The CDC reports that the average American lives for 78.4 years before dying. That sounds like a lot, right? But most of us high schoolers, at this current moment, have already used up 20%. Think about it. The average one of us only has four more lengths of our current age, if not less, to live. 

What is living, anyway? Is it breathing? Thinking? Doing? One can argue that one can be alive and not be living at the same time. People can “live” the lives of others but not live for themselves. This is most prominently shown through social media. First created to share one’s life with others, it has turned into one of the biggest wasters of life itself. 

For every second that you watch someone do something, you are losing that second for you to do your own thing. For every second you watch them vlog about their lives, you are losing your own lifetime. Seconds add up to minutes. Minutes add up to hours. Hours add up to days. And days add up to lifetimes. 

And those lifetimes are lifetimes in themselves. How many lost moments in a society do we add up altogether? If we added up all of the hours we together have spent living vicariously, you may potentially find that we wasted not only hundreds but thousands of lifetimes. Social media, at its core, is a money-making machine that not only sucks your attention, your productivity, and your lifestyle, but also your life in and within itself.

But this idea of time lived versus time living extends past the lines of code that compute when you swipe endlessly on a little, fancy, glowing gadget. 

Overfixation on grades is the other sucker. It is only natural and proper for one to desire to work toward and have good grades. But the problem comes when it is the only motivator in how one lives one’s life. You see, once we gain that hundred, we long to maintain that hundred. Keep that hundred. We greed and aim for more hundreds and are utterly devastated when we receive anything less than a hundred. The line between trying your best while giving time for yourself to enjoy life and completely giving yourself to your work is so thin. At the end of the latter, you no longer master your work. Your work masters over you. And so to many, getting into a good college is that goal post that dwarfs everything else, even time spent with others who themselves have their own limited lives.

“Sorry, I have a test next week,” you say. 

“At least I’m being productive,” you rationalize. 

But how many events will you ever get to attend with your parents? How many football games will your brother get to play? How many grocery runs with your family will you get to go on? In accounting for the brevity of the moments you have with others, grades come to be not the end of the world. Rather, they suck the life out of that said world. 

You only get to live each day once. You only get to experience that event once. Everything is whittled down to once. You never know which meal or breath will be your last.

Perhaps it is this shortness, this seizure of opportunity that makes people want to live others’. Escapism? Maybe. People are scared. Or people simply don’t care. Even if you are consciously studying to fulfill others’ expectations, you still live the life of another. You don’t truly live. 

We are not created to not live but to live. And life is so precious because it is so brief. Don’t waste your life living others’ lives. Live. Truly live. Choose to live.