A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.
I caught myself the other day being amazed at how much my students have bought into the value system of contemporary society. Not all of the values of our modern world are wrong or bad, but much of it has been twisted. Our culture today, exaggerated by mass media, focuses too much on certain aspects of life that are in the long run very shallow and unfulfilling.
But then I remembered, I used to be like that too.
How do you tell someone that they are really alive, and that they can find the strength to swim upstream too?