Are You Living Your Own Life? Or Someone Else's?

If I were to ask you to prove that you're living for your own life, you can simply state that you are going to perform an action within 3 seconds, and proceed to do them to prove it. But in some cases, you may not even realize that you might not be living for your own life. Here's why.

• An average American watches 5 hours of TV per day. Children aged 2-11 watch over 24 hours of TV per week, while adults aged 35-49 watch more than 33 hours, and keeps increasing as we get older.

• Statistics of YouTube shows that over 6 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube. That's almost an hour for every person on Earth.

In this case, we can easily add video games, movies, books, and they are all just a reproduction of life that we are not living in!

I am not claiming that it is wrong that we participate, but if we are excessively using our free time and will, to gorge on our false pretense life, are you watching the television? Or is the television watching you?

Here's an example that might resonate with you.

For those who yearns to travel, watching a pixelated replication of people traveling, we feel satisfied watching it as if we were generically there. Now that we're feeling satisfied as we watch more, it actually makes the idea of us wanting to travel to that specific place less and less inviting because it felt like we've been there already! We then slowly start to realize that its a hassle to save up money, to pack our essentials, and plan a flight, since it is much easier to click a button to view what we want to see.

So let me ask you this.

If I asked you about love, you can tell me all the romantic films you've watched, or you could easily quote me on the studies of William Shakespeare's sonnets, but tell me, what did her hair smell like? What did it feel like when she had her hand on your bare back after a long night? How did you feel when your heart was pulsating at a rapid tempo, as you embraced and kissed her soft lips for the first time? You never actually fully experienced it because it was just a reproduction of life you were watching.

Therefore, I'd like to invite you to live your own life. Stop continuously looking at screens and pictures of others living. Rather, go out there and feel the soft sand beneath your toes, feel the gentle caress of the wind, and go experience life entirely with your own 5 senses, to embrace your own personal piece of life!

“Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood.”

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

So now, if you are observing others live their lives,

who's life are you really living?

Source:
photo credit: <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/16210667@N02/15389755886/">CJS*64</a> via <a href="http://photopin.com">photopin</a> <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/">cc</a>