YOLO

 

A long time ago, Siddartha decided to leave all his belongings and ‘find the way’, after seeing the following four sights: an old man, a sick man, a dead man, and an ascetic. 

Dialing it back, Siddartha is the person who later became the first enlightened one, to ‘start’ buddhism. He was a prince who lived in a castle all his life, surrounded by luxury and pleasure. On his first journey outside at the age of 29, the prince saw the four sights and, shocked, ran out of his castle to find a way to end human suffering through meditation and contemplation. Can you imagine how shocking it’d be, to acknowledge the existence of human suffering after 29 years of ignorance?

 

Lucky for us, we are never in lack of the first three sights. Every day on the news, we see deaths and sickness as statistics. We all know that aging is inevitable and we are all walking towards a definitive end - death. Or even in a more grandeur scale, the end of mankind.

 

This brings us to the story of our modern version of Siddartha, who might have acted a little differently. Let’s call him Sid. Sid, after spending 29 years in his luxury apartment with his virtual reality games, Chipotle and endless sexual contents online, he might turn on the news one day and see terrorism, war, famine, and epidemics. He watched in fear and awe the bombing of innocent children for resources, plane crashing into buildings, starving children, police brutality, and tsunamis engulfing entire cities. In a dark lit room, Sid, his hands shaky, turns off his Samsung 55-inch 4k flatscreen. Then, in great shock, slowly gets up to his feet, and, under his breath, with great determination, would say…

Yolo. 

 

The combination of an individualistic society and a rather atheist culture led us to believe that our innate fear of death can be cured with ‘having fun’. I would call it more of a defence mechanism, where, to alleviate our fear of death and ‘end’, our ancestors created heaven in the afterlife, and we created ‘heaven on earth’, with smartphones, drugs, and advertisements that promise happiness.  Since you only live once, one is compelled to go on more trips, disregard the long-term effect of anything on anything (one’s body, environment, whatever dude), and do whatever one desires. Because, what other choice do we have, the world is going to end anyway right? 

 

I guess there is a fundamental difference, that Siddartha thought that death is not the end of being, while some people think, it is. 

 

I find it perfectly valid, despite the distastefully sarcastic tone, that one will have no motivation to seek longer-term happiness by sacrificing immediate pleasure, if the future is certainly doom. Frankly, all the religious values don’t matter if you don’t believe in its reward or punishment. For example, you don’t have to turn the other cheek if you don’t think an omnipotent, omniscient being exists. In fact, you can do whatever you want. It is frowned upon maybe, but how much does propriety matter nowadays?

 

 In the past this rather anarchic sentiment was suppressed by various means like religion, family-centered-values (‘for my offsprings!’), and ‘good-ol-values’ like honor, or righteousness.

However, we are at crossroads. At least in the western world, moral relativity is becoming more dominant, and it is increasingly harder (and offensive) to consider a community with any unified value. We can no longer answer the question ‘why we need to be good to other people’ with divine certainty, with a divine reference (the Bible). So we need to figure this out. That is all I am saying. I have no solid conclusion for this article, since, well, who am I to judge?