“Is there more to life than just when I’m feeling alive?” (“Is There More,” Drake)
One neverending aspect of life for us, as a society, is the obsession over our purpose and how that plays into this life. To be direct, no, there is no more to life than just when you’re feeling alive. To feel alive is to experience every sense in your body converging in unison. To feel alive is to feel present and grounded in a moment. Society as a whole has always had a difficult time being present. We’re constantly trying to fix things that aren’t broken and breaking things that are already very broken (and sometimes we mend what needs to be mended, slowly but surely).
The concept of the American dream fuels the pressure to remain constantly determined to move up and succeed in life through pure hard work. Although there are truths to the notion, it fails to account for the value of feeling present throughout the extent of our everyday lives. I think of sitting on a green beanbag, holding a cup of orange juice, in my friend’s lightly decorated room with the slight buzz of a Harry Potter movie playing in the background. The scene is beautiful and simplistic, and I believe that as a society, we overlook these very real moments.
This forces the question of who decides what it means to succeed in life. Don’t we all have different interpretations of success? I hope so. We’d live in an incredibly mundane society if we each equated success to being CEO of a company or becoming the best rapper. Furthermore, who convinced us to pay more attention to the “big things” in life? As I near the end of my high school experience, it has become obvious that my time there was never about graduating — rather, it was about the class that always made me laugh, losing my voice after a football game, crying in the locker room after a bad practice, and the friendships that grew and those that ended, to name a few. It was always about feeling human and experiencing life as it arrives in small moments.
Drake’s question interests me because, deep down, when I consider it, I want to say, “Yes, there is more to life than just feeling alive.” However, my experiences thus far force me to say no, and that is OK. Recognizing that we have to face our feelings and our life can be scary. Nevertheless, it means so much to be free from our expectations of life.
Nowadays, we put so much effort into escaping our lives—whether through social media, music, or movies. We do so because it seems easier. I’ve learned that I feel more at ease when I pay attention to my life and recognize my feelings, even when they feel overwhelming. In the end, we don’t need to know what “it” is about. Constantly trying to figure “this” out ruins the fun. We need to start appreciating the tremendous life in front of us and stop asking whether there is more.
