Music Monday #18: The Young and The Hopeless by Good Charlotte

'The Young and The Hopeless' by Good Charlotte was released in 2002, but this was yet another album that I didn't become aware of until a few years later.  It was 2005 during my second year of college when new friendships were cultivated and yet again the exchange of music tastes exposed me to new music and Good Charlotte was part of that exposure.  As I have mentioned in previous posts 2005 was a year of ups and downs which I've already gone into at length so I'll save the repetition.

The Young and The Hopeless holds many tracks that spoke direct to me, right from the open the first track after the introduction is 'The Anthem' which has the lyrics "Go to college, a university, Get a real job, that's what they said to me, But I could never live the way they want" which spoke the internal conflict I had with the recognition that I was living inside a system that I didn't want to be a part of, but that my environment was one that if I wanted to escape it, I needed to go with the system for a while yet, indeed the verse continues "I'm gonna get by and just do my time, Out of step while they all get in line, I'm just a minor threat so pay no mind" epitomised this mentality, if I could hold on, get through college I could find a way out through University to a new horizon, a new place to live, hope, independence, and freedom.  The verse goes further "Do you really want to be like them, Do you really want to be another trend, Do you want to be part of that crowd" spoke that conflict and the desire to pursue my own desires and my own dreams rather than conforming to a life that other people had mapped out for me. 

As a closeted gay man the default path in life that everyone else promoted was the idea of going through education, getting a job, getting married, having kids, and then supporting them as they went down the same path - this was a path that I never saw myself walking down specifically because I was gay, getting married was still illegal for gay people in Northern Ireland and even though it had partially been legalised in the rest of the UK initially through civil partnerships in 2004, it wasn't until 2014 that equal marriage passed and it wasn't until 2019 that equal marriage was predicated in Northern Ireland not by passage of the law but by a clause making it the default outcome if an executive failed for form and propose alternative legislation, this still holds a point of contention for me that even though public opinion shifted and is in favour of equal marriage and even though a majority in the former executive ruled in favour of it, opposition still blocked the measure through use of a mechanism within the legislature called a petition of concern.  The intricacies of the delicate balance of power in Northern Ireland aren't relevant here but suffice to say that we have in essence a dual mandate that has to be met and if both are not met despite an overall majority measures can still be blocked as was the case with equal marriage.

Growing up, the path that every other guy around me had seemingly accepted and actively pursued was a path that I didn't want to walk, I felt disconnected and this doesn't just hold true for marriage and kids it also holds true for religion.  I attended private schools for the first 12 years of my education that were heavily influenced by the Catholic Church and every single day every morning, and every afternoon before and after lunch, and at the end of the day prayer was incorporated into our daily routine for the first 7 years - my High School was much more secular and didn't include prayer despite still being influenced by the church.  I can't remember how old I was when I first made the observation but there were times where I would remain silent as the class recited prayers out loud and the obviousness of the indoctrination that was employed was deafening to me.  Those repetitive chants were more demonic to me than depictions of demons set against landscapes of Hellfire.  That awareness of how controlled everyone around me was, and how much influence that system had over them only nurtured a state of disconnection and separation, I knew that wasn't something I wanted to be part of and as discussed previously that mentality grew stronger and encompassed more than just religion in time.

This album in particular holds much more significance not just in its articulation of the anger I felt but that despite its title it actually promotes hope and optimism about the future, nowhere is this better represented than in the track 'Hold On' which is about suicide the lyrics "We all bleed the same way as you do, And we all have the same things to go through, Hold on if you feel like letting go, Hold on, it gets better than you know" speaks of the hope and the promise that if you can just make it through then there is more to come, what you feel in the moment can be overwhelming, and void of something positive to focus on, void of something to reach for, it can be hard to find the strength to hold on, you don't always know what you are living for, sometimes you can feel like there's absolutely nothing that you're living for but the mentality that I adapt that has helped me survive this long is that if you act upon it, then everything ends and that's it, but if you strive to survive then everything that you achieve no matter how big or small those achievements are, they become the reasons you lived. 

This mentality, that if you want to give up because you feel like you have nothing to live for is powerful, if you stop and take a moment to think of how empowering that thought can be and put it in a different context, that if you feel like you have nothing to live for then you have nothing to lose, and if you have nothing to lose then you have everything to gain by living - if you're ready to give up on life, then take greater risks, and do everything you can to get what you want because you literally have nothing to lose if you were ready to give it all up.  I know that's probably not going to be perceived as healthy by some people but that judgement is held in the context of their mental state, not yours.  You have to do what works for you, what it takes for you to get through, it's your life not theirs, nobody has the right to tell you how to live it, even me, everything I share I do so out of transparency and the want to convey a different narrative that probably differs quite a bit from conventional wisdom at times.

The Young And The Hopeless is an album I wasn't aware of when it came out, but I became aware of it at the right time in my life, it found its way to me through incidents and circumstance and is part of the reason why I try not to fight against the Universe.  I've spoken about that concept before but never explicitly spelled out what that means but for now suffice is to say that life has a way of getting better when you stop fighting it, things have a habit of coming to you when you stop looking for them which I know sounds asinine to most people but those clichés persist for so long in our culture because there's a ring of truth to them.