Disclaimer: My writing is dull, I misspell words, and my thoughts are unorganized. I'm not writing this blog to please anyone, just to keep myself accountable. With that, I'll explain as to why I'm writing this blog.
Frankly, I'm not a huge blog fan, and yet here I am creating one. I'm writing this blog for one reason: I want to keep tabs on myself. College is a time to "find oneself", and I'm doing an enormous amount of soul-searching lately. Surely this will change, but for right now, I like to live by two principles, one of which precedes the other. My first principle is to always be dynamic. Never be idle, never complain of boredom and never be one of the enslaved "mouth-breathers" out there. Preceding from this, my second principle is to be passionate. One should consistently be passionate about the things they do. This is harder to describe, but it's a more personal principle for me. Essentially, if I'm doing something for reasons other than happiness or the anticipation of happiness, I'm not doing that activity anymore.
I came across this quote today in reading, in which I'm giving some justification to the static nature of people today and why I want to avoid that archetype:
“Determine never to be idle. No person will have occasion to complain of the want of time who never loses any. It is wonderful how much may be done if we are always doing.” ※ Thomas Jefferson
Too many people are watching bad television right now while repeatedly refreshing their facebook pages. People listening to the same music, watching the same movies, doing the same tired things over again. I'm hardly a morbid person, but I can't imagine lying on my death bed and having trouble finding at least one hundred amazing things I've done with my life. Hell, two hundred. I can't get over the fact that people say they're "bored". There are so many things to do in this life. The only thing I want to be depressed about when I begin my next chapter of life is that I didn't have time to experience every possible thing I could do in life. Cheers, then, to living a dynamic life.
Similarly, another quote inspires me to be passionate about everything I do:
"I see in fight club the strongest and smartest men who have ever lived -- an entire generation pumping gas and waiting tables; or they're slaves with white collars. Advertisements have them chasing cars and clothes, working jobs they hate so they can buy shit they don't need. We are the middle children of history, with no purpose or place. We have no great war, or great depression. The great war is a spiritual war. The great depression is our lives. We were raised by television to believe that we'd be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars -- but we won't. And we're learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed-off."
I recently had a conversation with my dad about work. A certain employee of his obviously hated his job and has made it fairly apparent for the past ten years, yet he has been working for him for over 30 years. I never understood that, I told my father--why do people do things they don't want to do? I answered my question--either out of a perverted sense of duty, or simply to buy shit he didn't need. He wasn't passionate about his job, and considering he spent 50-60 hours per week at this job, he was wasting nearly one third of his life doing something he didn't want to do. What a waste. I hope he figures something out, and I wish I could thank him for being a partial inspiration for this blog.
I suppose ultimately, in living by these two principles, I want the value of my person to be only me. Not my possessions, but simply my mind, my body, and the things I need. To quote DeNiro from Heat, "Don't do anything you can't walk away from in thirty seconds."
Now that I'm finished with all that, I can get on to the important stuff, like how Lupe Fiasco is my new religion and how I'm going indoor rock climbing tomorrow.
--apoclater
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