Watch a video version of this post here.
Your phone, and I’m talking iPhone, Samsung, Blackberry or heck the SideKick (anyone still have one of those) is a gift and a curse.
There’s a lot of power in your hands. So much power that Peter Diamandis, author of Abundance and Bold, told Bill Clinton on stage at the Clinton Global Initiative that you have more access to data and information on your phone than Clinton had in his entire arsenal as President.
Think about that.
Yet, there are people, who on Friday night take the most powerful handheld device ever created and they scroll, and they scroll, and they scroll, through meaningless and soul sucking social media posts just to see the world passing them by.
They see that a distant friend from high school is having an awesome Friday night, or that their ex-girlfriend is going out to a nice dinner. Worse is when a loose acquaintance is posting about his new car or traveling to exotic places and the illusion that your life is going nowhere really sets in.
They are letting life pass them by.
This is one of the craziest fucking things that I’ve ever seen in my entire life.
Why do we do this to ourselves and subject ourselves to watching our lives pass us by on the screens and devices that give us so much power?
The Loss Of Our Adolescent Activities
I want you to think back to when you were a kid growing up. What did you do to fill your day, even absent of school.
Maybe you were going to karate practice, or having your parents drop you off at gymnastics or piano lessons. You had T-Ball and Basketball and playdates and birthday parties and family vacations and even some games of freeze-tag in the neighborhood with the other kids who had a ball of energy from the pitcher of Kool-Aid your mom whipped up for you.
Then you get to middle school and high school and joined the debate team or chorus or the recorder club. You picked up an instrument and jammed out with a band. You rode bikes to the comic book shop and played video games in an arcade before hitting up the bowling alley. You joined the football team or dabbled in cross country.
In college you rushed your way into a fraternity and all of a sudden you’re volunteering, interning, bartending and still have time for some yoga before happy hour with the clique.
Then you graduate and…BAM.
All of those adolescent activities stop. Happy hour becomes your saving grace, as does watching people through the screen in the palm of your hands as you go to work Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, dip into happy hour, sleep in on Saturday, head back to happy hour, go to sleep, wake up on Sunday, watch some football (God the Dolphins suck, some things never change), and ultimately go back to work Monday morning. Just to do it all again. And maybe enjoy a few 3-day weekends where you can’t wait to bust out Netflix or Call Of Duty and let life pass you by.
At this stage you’ve lost all your passions, all your dreams, all the things that you grew up wanting to do in your life.
You no longer have thoughts in terms of dreaming for the future, of having ambitions, of wanting to do more in the world. You lust for a cold one and the hope that Johnny from high school gets divorced so his life sucks worse than yours.
What the hell, bro?
- What the hell happened to wanting to be an astronaut?
- What happened to wanting to be a pro baseball player?
- What happened to wanting to visit every baseball stadium in the country?
- What happened to last minute road trips?
- What happened to the kid that wanted to be Captain Kirk?
- What happened to wanting to freestyle with a boombox next to Carson Daly on TRL? ( Do you even remember TRL?)
- What happened to wanting to never grow up and staying up all night talking about the big things you want to do before you die?
Now it’s like, “I can’t wait for Friday so I can drink my miserable face in this sugar-filled drink just to wake up fricking hung over to go get brunch and talk about how shitty and boring and uneventful the night was last night.”
That’s not life.
That’s not living with ambition, with purpose, with feeling and with meaning.
Your life wasn’t meant to be lived behind a screen. It was meant to be lived IRL.
Where you are the one making your unambitious friends jealous as they stroll through the ‘Gram on a Friday night wishing they were you. Envious of you. Spiteful that you did something with your life.
Make me a promise, mmm’k?
Happy hour will not be the best part of your week.
Start small.
Book a trip. An adventure. Find a new restaurant. Go outdoors. Go to a weird meetup. Sell something at a local farmer’s market. Do something your 10-year old self would be proud of. Play. Dream. Get into mischief.
Live a life of unforgettable memories instead of forgettable regrets.
Use that powerful device in your hands and its Google machine to find something that excites you, motivates you and gives you purpose. The clock is ticking my friend.
Watch the video version of this post here.
The post What The Hell, Bro? appeared first on Ambitious.