Listen to: Ludovico Einaudi - Nuvole Bianche
It's a question that has been asked of us constantly as we've grown up and also one that has weighed more and more on us each time it's asked. As children you were asked the question to respond with the most exciting thing you could think of, a singer, an actor, a dancer, a doctor, a vet. These were the jobs we dreamt of, these were the things we would run around as children pretending to be, singing into our hairbrushes, dancing around pretending to be a ballerina, operating on our teddies.
Then we grew up.
Reality starts to hit us, and it hits hard. It's not as if we never wanted those things, all of us wanted to be some famous, talented celebrity at one point or another but we just accept we missed our chance and we move on. We keep our head down and we strive to simple be acceptable. We pass our exams, we work to even get to the point where we can choose a direction for our life to go. But isn't that the problem? Isn't the issue that we're still forced down a path? We're still forced to choose want we want to be before we even know, we spend our entire adolescent years second-guessing if we've made the right decision, if we're doing the thing that we want or if we're just picking something that we kind of enjoy and will hopefully secure our future.
I suppose I can't speak for everyone, I know many people that have put everything on the line to pursue creative degrees; drama, music, the arts. These are people that have no guaranteed future, people that have graduated and are having to work jobs alongside trying to make it in their chosen field and I have so, so much respect for them. I also know many people that have finished their degree and realised it was never something they wanted to do. It was never their dream, it was never really want they wanted and they knew that, but they felt this overwhelming pressure to study something practical, something that would ensure they would get a job when they graduated. When did this happen? When did we stop living for ourselves and start following the path we assumed we had to?
I've recently looked around social media and realised just how many people I know that aren't even remotely where they wanted or expected to be. We're all on our facebooks and our twitters, posting about significant things that happen in our lives, be them good, bad or ugly. We're using these platforms to paint pictures of our lives that we want other people to see and I find myself constantly stepping backwards to remind myself that it's so very shallow. We see so little of each other and what we do see is so fabricated to appear how we want it to. It's no surprise we're losing ourselves when we no longer feel we can be ourselves. We're all guilty of posting things for likes or favourites or whatever, we're all guilty of wanting to feel like we're being accepted by whoever the hell we feel we need to be accepted by.
I think the saddest part of social media is how shallow it really is. Post a joke, post a hilarious story, post a great selfie - you'll get plenty of the attention you crave. Now say you post about your mental health, you're feeling low and want to get it out of your system - a few likes at best and it'll get lost in the void. Our brains are trained to run on auto when it comes to social media. We think in simple terms - pretty = like, weird = ignore. We don't stop to think about why people are posting things, we don't stop to think what happens behind closed doors, we don't stop to consider why we don't feel we can post personal things for our "Friends" to see. We want validation from everyone, that's the bottom line and we don't realise how social media perpetuates that need and so we unknowingly do everything we can do feel like we appear as perfect as possible. We sit here, our dreams lost, our futures fractured and we try and hold our lives together when we lost where we were going years ago and it's thinking about this that makes me wish I could quit social media. It's a virus. It's taken over our lives and we can longer function without it and I hate that I'm aware of it but know that quitting it would result in me feeling far too detached.
I realise that realistically a large majority of us simply couldn't follow our dreams due to lacking a talent of some description or another. I realise that people still have their goals but when did it become so hard to just do something that you really wanted? Why is it so hard to just be the person you want to be in the job you've always dreamed of? Why do we have to drive ourselves to the brink of mental instability doing a degree just to have to fight to gain a relevant job that's underpaid and not at all what you hoped it would be?
I wish I could answer these questions. I wish I knew why we feel like we have to sign our lives away to working jobs we may never feel are truly right for us instead of following that dream that's hidden away in the back of your mind. We instantly write off the thought of changing the directions of our lives because it's too risky, we can't afford to just up and leave. We all want to travel, we all want to try different things and find our calling but it's no longer done and so few people question that. They say the world is our oyster but we can't get out to see it.
Our dreams were lost in our youth, our lives are ruled by social media platforms that are built to connect us and yet so many of us are more lost and alone than we have ever been and we've completely lost sight of our real dreams, replacing them instead with the dream that we'll earn enough to get by comfortably.
So, anyone that makes it this far, I express my deepest gratitude. Now make sure you've not lost sight of who you are and where the hell you're going because if you have, it's about damn time you remembered and fought your way to get there.
Don't let yourself disappear.
No comments:
Post a Comment