In late 2012, the acronym YOLO entered pop culture for a brief period of time. 'You Only Live Once' is supposed to express a kind of happy-go-lucky mode of living in the moment; without giving a jot about the consequences. YOLO for a time, became the motto of people about to do something really stupid, or people about to do something which they would temporarily enter woo-mode for, such as drinking excessive amounts of fermented vegetable product¹ in a short space of time, or some kind of mild but ultimately silly attempt at temporary happiness like jumping in a river.
Of course the acronym is utterly pointless to Buddhists and other people who believe in reincarnation, as they do not believe that you do only live once but live many times. YALA 'You Always Live Again', which I assume is the Buddhist equivalent of this phrase, never really caught on though.
As with all vapid and ultimately substanceless things that pass by in the never ending pop culture parade, YOLO eventually faded; just like 'girl dinner' and lime green 'brat summer' have done in the more recent past. YOLO as a concept has also faded due to the fact that the people who would have become obnoxious teenagers and party people in their early 20s just haven't been replaced with anywhere near as much disposable income, even as in 2012, and their ability or even desire to drink excessive amounts of fermented vegetable product in a short space of time, or even adopt a happy-go-lucky mode of living in the moment, has very much been tempered and quelled by the demands of having to pay even more of what little income they get in rent, to their grandparents. The fact that we have struggling nightclubs in my city but record numbers of cruise ships arriving, where the average age of people taking a cruise is 79, tells you where the rewards of the economy are actually going.
In contrast as we cooked away in a Penrith train doing 6km/h, because of blank signals further up the line, I heard the guard in the rear car having a discussion with someone about WOLO happening up ahead. Yes, you read that right. WOLO; not YOLO.
WOLO?
Why Only Live Once?
What On the Livingearth is going On?
WOLO signs generally indicate that either due to the heat, or signal failure, or places where points are locked, or places where the dead man's arm hasn't raised, et cetera, that there are speed restrictions on the line ahead. This might be because the maintenance engineers have determined that there is a chance that the track could buckle, or that the points might unlock, or that because signals are not working that drivers may enter the block but purely operating on sight rules only.
In trying to determine what WOLO actually means, I found several operations manuals across Australia, and even the explanation of "Welded track Operations for LOcomotives" but this has to be a backronym. Unless a car in a set starts with a T to indicate that it is a Trailer car, then they are some kind of drive car in an Electrical Multiple Unit (EMU) or Diesel Multiple Unit (DMU). Actual Locomotives on the railways, are almost exclusively found on freight trains; with the most common exception being the XPT with Locomotives at either end of the train.
WOLO as it turns out, is likely to be nothing more than a code word; which was picked because a telegraph operator could memorise this and tap it out in a hurry. I have not actually found the NSW Railway Telegraphic Code Library but the existence of this tome is referred to a lot; which apparently contains more than 100 four-letter codes which telegraph operator would use to transmit messages around the system in a hurry (RYZY apparently means² that a particular box car has malfunctioning Westinghouse brakes and needs to have some other system applied to them; such as squeeze retarders in a hump yard). If this story is true, then WOLO is like flying the yellow Q-Flag for Quarantine, or the black flag with a red circle on it which is "The Meatball" flag and indicates that a car has a mechanical failure and is forcibly being retired from a motor race. WOLO as both the telegraphic code in the past, and now just as a word on a sign, is about communicating things in a hurry; which is ironic given that the thing being communicated in a hurry is an instruction to move slowly.
Speaking as someone whose days ahead of them are fewer than the days already passed, the benefit of applied and forced wisdom, after also having both the yellow Q-Flag and the Meatball flag applied in life, YOLO and WOLO look very much like two-sides of the same coin.
WOLO signs are about posting limits on operation before a train running over the tracks causes a critical failure. This seems to me to be a useful analogy when it comes to mental health. As I am not a psychologist, concepts like boundary setting and developing resiliance sound fine in the abstract, but I neither have the ability to offer any kind of advice; nor should I do so.
People generally do not need to be told YOLO before they embark upon some mildly amusing/bonkers/irresponsible endeavour but weirdly people almost always seem to need to be given permission to WOLO. Sometimes people need to be told WOLO or else suffer burnout, or some other kind of mental health failure. Humans are strange. For reasons that make no sense to me whatsoever, as someone who grew up and learned that being bored was acceptable, that watching clouds go by was fine, whose internal monologue was/is constant so I'd better put some kind of output instrument in front of it, that when people say that they can't stop, it makes zero sense to me.
¹Bread makes people happy. Fermented vegetable product makes people laugh. Money makes the world go round.
²RYZY is different to Skibidi RIZZ Toilet.
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