The Roaring 20s

We’re approaching a brand new decade, act like it. We need to progress as a people and leave the petty, undermining, and offended bullshit in the past. The roaring 20s are upon us, and it would be awesome to emulate another period of growth and expansion as with the previous century without the depressive economic state at the end. The 2010s have been such an odd time in my opinion. Things like gender reveal parties have flourished while simultaneously all this gender debate has been at the forefront in social news. Just seems kind of ironic to me. We’re having parties to announce the gender of our unborn baby while throwing the book at people assuming someone else’s sexual identity in the adult world. Odd. We also live in the age where technology is at the tips of our fingers, but so help me let me see one more person share an article of a missing person that was found in 2017 or a celebrity that died 6 years ago. Just click the article and read the first line people. You literally have a wealth and encyclopedia of knowledge with the click of a button or a swipe of the finger. We are also throwing our life savings into weddings where the marriages don’t even make it past the first 5 years or blowing our hard earned money on a degree that we don’t even put into use once we start working and just end up inundated with massive amounts of debt. Let’s do better as the next decade approaches.

Our ancestors were primal warriors; true examples of survival of the fittest. And nowadays we have people unable to function without safe spaces and emotional support animals. While we all need a little bit of help sometimes, we can’t rely on the world to placate to every single one of our emotional pleas, especially when it disrupts the cycle of everyday living. Sometimes, we just need to buck up and grab life by the horns or risk drowning in its multitude of arduous waves. It takes zero effort to not be a dick to someone, so I will always maintain a modicum of respect to everyone I come in contact with, but we need to understand that literally every single one of us is riddled with anxiety and that everyday we combat that in order to get done what needs to get done. If we let every single disparaging feeling inhibit us from living our lives, we would all be a bunch of hermits living a reclusive lifestyle shut in our homes having every necessity delivered to our doorsteps, which quite honestly is already happening thanks to services such as Door Dash, Amazon, and grocery delivering companies. What happened to the fierce survivalists that endured and suffered through plagues, ice ages, raids, and pillages over the course of various centuries? Nowadays, if there’s one too many people in a store, people are sent fleeing for the exits quaking in their boots and deciding that running an errand is too mentally exhausting. Fuck your ancestor that fought a sabertooth tiger with their bare hands while under crippling pain with dysentery, there was one too many people in the canned soup aisle and you had a panic attack.

Also, it saddens me to see familial ties and friendships disintegrate before my very eyes over simple disagreements and differing of opinions. Are these relationships not worth discussing matters further and trying to sympathize with someone else’s perspective? That doesn’t mean you need to tolerate ignorance or downright vitriolic behavior and defamatory words, but just having opposing views on a subject shouldn’t be enough to eradicate someone from your life. You are 100% entitled to your feelings and to feel hurt or upset by someone’s words, but if you don’t let that person know in a calm fashion how what they said affected you, then you are equally responsible for the disintegration of that relationship. People these days truly despise conflict, and rather than facing it head on, they would much rather block an individual and delete all forms of contact without letting them know why. This is putting a bandaid on an issue rather than healing the root of the problem. Talk to people. Communicate. We have so many facets of communication in this new millennium, and people are too afraid to confront the issue and much like an ostrich, put their head in the sand instead. If you have a problem with something I do or say, please talk to me. Don’t regale to name-calling and insults, but let me know how I caused you pain and I will without a doubt try to rectify it and apologize for any transgressions, But if you choose to block me, speak ill of me online or on a platform where I can’t even defend myself or my actions, then you are own your own boo boo, and will have to live with the guilt plaguing you for not addressing the problem at its source.

It’s no secret that I hate weakness, but hate it in a different way than you might think. I do not believe that crying, asking for help, or seeking alternatives like medication render a person weak. I actually find them incredibly strong for taking responsibility of their own life in order to try and better themselves. What I find weak is people who allow what happens to them to completely rule their mindset and control and dictate their emotions and inhibit them from actually living their life. Unless you were a POW or endured something incredibly traumatic, if you need an emotional support chinchilla to go to the grocery store or ride a plane, your caveman ancestors are wishing that mammoth tusk pierced their gut before they had the chance to procreate which led to your genealogical gene pool. Life is hard, it is absolutely the hardest thing we will ever do, but you will miss out on so much happiness and opportunities if you refuse to take responsibility for your own feelings and actions. Weak minded people will always assume that successful people only achieved greatness through luck and never suffered any setbacks. Truth is, they just didn’t allow the bad that happened to them completely render them helpless and incapacitate them from trying harder. Take control of how you are living on this earth, you literally only have one chance at it. Don’t waste it being controlled by your anxiety, depression, negative thoughts, fears, and complacency. Take risks. And if you fail, fail with flair. I will always jump at the chance to take a flying leap of faith off that building in the hopes that one day I may fly, and should I plummet to the ground, I will do so in a spectacle of glitter and radiance and make sure the whole world admires the bravery implemented into that action.

I was definitely all in my feels in this blog post, but time goes by fast, and I want this next decade to be such an impactful one in history. If my words touched a nerve, maybe it’s time for some self reflection on how we can improve on what’s holding us back. Let’s do better as a people, generation, society, and a whole. In the 1920s, penicillin was discovered by Jonas Salk, and in the 2020s we are on a fast path for antibiotic resistant bacteria leading to mass deaths thanks to the yoga moms who “do their research” online with no medical degree and deem vaccines as a dangerous risk. Screw the newborns or the immune-compromised I guess. In the 1920s, women worldwide were finally granted the right to vote due to the ratification of the 29th amendment, and in the 2020s we have women becoming outraged over trivial bullshit rendering the feminist movement as a mockery never to be taken seriously. The bandaid was invented in 1921, in 2020 it’s time to move past that and suture the actual abrasion versus covering it with some gauze and tape. We can’t always control what happens to us, but we can 100% control our emotions and how we react. I know it’s tough, but we need to stand tall in the face of adversity and transgressions and do what needs to be done or else crumple as a society. Be resilient and resolute and understand we all need to leap over the hurdles threatening to hold us down. Be compassionate to one another and communicate clearly and concisely while keeping your mind open to constantly learning. Changing your opinion based on learning new facts is a sure sign of growth and understanding. Lastly, as we approach the 20s once again, I am reminded of a quote by The Great Gatsby author, F. Scott Fitzgerald: “There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy, and the tired.” Time to decide where you will align yourself.