THE GREAT GATSBY!
High School Advice
Real Will Succeed. Fake Will Fail.
Jay Gatsby
Gatsby, a genuine person, slowly becoming fake by keeping his eye on the fake prize: Daisy Buchanan.
Jay Gatsby & Daisy Buchanan
Daisy being phony towards Gatsby.. acting as if she actually cares about their love.
Nick, Gatsby, Tom, and Daisy.
Gatsby trying to win over Daisy by becoming fake.
What Kind of A Life Do You Want to Pursue? Genuine or Fake? Start With High School
Imagine a world full of real genuine people. Imagine a world without the idea of fake. Picture a world full of value, full of truth and depth. In a world like this people would be putting meaning into their lives. Their lives would be lived for a purpose. I believe society would succeed if this were the case. Unfortunately, fake does exist in our world today. I see most examples of this in the new generation, in my own high school more specifically. The way for this society to succeed is to flush the idea of fake out, run from it, and run towards things that are real and are going to lead us to a rewarding life. In order to do this, we must set our priorities straight. Fake concepts such as popularity and self-image are what most people in high school care about. This is our new generation. Why should we focus on subjects like this? Why are these the most important aspects of a high school student’s life today? Some might agree that many high school students do not have their priorities in the right order. I would like to know how these issues would help you later on in life when things actually matter. I would like to know how a generation that is focused on fake things, such as popularity and self-image, would succeed. Look at your best friend, or the person you hang out with the most, you will soon find yourself acting like them or adapting some of their habits. Your priorities in life are just like this. The more you focus on fake priorities, the more fake you become. Fake priorities will only lead you to failure. The more you focus on genuine priorities, the more genuine you become. Genuine priorities will only lead you to benefit your future and achieve success. I guarantee living a true life will give you a small amount of regrets. Priorities in high school consist of many things. Most of these priorities include partying, having a lot of popular friends, and relationships that everyone knows about. All of these priorities are fake and unimportant to your future. This is usually what the fake crowd is about. These are the priorities that change a person because they care about their image so much that they make these parties, friendships, and relationships their image, which causes a genuine person to become fake. I believe there are many genuine people in this world, but they get sucked into this idea of giving into fake unimportant things that as life goes on they gradually become fake and unimportant people once high school is over. At the beginning of the novel, The Great Gatsby, we quickly learn to trust the narrator Nick. Nick is a genuine person; therefore we take what he says to be true. “Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction…” (Fitzgerald, 2), says Nick. This quote leads us to believe that Gatsby, like a high school student today, was a genuine person who eventually went down the wrong path and prioritized the real things in his life poorly. As we see in The Great Gatsby, everything Gatsby did in his life, like striving to be wealthier and boost up his self-image was in order to get Daisy to fall in love with him. Daisy was Gatsby’s ultimate priority. I think the love on Gatsby’s end towards Daisy was genuine, and the love on Daisy’s end was fake. Everything Daisy represents is fake. If Gatsby, being a genuine person, makes Daisy, a fake person, his first priority then Gatsby will eventually become this idea of fake and this lead to failure in his future. If Gatsby would have stopped going down this fake path, and went back to his genuine roots, he could have had a better life without Daisy and ultimately could have lived. Gatsby could've been a successful person and could've lived much greater life than the life he had. Gatsby had everything you could possibly think of, the only thing missing was Daisy who was the fake obstacle in his life, which caused him to change. Gatsby could have found another genuine girl to replace Daisy. This girl would have been far better than Daisy. A girl that loved him, a girl that he didn't have to change himself for, and a girl who ultimately could have led him to a beneficial life. Clearly Gatsby’s priorities were not set straight. Jay Gatsby had the potential to have a life full of happiness and success, but just like high school students today, he had his mind set on the wrong things. Why should we continue to let fake unimportant things, such as self-image and self –image, like Daisy, hold us back when we could be focusing and achieving productive genuine things to push us forward in life? If we want high school to lead us to a meaningful life, we should pursue real or genuine subjects in life. If we don’t want high school to lead us to a life full of failure and destruction, we should destroy the idea of fake and take it out of our priorities.
