Cereal Wisdom

(My rant in "The Culmination of My Education" was exceeding appropriate blog length, but don’t be fooled, this is just a sequel).

It’s Saturday morning 1997, you’re watching Recess and Doug on ABC. There’s a commercial break.
Trivia question: who are the baddest asses of the advertisements run during the cartoons?

If you guessed the Hot Wheels kids or the Transformers... [BUZZ!] Wrong.
If you guessed the Apple Jacks crew... Ding Ding!

(Allow me to refresh your memory)
Mother: “Kids, why do you like that cereal so much? It doesn’t even tastes like apples!”
Kids: “WE EAT WHAT WE LIKE!”

Hell yeah.
In these post-collegiate times of uncertainty, I think it’s time my generation makes an effort to appeal back to the Apple Jack spirit of our youth.

We students are so easily conditioned into the mechanistic rhythm of productivity. We cultivate a persistent shadow that attaches itself to our heels and haunts us with a perpetual sense of urgency; a desire to do, to go. This addiction to motion may not always be strictly scholastic (i.e.: “I need to watch three more episodes to finish the season” or “I have to work out because I didn’t yesterday”), but it is tinged with the flavor of academia for it’s arbitrary deadlines and fabricated sense of pressure. Philosopher Jean Paul Sartre referred to this as “Bad Faith,” or the self-imposed mentality of duty. It is the “I have to”s and “I need to”s, or Freud’s “Superego.”

The formula is elementary: If you spend your entire academic life shoving what you want to do under the rug in order to do what you “have” to do, you will graduate a box-shaped robot spitting out copies of a square resume that will land you a 9 to 5 in a cubicle (into which you will fit like a 3D puzzle piece).

Tragically, this is the curse of our generation (and the worst part is this economy is running out of cubicle space faster than a game of Tetras). The robot monster (operating on the binary code: [Requirement][Achieve][Requirement][Achieve]) consumes our souls to the point that when we reach the point where nothing is statedly required of us, we hardly know what to do with ourselves. Many of us resort to inventing new external gags for ourselves (under the guise of “goal setting”) so that our daily lives can revolve around a different robot god.

We don’t know how to do what we want. We fill the chasm of indecision with the only solid object our non-actualized selves can cling to: “What’s best for us”, a.k.a. Momma’s advice + pop culture norms.

Let's give ourselves (and our free will) some credit, shall we? Let's volunteer, travel, read for pleasure, make art, and get interesting and random jobs-- not because we should or we have to, but because we want to. Let's eat some damn Apple Jacks.