“We see everything that's going wrong with the world and those who lead it, we just feel like we don't have the means to rise above and beat it, so we’re still waiting, waiting on the world to change” …Says John Mayer in his song, waiting on the world to change. This verse is extremely significant to me and I think about it every day of my life.
The first half of these words describe my generation watching as the country builds up a substantial debt, fights wars, and while terrorism and hate crimes occur regularly around the globe. This lyric also addresses the world leaders’ reaction to these events and implies that they are wrong. Conveying a negative image of the world today at first, the second part states that “we don’t have the means to rise above and beat it.” Mayer is saying here that our generation is discouraged and unsure of how we will handle today’s world. The majority of my generation is accurate to this unhappy outlook on the world, like being successful is “out of our hands”.
Why do I think about this lyric every day of my life? This opinion conveyed by this song is the exact opposite of the way I feel! I wake up every day and know that I am going to be a successful man by my own methods, and that I have the means to “rise above” and change the world. I’m not “waiting on the world to change, I am adapting to change the world.
These lyrics resonate with my past, because I can remember being told “you can be anything you want to be”. But yet more recently I have been told to “not to fight the system, you can’t make it alone in today’s world”. I am an optimist by nature, so, I believe that I can fulfill my childhood dream of becoming a contractor and a politician, rather than the pessimistic view of going with the flow, because the current will drown you. That being said, I am not waiting on the world to change; I am planning on changing the world, so these lyrics inspire me in the deepest way to stand out and make my hopes for the future into my reality.
My philosophy in life is to “keep on rocking in the free world” and to make something of myself or die trying; I want to leave my name everywhere I can and to be remembered for bettering America and the world. Sitting around waiting on someone else to do this and “change the world” or “rise above and beat it” is the exact opposite of my philosophy and the way I live my life. Thus these lyrics work inversely to motivate me and burn my deepest passion and drive to do none other than succeed. In fact, one could say these lyrics anger me into succeeding, and that’s what sets me apart from others and why this means so much to me.