When the band name is this awesome, you know the song is gonna be good. Ok, maybe not. But this one has a catchy, driving beat to it, and I think the message is a good one too. Anyone who's made it to adulthood, gone to college and gotten a "real job", or maybe gotten a "real job" without going to college, will likely find out that things aren't always roses. The grind of a 9-to-5 desk job can be quite taxing. The grind of a job involving manual labor can be grueling. The "rewards" (making money so you can buy things so you can keep up with the Joneses) aren't necessarily worth putting up with things. And unless you're really lucky, even if you're doing something in which you're interested, you probably will not want to keep doing it 5 days a week for the rest of your life.
Yet, once we are in the system, and once we've started living the "American Dream", we find it incredibly hard to break free of it (the "middle class rut"). At some point, we each hit a new low - depression stemming from the mundane aspects of bringing home the bacon, putting up with corporate red tape and the inanity of office chatter, having our efforts go unappreciated, or whatever else it may be. When we were kids, we dreamt of being astronauts or athletes or movie stars or princesses. Then, when we became old enough to realize that these were not realistic for most of us, we moved on to more "normal" aspirations. And even if we've reached these goals, we may find they are not as fulfilling as we had imagined.
To quote a movie you may have seen, " Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy stuff we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact."
Don't let yourself be bogged down in the rut of consumerism, and don't let your life be wasted away working for the man. If you have a job you can tolerate and it provides for your family and allows you to spend time with people you love doing things you love, great. But if you're just plugging away to pay for your 789 channels of HD TV and your leased Audi, maybe you should reconsider your priorities, and the true cost of this lifestyle.
One more quote from one of my favorite bands: "Decide what to be, and go be it."
Enough blathering, here's the song:
"After your dreams have all died and morning is in mourning... what are you?"
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