One thing we see in our high school every day is the idea of fake popularity and self-image. Partying, having a lot of popular friends, and relationships that everyone knows about are specific examples that come to mind easily when thinking of these subjects. As high school students we invest a lot of our time and passion into self-image and relationships, whether it be friendships or a relationship with a significant other. To be loved and accepted is something every high school student wants in his or her life. They will search high and low to find these things. The problem with this idea is that they don't care enough about the aspect of truly being loved and accepted for who they are. People want to look cool and hope that they can boost up their image by partying all the time, hosting parties, or eventually screwing up their lives by drinking or doing drugs all the time. People want to have a lot of friends so that they can say that they do and make it look like they all are the best of friends who have a great time and that they have no problems in their friend group. That is the fake image they put up because they do have problems, there is so much drama in fake friend groups such as people feeling left out, someone backstabbing someone else, someone gossiping about another, or someone liking the same person as another. People also want the hottest boyfriend or girlfriend and care more about talking about it and making it known than they do actually caring about the person. They also use each other until they tangle themselves up into this emotional mess that they wish they’d never gotten into, until they feel like it is the end of the world because they invested so much time into each other. I have experienced the friend group’s aspect of things during a time in which one of my best friends would have rather had a big group of fake friends, to show fake love and acceptance rather than have one genuine friend like me to stick with. I came to the conclusion that I was not the only one dealing with friends like this. Everyone wants a group; everyone wants somewhere that they can fit in. If you are changing yourself to fit in with these other fake people then how are you fitting in at all? People change themselves all the time. People need to keep changing themselves if they want to keep climbing up the social ladder. In my eyes ten years will go by and we will probably not know half the people we know at our high school today. If this won't matter in the long run, why keep changing ourselves to alter our image to impress others at our high school that we probably won’t know later on in life? Why should we keep dealing with fake people and why should we start becoming these fake people? Why do we want to spend our time with people that act like their real selves around us and act a completely different fake way around others to alter their self-image? Why do we want friends who will backstab us just for the change in social status? These things might seem very important now. It may seem like the end of the world when you are all alone because everyone is partying and you’re not because that’s who you are. It may seem like life is over at the moment because your boyfriend or girlfriend of 1 year broke up with you and all that precious time was lost, but if we keep pouring our heart and soul into these untrustworthy and fake people, we become them and we will hurt rather than if we would have chosen to do things right. We see many examples of consuming yourself with fake ideas in The Great Gatsby. We see the way Daisy acts towards Gatsby when they're alone. She gives him false hope that she loves him, but ultimately back stabs him in the end by choosing Tom in order to save her social status. The more Gatsby surrounds himself with her the more you start to see him failing. Another example is when none of Gatsby's "friends" show up to his funeral. Meyer Wolfsheim was one of Gatsby's great friends, and he wrote a letter saying he could not make it to the funeral for the sake of himself. He stated, "I cannot come down now as I am tied up in some very important business and cannot get mixed up in this thing now"(Fitzgerald, 166). Now I don't know about you, but would you want to consume yourself with these fake friendships and relationships and then realize in the end that some of these people from high school probably won't even show up to your funeral and are only here for the time being? I am not by any means saying not to have friends or have any fun in high school, but there is a right and wrong way to do it. I am just suggesting not making parties, fake relationships and fake friendships (things that reflect self-image and popularity) your first priority in high school. It will destroy you.
In conclusion, I think our generation focuses way too much on fake things that are not going to be important in the long run. We do not have our priorities in order and I think this will hurt the future of our generation. There are so many good, true and genuinely beneficial things to focus on in high school. Some of these things include school work, clubs, extra curricular activities, having legal fun with your friends and being yourself, and having few but real friendships. These subjects of life are the real things that will lead us to a bright beneficial future. Country singer phenomenon, Brad Paisley wrote in his song Letter to Me, "And oh you got so much going for you going right, But I know at 17 it's hard to see past Friday night, I wish you'd study Spanish, I wish you'd take a typing class, I wish you wouldn't worry, let it be, I'd say have a little faith and you'll see". Brad Paisley explains how he wasted so much time thinking too seriously about fake and unimportant things in high school such as fake relationships etc. He talks about how he wished at 17 he would have spent his time wisely instead of stressing out about these stupid fake things in a high school student’s life. These aspects in high school may seem like it's the end of our world at the moment and may seem like our life will end in failure like Gatsby's life did, but if we focus on the better things that will help our future and we don't prioritize poorly or have the same mind set as Gatsby we won't fail like he did. If we pursue a meaningful life, we will succeed.