You only lack originality
By Dalton Martin
Where have the innovators, the type of people who stepped out of the norms of their society and used their unorthodox thinking to bring success to their lives, gone?
Today, there are fewer and fewer people who are willing to not go with the flow of whatever sensation is happening among us. Teenagers today are no worse than lemmings following each other off a cliff; we are victims of the hash tag fever.
Hash tag fever
How do you know if you’ve been afflicted with this epidemic? Well it’s quite simple really; do you use YOLO in everyday conversation? Do you base everything on how much swag is given off? After any boring recollection of events told by another, do you reply with a “Cool story bro!”? If you said yes to any of these, you have become a casualty of Hash Tag Fever. But do not fret my friends; you are not alone, for it is fairly common to see such terminology used in this day and age. These words have been rooted deep into our ways of life and conversation, and now literally everyone and their mothers are using them.
These times are a changin’
Now before I’m lynched for being a “hater”, hear me out. YOLO, the acronym for the mantra, “You only live once,” has been around for ages. Before rising into the top trending section on Twitter thanks to the Lil Wayne and Drake song “The Motto,” my great grandmother sewed it on a pillow. Wow, who knew my great-grandmother was a trendsetter!
Now let’s not leave swag out of this unpretty picture. Today it is the common index we use to tell how cool something is, but in the years prior it was commonly used as pirate slang for stolen goods, or even more modernly, the free stuff that’s given away at conventions. Man, I always knew pirates were such hipsters.
Into the dustbin
Much like any cultural phenomena in today’s times, these words will die out. Don’t believe me? Well then just look back to last year, does anyone plank anymore? Is Tim Tebow still the football sensation he was yesteryear? Does anybody even know if Rebecca Black is still alive? You can lie to yourself, but clearly all the answers to the above stated are no, and soon the ways of YOLO and swag will be thrown away into the dustbin of history with such words as rad, groovy, and phat. Decline is showing thanks to mass marketability on these things. If I see another shirt with Abraham Lincoln or hipster SpongeBob with the word swag in bold underneath it, I’m going to throw up.
A forgotten class
As a member of the so-called “Class of Swag,” I refuse to buy any school merchandise with the above stated. Think about it, do you really want something that down the road will be forgotten to represent our graduating class? I, for one, don’t wish for this, and I am not alone in these feelings. Who or whatever decides these things needs to redraft this stuff because swag is on its way out the door, it is it’s destiny to die out alone and forgotten.
