On Reality, Success, and Love
Reality:
“I will die of having lived”
-Willa Cather
Reality needs to be accepted, but it is the one need humans seem to be able to survive without, because they really do not want to. What do people think their life should sum up to? Poetic justice usually, I suppose. Then there are the atheists who choose to live a hollow life, believing in simple science and evolution, making our lives meaningless. This in reality is more fact than a belief. But in that sense, isn’t our evolutionary advancement a mind capable of deeper emotion, that which made us the fittest to survive. Therefore, these intellectual minds, carrying with them the burden of emotional senses, must appease these mental sensations with unrealistic remedies to the realistic sadness we have built into reality. The difficulty and torment of life and the almost constant discontent brought about by emotions are inevitable. The results of trying to ignore these serious disadvantages of ever living are involuntarily crafted mortal ideals like faith and love. These pleasures and optimisms pull us away from reality just enough so that reality itself does not kill us. When people lose these pleasures, facing reality forces them into unhealthy or deadly coping mechanisms, such as alcoholism and suicide. The reality of life in itself is the greatest threat to our lives.

Success:
“Dependency has been a thief at night.”
¬-Allen Stone (“Neon Cathedral” MacklemoreXRyanLewis ft. Allen Stone)

Success is subjective. Every person will find a different meaning concerning success because everyone has their own goal for life. My personal desire in life is to eliminate dependency. Now the quote I have used, from an R&B singer named Allen Stone, concerns alcohol dependency, and how it stole his life away from him. I have a different use for these words. Being dependent on another person or people, usually parents when you are younger, is the greatest deprivation of your own life. My sister, who did not have a job until the last three weeks of her summer before she went to college, has yet to prove that she can be independent in any way financially, seeing as the majority of my parents college fund for us is going to her tuition, which proved more expensive than they anticipated. She has no plans to help with the payments. I’m not sure if she is just that selfish and lazy, or if she is long overdue for a wakeup call, but she is wholly dependent on my parents to survive. I’m not trying to talk badly about my sister, I’m just using her to make an example. I am already saving money for my own college, because it will be necessary soon. I pay for everything I can, including most of my clothes and dinner on the nights I’m at work and don’t eat at home. I am as dependent as I can be with only 16 years of age and usually less the 15 hours of work a week. Dependency on others is my greatest fear for my future. Breaking free wholly and completely would be my definition of success in life.

Love:
“Bound to fall in love”
-Kanye West (“Bound 2” by Kanye West ft. Charlie Wilson)

Using quotations is what I find to be one of the most effective devices to describe an ideal, in case you haven’t noticed. Some people have the ability to arrange words in the best possible way, whether or not the actual meaning the author meant with those words is relevant to my point. Kanye West has captured the essence of my beliefs in this statement. We, as human beings, are all bound to fall in love. Eventual love is inevitable. Not only that, love binds us. We are bound by a devotion to who we are in love with. But “Love is cursed by monogamy,” another classic Kanye West quote. I will admit, West is not the ideal role model, nor that quotation the ideal philosophy, but again, I am using his words with a different meaning. Society is the number one pressuring force that controls people’s lives. One of the most well known and accepted conformations in that we must love one person monogamously. Beyonce, a fellow hip hop artist believes that “if you like it then you should’ve put a ring on it”. But as human beings are bound to fall in love, they are bound to their partners, but those bindings can tear, and new ones can be developed with another person. This is why most relationships and marriages do not last. Love does not always last, but it is always renewed. It is the greatest remedy for the terrors of reality.