require certainty, because I've lived a year segmented by boundaries of finances and responsibilities and "no you can't"s. I can't do that anymore.

There's no reason to jump the gun, to put up a front as a Confucian proverb dispenser. There will be a time to spout out aphorisms that carry zero practicality.

So, all of that to say, let's dial down the fortune cookie tweets. #hadtogetitoffmychest #PSnoonereadsthesehashtags



*Often disguising a Humblebrag