Estremera: What have we become?

ART indeed is life, as artists have always been saying, and because it is life... you can’t just dabble into it and claim you are a true-blue artist, like I thought I could. Major fail.

It’s because it takes over everything else and you start to resent your friends for coming over or inviting you to this and that function, and you no longer have time left at night to dabble, since all your energies have already been sucked up by your day-job and the necessities of the day job, in my case as the newspaper chief editor--socializing.

There must be some middle-ground, though, and the search for that middle ground has left me even more bedraggled than when I started.

“No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.” (Mark 6:24)

But both are passions not God nor money, a tiny voice pipes up in your head. Woe is I.

Listening to Manila artists who have been exhibiting and selling in Manila and abroad for several years, even decades now, somehow show what real art really is.

Yes, it’s the art that our Mindanao artist Kublai Millan has, a forever-thing that he keeps at the break of dawn until late afternoon, and even sometimes through the night.

Much like my writing, really, but not my visual art. Woe. But that’s just it, and that is what’s causing all the frustration. Not about myself, but about the young ones around. There is drive, all right, but in their own definition and their own time. Is this the generation now or is this just a warp in time where they all found their way to my company?

But yes, I’ve been hearing the same complaints on different levels and issues, but most often about Yolo (You only live once).

A long time ago, when my artist friend Vic Secuya turned 50, it was an eventual birthday for him, of course, It was when he shared that having reached that golden age, all that he desires to do is to push himself to discover all the talents he has because it will be such a waste if he does not knowing that there were talents in him that he never knew and explored.

I say, zip-lining and light plane flying isn’t a talent to be explored. It’s a recreation to pass the time away, and taking it up for the excitement and because Yolo all the time is such a waste.

It wouldn’t if you push further to become the best zip-line designer or make light plane flying your own business. But if you just go for the thrill, and spend your money for it as many times as you want, then that becomes a vice. For Yolo thrill or not.

If only we can collectively shout at this Yolo generation to get a life, a real one, and discover what gifts beyond gab and put-on accents they have, then maybe we will find ourselves in a world that is full of talented young people striving to become experts in more skills, than the brats that are more concerned about how good they look in social media.

In my mom’s generation, this angst was called generation gap--that divide that makes the preceding generation have difficulty to understand the successor generation.

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