Why I hate this 'YOLO' nonsense

On leaving my apartment each morning I traverse the 3 or 4 metres across the corridor from my door leading out onto the stairwell. This is a micro-journey that lasts around 5 or 6 seconds, and yet, each morning my line of sight is ignominously jousted by the apartment directly ahead. Upon the door in black tape has been rendered the abbreviation 'YOLO'. Every morning, the fractional cognition I have of this is like a thorn bush of irritation that I cannot pass without brushing against.

Who is this person or persons, I habitually wonder, that would seek to personalise their habitational facade with so bland and generic an inscription? Is this then the new 'mantra of cool' that symbolises an attitude of rebellion and vivacity? This neologism has been spewed out all over the place in recent months - probably meaning that its slang currency has already defaulted - slapped onto social media flotsam like the carpe diem for the Twitter generation.

Ordinarily, such a non-statement as 'You Only Live Once' could be tuned out by selective deafness like other dead phrases that infest our common discourse - "whatever", "to be honest", "at the end of the day" - merely acting as verbal sandbags we subconsciously pile up as a preventative measure against the encroachment of awkward silence, interruption or faltering diction.

But there's something more persistently facile and revealing at work when it comes to the deployment of 'YOLO' that fills me with acerbity by each exposure to it and which I think warrants more forensic scrutiny. So I started wondering to myself; what is meant by the phrase and what lies pathologically behind people's usage of it?

1. The way in which it is utilised is predominantly as an apologia for things that would ordinarily provoke guilt. As a facetious example - 'I was going to go to gym but instead sat at home and stuffed my face with doughnuts until I vomited all over myself. YOLO'.

I find it a very odd symptom of our still-neanderthal online existance that some people choose to affix a statement affirming one's own mortality as a means of assuaging personal culpability or justifying a decision made on one course of action over another.

I ponder over what sinful exploits might be taking place inside that apartment, so horrendous in nature that the inhabitants feel the need to publically proclaim that this is an area quarantined by the ethos of 'YOLO', and hence anything occuring within is beyond the realms of conscience or retributive shame. Perhaps it is some kind of wild sex dungeon inspired by Pauline Reage's 'The Story of O', or perhaps it doubles as the London syndicate for international enthusiasts of origami?

2. At its core, this rank little statement symbolises the endemic short-termism and individualist attitudes that stand as the underlying cause for so much of the world's ills.

It may only be a crass catchphrase, but it speaks to me at least of the same brand of consequentially blind, slash 'n' burn insouciance, and the fuck-you-I'll-do-what-I-want mentality that lies at the heart of crony capitalism that fuels boom and bust economies, inspires corruption in all systemic arena, and causes irreparable damage to the environment and the natural wonders of our planet. It is the same fundamental psychology at work just on more reduced and pithy a scale.

3. It is also a remarkably assertive statement in favour of atheism; so much so that it could have been coined by Richard Dawkins' teenage offspring. It raises the enduring conundrum that if we really do 'only live once' and if, as Neitszche said, 'god is dead', then surely that leaves us entirely free sentient beings? If there are no divine consequences for our earthbound actions then what is actually preventing us from acting in any way we choose, beyond the vagaries of criminal punishment?

The fact is that, as Rousseau said, 'man is born free and is everywhere in chains'; bound by expectations and conformities that are promoted by society which, in most cases, stands as a not-entirely benevolent cage. For certain, we rely on society's general order of things for our security and well-being, and for the fact that any alternative is far too radical to be considered objectively; but nonetheless it is still a cage.

It seems bizarre to me, the idea that someone could spend 8 or 9 hours subordinating themselves to a fickle employer for a meagre return, taxed by a state in which they place little trust or interest and vice versa the state to them save the continued extraction of said taxes, only to promote the 'YOLO' maxim in relation to some trivial derivation of free will.

Besides all else on the subject of only living once, how the fuck do you know?! Existence might be nothing more than an eternal return as in traditional Indian philosophy and the Stoics (the constant replaying of one's own life into infinity), or the paganist reincarnation tradition which could find you reanimated after death as a hammerhead shark. The only thing we know for certain is that we don't know anything with any absolute certainty.

I'm sure you may say, for god's sake get a grip and stop thinking so deep into such a vacuous buzzword that is likely already forgotten by the perpetrators of its use. But no, I won't; if nothing else it allows me to translate ire into wry amusement, and you only live once after all...