Is YOLO a reason for being?

I first heard of YOLO from my friend Aimee over margaritas on a Friday night. “You only live once, YOLO. It’s a reason for being,” she said with her usual utopian glasses on. This encompassing idea of YOLO resonated with us because carpe diem-ing the crap out of every day sounded exciting, and we felt, necessary. 

Carpe diem — translated to “putting as little trust as possible in the future” — was appealing because growing up, everyone made us believe that every action and decision is supposed to be laid out for our “future.” Now we’re 23, just as much in the “future” as the present tense can be, and while our careful life planning had its advantages, we feel somewhat incomplete.

The popular saying YOLO (You Only Live Once) going around the social networks has been reduced to an excuse for a shallow kind of present-tense living, wherein “living” encompasses clichéd notions of fun, as dictated by the girls and boys of Gossip Girl (alcohol, sex, drama) (photos from 9gag.com).

So, enough with the future-tense thinking. We want to be present-tense people now — heck, to enjoy a little bit instead of laying out every decision for this so-called “future.” We want to live in the now and make great stories and learn from new experiences, which the “future us” will be proud of. Sure, “future us” may not be rich. But we will be damned interesting.

For a while, I liked the sound of this so-called reason for being. I believed in it. It’s an old philosophy gift wrapped in youth speak, which in this case, is a rap. Drake raps in his song The Motto: “Now she wants a photo/You already know, though/You only live once/ That’s the motto, n---a, Y.O.L.O.” And YOLO was born.

YOLO then became a huge hash tag trend on Twitter, which then sort of became a joke on 9gag. Twitter started flooding with 140-character narrations of #YOLO ideologies, which mostly had something to do with alcohol, drugs or exciting illegal things.

And just like that, YOLO was no longer a reason for being. It was just an excuse. Living in the now was really less about living, and more an entitlement to hedonism, a shoddy title that people threw around because it supposedly gave the perception of someone who was grabbing life by the balls. But the “living” had dwindled down to a slew of romanticized notions of “fun,” as dictated by the girls and boys of Gossip Girl (alcohol, sex, drama).

In fact, the way it’s used, YOLO could very well be passed for #conyoproblems:

• I am studying in this prestigious school but I want to waste my education away because school is boring #YOLO (#conyoproblems).

• Yelp! No plans this weekend, need to get drunk because #YOLO (#conyoproblems).

• I need to do something else with my hair because I’ve had this hairdo for years, and #YOLO (#conyoproblems).

Also, if you really did believe in YOLO, and wanted to lead a life full of meaning, you would be out there actually living this life, instead of spending an incredible amount of time tweeting about it.

My friend Klaro put it best when he said people shouldn’t YOLO, people should YODO. As in, You Only Die Once, which is something he says our very own Jose Rizal believed in. “You only die once, so it better be legendary since you can’t redo it, brah,” he says.

“Are you sure Jose Rizal said that?” I ask. “It kind of sounds like you.”

“Well, I might have paraphrased it a bit as Joe Pro.”

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One only dies once, and if one does not die well, a good opportunity is lost and will not present itself again.  — Dr. Jose P. Rizal, in a letter to Mariano Ponce, 1890