10 years from now, no one will care about how you look now, the way you act now, or really anything about you now. All that people will remember of you is your successes, and to a greater extent, your legacy.

So what do you want your legacy to be?

Today's society is constantly changing, rapidly conforming to what people expect of it, and platforms such as social media and the news fuel the way we think and what we think. Issues are given their spotlight for a while and other, more "relevant" issues make their stance and people temporarily obsess over them for a month or two.

But what happens then? Important issues that need to be taken into consideration completely disappear from the table when something that people feel is more drastic makes its appearance. Society is so focused on being with the times and trivial details that it chooses to forget about other subjects of equal or greater importance.

Take for example the Santa Fe High School shooting, along with numerous others. For a time, that seemed to be anything and everything people cared about, but soon enough, its "popularity" died away along with the severity of the concept. This affair is obviously still given great importance, but the relevancy of it to our everyday lives faded along with time. I myself took a stance on this concept and chose to write an article on the Odyssey about the event and my views upon it, but it ended up getting a meager amount of views. Compared to this, my article on advice for upcoming freshman got almost a groundbreaking 3.7k views. This serves as just one of the examples relating to how people give undue attention to trivial topics compared to issues that genuinely matter.

People have stopped caring about, or at least diminished in giving importance to major controversies. Hardly anyone focuses on DACA anymore, which is an unfair policy that mistreats immigrants and needs to be shown the spotlight. While people still avidly converse about Trump and his unfair policies, no one actually seems to genuinely care about his actions and the majority of us just hope for the best with him. We see the North Korean missile crisis as yet another bullet that has been averted, but the reality of the issue is that it poses an imminent threat to our very existence.

Rather than concepts like these, along with countless others, we choose to focus on the Kardashians and misogyny. Our pop culture serves as a looming threat to our intelligence and could very well be the bane of our very existence. A myriad of people prefer to obsess over Kylie Jenner's Instagram and Drake's new album rather than give even a shred of their mental capacity to things that actually matter. Being a female myself, I think misogyny is an extremely important issue, but what hardships does a twenty-first century woman in America really endure? The wage gap is almost bridged, and women have all the opportunities that men have. Frankly, I think it's an issue that has been abolished a long time ago.

So instead of giving exceeded importance to the clothes you're wearing for that party tomorrow or having the latest high school drama be the bane of your existence, read the news for once. Venture beyond your comfort zone and immerse yourself in a controversy that you're passionate about. You just might find that there's a lot more happening right now than you ever knew about.