YOLO

YOLO (You Only Live Once) has become a pretty popular internet meme. I've enjoyed seeing all the different ways that people have rendered this acronym. Often very funny. Sometimes even insightful or enlivening. 

I have, however, just encountered the first instance of an 'anti-YOLO' meme. I'm not sure what to make of it. The meme itself is a bit silly. I don't think that this really points to the true meaning of the YOLO thing. But at the same time the YOLO thing, the attitude that it expresses, is a bit problematic. 

I'm not sure how much I want to say right now. I'm tired.

I was at Top Pot downtown today and it was the Pride parade. So things were a bit nuts. Just constant lines constant work. But it was good because I did get to work the espresso bar for most of the time. Madness.

The phrase YOLO, I think, is about having a certain attitude towards decisions that comes from one's awareness of mortality. I know that I am only going to live once, that I will die and I will not be reincarnated or live in after-life. Therefore the decisions that I make in my life ought to be bold, they ought to be daring, because death will ultimately obliterate me and any trace of my embarrassment, shame, fear, or any of those other temporary mental processes that often discourage me from making a decision that I know, somewhere in me, I want to make.

Steve Jobs, interestingly, has a very poignant way of putting this whole mess: 
"Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything -- all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure -- these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart. ... Stay hungry. Stay foolish."

Very odd, indeed.

But all of this YOLO business is all up in this quotation. The awareness of mortality, the imperative to follow one's heart, the insistence on there being nothing to lose. 

All of that stuff is great. I have personally tried to use death as an impetus for action and appreciation. So, YOLO: I understand it and I identify with it. 

But I also have a problem with it.

The thing I'm still working hardest on is working on a conception of historical morality. I know one of its major hallmarks will be the commitment to working within the customs and mores of my historical era. I am bound to use the words, walk the streets, work the jobs, and jump through the institutional hoops that are all unique to my age. 

Recognizing these fundamental elements of life as historical can be a painful process. Everything I love and do and interact with is a passing trend of history. None of it has this universality. It has only a historical flow. This recognition has led some folks to conceptualize morality as a rejection of history and tradition, and instead making a radical break that somehow launches a new kind of path. And of course this has to happen one way or another, new things must always happen, new decisions must always be made, and we should be active in the creation of our own history.

But I don't think that the best way to go about creating our own future-history is to reject our actual, concrete history. Because our existence can only be historical, we can only live if we are willing to accept that the most important elements of our lives, including our 'self', are riding on a historical wave, forever changing, never to be still and never to stay the same.

My claim is that the best way to go about creating our own historical life, the best way to be free, is to come to terms with ourselves as historically constituted beings, ones incapable of living in any world other than the historical one in which we find ourselves. Moreover, I believe that this type of commitment to historical living, binding oneself to the  habits and traditions of one's time, is also the best way to go about creating something new. 

This has to do with some ideas about repetition, culture, and newness. All culture, I have begun to think, is a form of repetition. Everything we do, every word we use, is something that we have seen or heard someone else do and that we are repeating. But every time we repeat we never repeat it quite 'right'. Something is always a little different. Something always changes.

This means that I want to use repetition as an to approach decision making and newness in life. I want to go about creating myself as something new by repeating the people or ideas that are most appealing. 

I'm not sure what this all means.

But it definitely means that part of me is hostile to the YOLO sentiment because I think it encourages the idea that freedom is achieved through a radical break with habits or traditions, and is thus tacitly anti-historical. And there is definitely something to be said about freedom and breaking habits. There is something in all of this stuff.

But at the same time we do owe something to our history. We have a unique duty to our families, to our friends, and to our communities, that can't be fully explained by rational thinking. There is an importance to these customs, these rituals, these ways of living that we cannot reject. 

Our history is the only water through which we can swim, the only medium through we can hope to understand ourselves and create something new.