So many people say, “go out and live life!” I would like to take a moment to turn this on its head. Rather than saying life is “living”, or in essence all of the things that you do in your life, I would like to present to opinion that living is in fact life.

Crazy huh? Yeah, seems so profound. While it might seem like this is exactly the same phrase, I would argue that it is not. Look at how society depicts life: American Eagle’s slogan is “Live Your Life”, people get YOLO tattooed on themselves, and in commercials everyone is seen skydiving, base jumping off of bridges to get that soda bottle, and chasing that dream of experience down the sunlit highway with a cool breeze blowing through the convertible’s nonexistent roof.

In no way do I disagree with this. I think that doing things that consist of that element of living is vastly important to having a well rounded life, and I chase those moments like the people that chase storms; all in for the heat and raw beauty of the moment. But I don’t believe that they are what make life. I don’t believe that to have a life, you need to go out and ‘live’. I believe that to go out and live, you need to have a life.

So here is the phrase I will present you with: “living is having life.” And the good news for you, it hasn’t become taboo yet! So go out and get a LIHL tattoo! People will wonder how dumb your sorority sisters are, and you can tell them, No! It’s not a very poorly spelled attempt at "Lil’" that my Big made me get! It means I have a life! And then they will really look at you funny, and start calculating in their minds how many beers you drink at a party on average, or how many ‘friends’ invite you places on the weekends. Before they walk away with a warped perception of a socialite who can’t spell, you can tell them what it really means.

(For the record I am in no way recommending that you should get this acronym tattooed. It doesn’t sound good, and who knows, that situation I just described might actually happen…)

What I actually mean by this statement is that in order to have those experiences, you need to actually have a life. This means the bad things, the tangible and intangible things, the lazy things, the motivated things, all of the adverbs that you can place before the vague highly descriptive word things. If you live in the United States, or a country similar to it on the global scale, meaning a core country in stage 4 on the DTM (demographic transition model), in other words one of the most highly developed countries in the world, you have the ability to do all of the “living” things. We are developed technologically, agriculturally, educationally, and have low overall population growth, with good life expectancies, low infant mortality rates (sorry, this will get briefly morbid), and a higher status of women, which is why you are actually listening to me right now. We are no longer an agrarian society.

Think about this, how many people do you personally know who own a farm? And I’m not talking about a few chickens or goats, I’m talking farm-farm, where they produce food for the masses, and that is their life. The chances are it’s probably in the single digits. Is that too difficult? How many farm farms (I feel like that should be a kid’s song) do you pass on your daily commute? If you do not live out in the middle of nowhere, the chances are that number is even smaller.

The way that our society has shifted is in a way that pushes us away from primary, and even secondary economic activities, to the tertiary sectors.Our mass produced goods, are our minds. In these more developed countries, we do not need to concern ourselves with producing food to live. We can outsource that. Instead, we are the brains of the world. The production of doctors, cures, language experts, lawyers, teachers, managers and goods and services such as medicines, educational materials, curing diseases and making advances in historical or scientific discoveries is what we offer to the global market. And because of this, you can’t just live life -- to live you need a life.

We have the abilities to help the world as a whole. About 3,000 children die from malaria a day. A day. But the good news is, there is a cure for this lethal disease. A pill. But because this number of deaths is so high, it’s natural to assume that this miracle drug must be worth millions of dollars right? Take off a few zeros from the number in your mind, until the decimal place is directly after the one. One dollar. So you can see the gravity of this number:

$1.00

That’s less than you would spend on a hamburger at McDonalds when you include sales tax. But the problem is not that we don’t send it to them, it’s the governments in place, and how the world is developing. Dwight Schrute on the American sitcom The Office said it perfectly: “We need another plague.” People don’t care about these problems, because it is solving others, such as the growing global population, and it is not strategic for the tyrannical governments of the countries that suffer. Therefore, many times aid like this can become useless. This is the root of the large flocking of followers to terrorism. The radical leaders know how to manipulate people, and by withholding basic necessities for life, are able to forcibly mobilize groups of people, and cause mass destruction of lives. When I say the phrase, a life, it now carries more weight than YOLO. Or, is it YOLO carries more weight than a life?

While all of these world problems are eye opening, and most likely shocking to many, the fact is we do live in a first world country, and you most likely don’t face malaria on a daily basis. So all of this being said, we must do our part. We need to life. This is not correct grammar, but I mean every misplaced word. By taking an active part in understanding, you will face inner conflict. Some things are the way they are, and to live the life we live, they must be that way. Sweatshops have to exist to have any of the clothes on your back right now, and your apples will stay the price they are because of migrating guest workers. And this isn’t what we want to change…

We want to change the fact that we know, and that we are okay with it. But this is as impossible as your cell phone not dying when you need it most. Murphy’s law seems to rule. And this may be the worst possible time. Now we have grown up in this world. WE are the generation of apathy, and displacement and exaggeration of anger. A world where everything becomes a debate over race, sex, creed, religion, or any other source of lightning strikes for the media, who use the flint and steel of their words, and gatekeeper tactics, to catch us under the shower of sparks until we are bathing in the heat of our own perceived prejudice.

A life is an accumulation of everything. That’s why to live, to have those moments that are available to us, we must decide on life. With Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Pintrest, and Tumblr, we crave the filtered moments. These are the pictures of smiles with friends, dresses that cost a month’s salary, and starving children with a quote from Buddha, or Gandhi that make us feel important and simultaneously guilty when we double tap, or hit the comment button, and send an emoji of praying hands. Then because we have noticed the problem, we feel good about the realization that we are a compassionate person, and we continue with scrolling through our feed. By deciding on life, we are deciding to explore the messy parts. This is however, not a special category set aside for third-world countries; people in our developed nation face it every day. It can come in the form of bullying, sub tweeting, mental illness and lack of a good home life or strong foundation.

By choosing a life in order to live, you are choosing to explore concepts that can drive you crazy because of the warped way they can’t be dealt with effectively. You are choosing to acknowledge the desire to rest, and adequately give your mind a break to better prepare you for the tasks ahead of you, and then to work hard, and push yourself to your full capacity when it is your time to contribute what your gifts are. By choosing a life, you are choosing to look at all sides of an argument, take the common facts, your morals, and make a decision that you can defend. You are choosing to be open to a change in mindset, because there is no way to know everything in this world, and the ability to change without compromise of your character is a vital skill. By choosing a life, you are choosing to accept all of the bad, all of the good, and all of the average days in between, and count them as a necessity to understand a purpose. By choosing a life over simply living, you are making a choice that will inspire living, inspire progress of yourself, inspire others to follow in your footsteps, and then in the darkest of times, reignite the flame that you first set kindling to.