Lifestyle

Are We All Just Worried About The Wrong Things?

Priorities and Generation-Y, oil and water, two dicks and no bitch: some things just don’t mix well. Why? As a generation, we’re always worried about the wrong things, the insignificant details that we devote our valuable time to and what we allow to carry import.

No pressure, but we’re currently living in one of the most pivotal points of our lives. Our decisions now will shape our destinies and determine the rest of our adult lives. Yes it’s scary, welcome to adulthood. Welcome to responsibilities and consequences beyond the principal’s office. The stakes are much higher here.

Sure, we’re the ADD generation, the party generation as well as the insecure generation, and all of these titles have jumbled and contributed to a great disadvantage. Technological advances have made it nearly impossible to focus on anything, between social media and your cell phone.

Never mind your drama, your friends’ drama, your social life, your drug life, your love life, your fuck life, your studies, your job and your future – it’s a lot to handle in your 20s. And the recession isn’t helping.

Our priorities are all messed up, we care and worry about the things that are artificial and, consequently, can’t discriminate between what is important and what is not. We allow others to make decisions for us because of our insecurities, wanting so badly to fit in, we go along with the crowd.

It’s as if we’re blind to ourselves and can’t determine a good idea from a bad one. We have given up on listening to our gut and have become cult followers of the pack, doing what everyone else is doing rather than focusing on what is right for us.

What we tend to forget is that most of the things we decide to give our focus to in life have no value or meaning, and it is a trap that we allow ourselves to fall into. In life, we only have so much focus to give, there’s not an unlimited amount of space on our memory drive.

When we give our focus to nonsense: like trying to fit in, always staying with the pack, involving ourselves in drama, being obsessed with our phones and partying till 5am on a Monday night; these decisions will come back and haunt us sooner rather than later.

I get it: work hard, play hard – but you have to realize you don't even know what hard work is. Worrying about the wrong things has made us lose our identities and ourselves. We’ve become carbon copies of one another, lost in the world, worrying about nonsense and unsure of where life will take us.

I’m not saying you should abandon fun, but you need to know balance, responsibility and understanding before you deserve it. No one will bail you out when shit hits the fan, and the more you let other people make your decisions for you, the further from yourself you get.

Time is the most valuable commodity we have, and when we let it go to waste, we let our lives go to waste. Wake up and smell the coffee, you’re not a child anymore. We have allowed distractions to determine our priorities.

And in doing so, you have lost who you are and have become blind to your own instincts. Perception is everything, and when you allow it to be obscured with distractions and insecurities, you’ve become what you feared most: average. The special people in the world have learned to prioritize.

It’s about knowing what things to place above what. It’s having a sense of responsibility and understanding that most of the things that are currently distracting us are artificial and have no true value in this world.

What we should value is understanding ourselves, being able to be alone and doing what we feel is best for us, not what others think is right. If I had listened to my friends and the people around me, you would never have something like Elite Daily to read.

Restructure your life so that it plays out the way you would like. Understand that the things that you think are important now, you will laugh at in 10 years. Remember when you were a child and you thought keeping your Tamagotchi alive was your end all and be all? Now you look back and laugh. It’s the same for the stupid shit you worry about now.

These are known as "seasonal concerns." They are exactly what they sound like, you worry about them because everyone else around you is worrying about them. If everyone is jumping off the bridge, will you jump too?

Preston Waters | Elite.