Is there anything more annoying than people that spout off pithy little sayings thinking that they are imparting important life lessons? Apparently these people feel that the sum total of advice on how to conduct one’s life can be reduced to clever sentences needing no further explanations. The two most tired aphoric abominations have to be “live every day as if it was your last,” and “just be yourself.”

This first phrase, “live every day as if it was your last,” has to be the worst advice I’ve ever heard. Think about what that is encouraging. If you knew for a fact that you’d be dead tomorrow would you be stuck plodding through whatever daily drudgery you tolerate for survival? Of course you wouldn’t, you’d be in the penthouse suite of the closest five star hotel snorting crack off the ass of a $10,000 hooker just like anybody else. This saying suggests that we forego planning, hard work, and commitment to objectives greater than the self because, hey, we could be dead tomorrow. Don’t get me wrong, I can’t wait for the day when it’ll be perfectly moral for me to snort crack off expensive call girls’ taut buttocks because I’ll be too old and decrepit to have any worth to the world I just don’t see how this world view is appropriate for the souls full of vitality that most people are. I find it especially disturbing that this phrase is so embraced by our youth culture in America today. It revels the hedonistic approach to life many of our young adults have adopted and the lack of responsibility exhibited in our interactions with one another.

The second phrase, “just be yourself,” irritates me to no end simply because it either doesn’t mean anything or it encourages horribly reckless behavior and yet everyone bandies it about as if it were gospel. If the phrase means to do whatever I think is right in a given situation, well, that’s what I’m already doing, right? People don’t just act arbitrarily, we do act in some morally responsible way according to what we think and what influences us, primarily societal influences. The other interpretation of this phrase is that it is telling us to ignore social influences on our decisions, which is a horrible idea. If it wasn’t for society I would probably choose to not wear clothes in the summer and the obvious shame this would cause everyone else who had to gaze upon my physical perfection could lead to mass suicide. I don’t want to be the cause of that.

Why do we accept this nonsense as good advice and wisdom? Are we that desperate to think that we can somehow understand ourselves and the world at large that we resort to such meaningless tripe for stop gaps instead of actual knowledge?