My First Editorial: Get off your ass before you fucking die

By DAVID MEIDINGER
Staff Writer

Lethargy and teenagers is a match made in genetics. The time we enter adolescence, a flurry of emotions and mental indecision render us into a state of apathy.
Everyone has a friend who gives up on life, the person who lives inside their house, stumbling across the internet all day, not knowing what to do next. This time in our lives only comes once, and we cannot let it be wasted.

Facebook and television programming has turned our society into sycophant drones. We are taught to live by the ways of mass media, and not how our ancestors had lived. Our ancestors lived on the land, our ancestors hunted and explored their world. Their descendants now ‘struggle’ and ‘survive’ in a world that caters to their every need.

Comfort breeds apathy in the pubescent mind. Small, insignificant displeasures prevent us from appreciating how little we have to work for our comfort. We have learned to consistently depreciate everything in our reach.
As a human being, we develop technology to simplify our lifestyles. The irony is that technology complicates how we understand ourselves. By creating a supply of gadgets and tools to distract ourselves, we fail to look at ourselves. We’ve created a world that interferes with our selves. Technology does not reveal ourselves, existing outside of it does.

Last year, my life consisted of school and returning home to use the internet. The weekends passed by like hours, and the weeks felt like months.
I didn’t go to summer school last summer. Instead, I went on an odyssey of mindless wandering and incredible concerts. I didn’t know it yet, but I had eliminated my lethargic tendencies.

The life of a student consists of strenuous work that doesn’t give immediate results. This is the most detrimental process to put the developing brain. The students will grow impatient, live in confusion, and lose hope. This is proven by the ‘sophomore slump.’ The sophomore slump is when a person, or group of people, fail to measure up to their first success. The cause of the slump is the lack of rewards a person sees after feeling accomplished. The slump is when you cross the finish line in first, but the crowd had left minutes before you made it.
The sophomore slump is directly related to depression, and the feeling of worthlessness.

To eliminate the slump is to give your life purpose. Students depend too much on school to give them direction, instead of traveling without guidance.
To live, you must explore. When you climb a mountain, you do not conquer the Earth, you conquer yourself.

In this era, we have adjusted to staying inside and taking the outside world for granted. Instead of sitting in your dark room, alone, you should go outside and live in the world that surrounds you.

Living in solitude and isolation may be calm and safe, but it can cause xenophobia. An indiscriminate fear of what you don’t understand will be harmful to your required social skills. This will create obstacles in getting what you want.

Life isn’t glamorous for the couch potato. Commercials and sitcoms tell the couch potato what life is. Life is not thirty seconds of an actor living to background music. Life is the adventure that we, as living organisms, were born to experience. You cannot learn life from text books, computers, or television programming. Life is a journey full of hardships and mistakes, and no one can win the human race. There is no defined reason that we are alive, there is no universal truth we can all follow. The world is not black and white, but many shades of gray. You cannot differentiate between the real world and your world unless you live in both. The more humans travel, the more we communicate, the more we live can help us change the world. If we learn how to function on our own, we can then learn to care for the collective.

If you are reading this, please stop. You are wasting time. You need to stand up and listen to the world around you. I cannot tell you what happens next. No one can tell you how your life will turn out. The important idea is that you will come to appreciate your life. Your life is no where close to what people tell you.
It is your turn to stand up against the current, and voyage into the world unknown.
Henry Rollins once said “A traveler is someone who doesn’t know where he's going. A tourist doesn’t know where he is.”

I can only hope that if you read this, you understand the idea I stress. No one is in control of your life but you. Make a difference in your life, and soon your life will transform from a sorrow existence to a thriving passage into a life that no one could have explained. Your life might end tomorrow, or it might end in decades, but life isn’t worth living if you aren’t willing to spend it.