How We Went from Carpe Diem to YOLO: The Downfall of Consciousness

Oscar Knows...

With more people listing YOLOOOO as their life mantra while falling under the illusion that Carpe Diem is a kind of Italian pasta, the need to say something about it struck me as somewhat necessary. 

To provide you with some perspective on the abysmal direction which our society is heading in: A couple of days ago I found out Jason Silva was giving a seminar in Abu Dhabi for IBM Software Day and was staying in Dubai afterwards. In an attempt to explain Silva's magnitude think Richard Dawkins meets Ashton Kutcher . That kind of places him on the same pedestal as any huge celeb out there, seeing as he has 30k followers on twitter. But of course I only found out he was in town through his personal twitter account and not thanks to any trivial media coverage. For some reason though, media coverage starts to resemble a 3-day Indian wedding festivity when Kimmie or Paris grace us with their presence which is almost always tied with how much revenue their  widely publicized sojourn generates for the UAE. If that isn't enough, you'll also probably see the same story appearing in three different sources, of how well Kardashian wore that local Emirati dress and how she could totally pull off her own Aabaya fashion line. Again, this is just an example of how blindly people follow a trend. It is none of my concern if you are a legit follower of celebs and all their news. It is my every concern, however, to point out that even indifferent people find themselves coerced into this trivial cyclone of "trending" news just by the exaggerated media hype. Just typing this is giving me an aneurism. I think you all get the point I'm attempting to drive home so I'll just stop here. 

That being said, if I have to see one more Harlem Shake video being shared on Facebook I'm going to lose my mind!! Sure it was fun the first couple of times watching people manically humping air which made me feel like I was part of some orgy on LSD. However, the degree to which our idiotic species manage to saturate and completly drain a certain a trend makes me not only abhor that trending phenomenon but also the very individuals responsible for it going "viral". In turn, such frustration leaves me wondering how to make the outbreak of a new plague seem like an accident. 

Yes, that crazy gangnam dance was cute in a way that showed song lyrics don't really matter as long as there's a fab Korean guy doing fancy footwork in a Korean horse stable. So what if Honey Boo Boo Child's mom has a boyfriend and I'm still single as f***? Ok, and maybe I would have actually appealed to the Harlem Shake if my pathetic excuse of a campus partook in the madness... And lo and behold, all these acknowledgments still leave this question unanswered: Where do we go from here? 

What does it mean when an Internet phenomenon manages to awe and impress 1/7th of the worl'd population? Not only did we become so entirely consumed with discussing these global phenomena and actively "trending" them online, but more importantly we lost sight of the events that weren't as popular but which were more deserving of our attention and cyber activism. For instance, how many people knew that World Cancer Day was just 4 days into February? How many people actually gave a shit that Valentine's Day marked the first day of Palestine Awareness Week? What about the meteorite that hit Saudi Arabia a few days ago? or the fact that Abu Dhabi is now granting blue-collar workers a proper weekend? Human beings that are a part of this society, planet, and universe, can either be one of three things: A. Happy-go-lucky kind of people who would rather go with the natural flow of things because they're already overwhelmed with their own problems to divert their attention to other wordly matters OR B. Secretly informed, but they choose to be non-chalant  because they have a certain image to uphold, in which case they are hypocrits OR C. Fully aware of what's going on outside that circle of trending pop songs, videos, fluff news, and TV shows, but they think of such matters as a waste of time, and whoever dare diverge from whatever has gotten the majority's stamp of approval must be a loser, in which case I'd like to say to these people: CONGRATULATIONS! You are at the very bottom of Mother Nature's hierarchy of organization.

Ultimately, we live in a dog-eat-dog kind of world where one doesn't stand a chance if there's no feature other than an olive-shaped mole on a calf to distinguish him/her from a throng of atypical beings. Years from now, do we really want our future children to remember the uniqueness of our glorious youth with the story of that one time when we were so torn apart with which Instagram filter to apply on this one picture of food which then ended up getting 100+ likes, regardless? No one is asking you to join a cult or highten your eccentricity to the point of agressiveness. Just be aware. Be multi-faceted. Don't follow unless it is with the power of your own free will. One doesn't have to read volumes of books on philosophy or Darwinism to achieve that. As the self-explanatory Jamaican proverb says " Small small catch monkey". One Facebook page here, a retweet of a powerful quote from there, and one's consciousness becomes sensitized to the point where anything ordinary or banal no longer satisfies hungry curiosity. We should have utter faith that this strategy will serve our own wellbeing in the long-run. Each person will have a brimful to offer in terms of gregarious personality and witty discourse. Those with elevated consciousness won't panic all of a sudden when thrown into an unfamilair social/professional setting because they actually took the time to master the specific set of skills required to improve their understanding and perception of the world beyond its visible peripheries. They won't merely survive because they've learned to quickly adapt to change, but they will thrive in every aspect imaginable! Trust that those souls that merely exist without living, that talk without speaking, that hear without listening, that look without seeing, that feel without moving, are all doomed to perish in an evolutionary sense. But believe with every fiber in your being, that after waking up no one ever goes back to sheep. 

It's been said that modern humans nowadays
have an underdeveloped temporal lobe
Can you guess which area that represents?