An Essay On Current Society
You wake up to your alarm. “No, not yet,” you think because you aren’t ready to face the day yet. You snooze your alarm.
You finally wake up and your to-do list floods through your mind. You have to work-out before work, get a good Instagram picture and make sure your hair looks perfect.
You check your phone. So many notifications and yet not one person has called or text you to ask you how you are. To see if you need any help. To have a chat.
You make a smoothie for breakfast but forget to Snapchat the process. Dam.
Before you drive to work you get in a heated Twitter feud with someone you don’t know over Trump. You check your email and find an eBay store refusing to give you a refund on an item that didn’t arrive and now they are abusing you. Perfect.
At work, you try your hardest but find that those you work with are constantly nit-picking what you do. You look outside and forget what it is like to spend time in the sunlight during the day. You scroll through social media and see bloggers travelling across Barcelona. Fuck them.
By the end of the day you are tired, stiff and sore, but you know what will make you feel better. You scroll through the K-mart site and fill your online shopping cart with bit and pieces that will make your home Pinterest worthy. It doesn’t matter that you have blown half your payday because it makes you feel good in the moment. You check your Facebook and find you are invited to several events by people who haven’t bothered to keep in contact with you for years. Weird.
You slog it out at the gym but still hate yourself when you look in the mirror. You notice that you don’t thigh gap and think “maybe if I get a spray tan, eyelash extensions and dye my hair then I’ll feel better about myself”.
You spend the rest of the night bulk-watching Netflix and go to bed way too late. You lie in bed wondering why you can’t have all the things you want and why you have to work so hard to get barely anything in return. You wonder if there is something more.
And there is more. There is more to be found in less. You have just forgotten a few key things along the way. You have forgotten that life is not a race and that you aren’t competing against anyone else. In constantly thinking about what you have to achieve, you have forgotten to dance. You have forgotten to smell the roses. To look at local buildings and wonder who built them. To put on your favourite music and sing like crazy. You have forgotten to write letters to random pen pals across the globe, to send your friend a gift in the mail just because. In the words of Alan Watts, life is a musical thing and it is meant to be played.
You see, you don’t need anything to be perfect because you already are. You don’t have to achieve anything, you just have to live. To sit and breathe. To be in the present moment. You don’t have to hustle, you don’t have to be an entrepreneur, you don’t have to be famous, you don’t have travel the globe, you can just be you.
You deserve more than a few likes on Instagram or a few comments on Facebook. You deserve to receive compliments, to be praised and to be hugged. You deserve to live the most amazing life possible, and that isn’t acquired by purchasing more stuff.
What can you do today that will take yourself out of the rat race? What do you ACTUALLY feel like doing? Do you have to climb the corporate ladder? Do you have to buy an investment property? Maybe you just want to bake tuna bake every night and that is your bag baby. Think about this, and act lovingly and accordingly.
Much love,
