One Direction, Plane Crashes, and why it's okay to care about both.

Admit it, you're a tiny bit sad to see him go.

As some of you may have seen on CNN Breaking News (I don't think they actually covered it, but I wouldn't be surprised), Zayn from One Direction has decided to leave the boy band. While 13-year-old, hearts all over the world have been breaking the rest of the populace has generally been disgusted at the fact that anyone could be concerned about boy band news at a time when planes are being intentionally crashed into mountains and hundreds of woman have been taken captive. Though it makes sense to see this as an example of how loathsome the younger generation is, that is really missing a much bigger point that this shows.

Now bear with me, but sometimes we need a boy band potentially breaking up to be the worst thing to happen to us today. Every day there are upwards of 7 billion different lives playing out. Their day is sometimes boring, sad, happy, interesting, wonderful, devastating, average, a whole multitude of things that make up their individual life. Now imagine trying to care about every single of those lives, the good, the bad, the plain.

You have hopefully realized that you can't. It's impossible to care about everything and every single person around you no matter how empathic you are. In fact, it's emotionally exhausting trying to care about all of those things. Depending on your specific situation, you may be carrying around your own set of emotional baggage with that also.

While we do need to be aware of world around us and what is happening some days we need to just get by until the next one. And maybe thinking about and comprehending that day's tragedies are just not going to let you get there, so you have to place your sadness and emotions in other places that don't seem quite as important to others.

I guess the overall moral is that being upset about frivolous things does not take away from the gravity of the real tragedies, sometimes it just helps us deal with it.

So tomorrow we can mourn the loss of those 150 people that passed too soon in the Germanwings plane crash. But today if we can only handle mourning the loss of the "cute one" from One Direction, let that be enough.


XOXO
Hayley

*Note: While I doubt that many 13-year-olds will wake up tomorrow and care about the hard hitting news stories, I thought that this was an adept example to illustrate how I think this could apply to anyone.