YOLO

            As I rounded the corner into the second third of The Privileges, I noticed a reoccurring theme within the character Adam Morey. Author Jonathan Dee portrays Adam as a progressive man with a goal and no desire to look into the past. While I disagree with his concept on forgetting the past completely, I do find myself encouraging his attitude of moving forward. One passage that describes how I would want to live my life comes from Adam Morey himself as he believes that “The only thing that exists, the only risk to be analyzed, is what’s in front of us today” (143). I admire Adam’s sense of purpose in life and his driven attitude to achieve it. To me, this passage means that even if one makes a mistake or does some sort of wrong, once a lesson comes from it, there proves no reason to further analyze the mistake. As a human, I tend to make the occasional mistake and usually find myself dwelling on it as a vast majority of people do. Even once the mistake becomes corrected, I cannot help return to that moment and analyze it, no matter the kind of embarrassment or shame or other feelings that came from it. While people may take this passage the wrong way and read it as forget the past without learning, I believe Adam simply suggests that dwelling and analyzing the past can stifle present and future progress. I would like to live my life in this way that I learn from the past however move on because, as Dee implies through Adam, the present only occurs once, while the past has already happened. Or as our good friend Drake says, YOLO.