Living vs. surviving life
By Meah McInerney, Reporter
I was listening to Adele recently when her song, “Love in the Dark” came on. The lyric “I want to live and not just survive” stood out to me. It got me thinking about the difference between what it means to just survive versus what it means to truly live. To me, surviving is doing the bare minimum: eating, drinking, breathing, sleeping, and just going through the motions. In contrast, living is being spontaneous; being present in the moment is what truly living is to me. But that’s not all it is. Living can be shown in just appreciating cerian things or moments in a day that you might overlook. Living isn’t solely on spontaneity and resisting a routine, but it can be embracing moments in our routine that we under appreciate, something as small as looking at the sky.
When surviving, I think of the fact that everyone follows a routine, including myself. I wake up, get ready, go to school for seven hours, go home, have soccer, and go to sleep. Almost every single day. 12 months, 52 weeks, or 365 days. I commute to school; I spend almost two hours of my day commuting to an island just so I can get an education. Surviving is a default, living is an achievement. Everyone can survive, but not everyone can achieve living. Living in general is a complex thing to understand along with many other things related to our ability to exist.
I can’t explain it if I’m being honest. “It” being life. I can’t explain what life’s purpose is, or what it means to me or you. I can’t describe what living is because there’s no textbook answer. I can’t describe it because everyone’s answer is different. Everyone’s example of living is different from everyone else’s.
If I’m living, I’m going on adventures, I’m ruining my routine, I’m hanging with friends instead of working on homework. I’m not caring what will happen next. I’m being spontaneous. To me, living is a positive, surviving is a negative. Surviving is boring. Yes, you have to breathe, eat, drink, and sleep to survive—that’s what surviving is. But that’s not all it has to be. Surviving is seen as being alive, breathing. But living is all those things and more.
Living is breathing, but making all those breaths count. Living means making decisions that could have consequences, but with those consequences in mind, it makes those spontaneous choices of living much more worth the risk. The aspects of living can be many different things, but in order for me to live, I have to do spontaneous things even though I know there could be consequences. Something even as small as dying your hair a different color, its fun thing to do that doesn’t affect anything too greatly, but there are still possible consequences.
I don’t know how to explain the feeling of doing something that makes you feel exhilarated. In my own
words, it’s like an extreme amount of adrenaline is being pumped through my bloodstream. I know that I
should be doing something else, like something that could help me in the future. But I’m 15, I’m a teenager. I don’t wanna be spending all my time studying, or doing something boring. I’m at my peak, these high school years aren’t supposed to be spent figuring out what I wanna do later on in life, they’re supposed to be spent living it. Being in the moment and doing things that I wanna do, and not just doing them because my parents, or the school want me to be doing them. Yes, it’s important to have an idea as to what I wanna do later on in life, but to be able to do that I need to live. I need to go out and experience things that in the end will help me decide what I want to do in the future.
I want to live my life and not just survive it. Existing in many ways is a privilege we will never get
to experience again. Whether you’re living or just surviving, life is a gift. A thing that even after 4.5 billion years people still don’t understand.