Yesterday I wrote about the importance of taking the long-term view of life and not giving in to the common advice of living like you would die tomorrow.
The best way I can conceptualize this idea into a life philosophy is through a food analogy.
Life is like eating at a buffet.
Not just any buffet, the greatest buffet ever created. A buffet that adds food choices at an incredible rate, so you know you will never be able to choose them all. And a buffet with a special wrinkle–you are going to be banned for eternity at an unknowable time.
At some point, you will be kicked out of the buffet and never allowed to return. You can tell from the people around you that it tends to be the people who have been there the longest who get kicked out, but sometimes it is newcomers, and sometimes it just seems random.
How would you choose your course of action in such a buffet?
First, you would want to try as much food as you could, and you would want to eat the best food there.
To do that, you would need to pace your eating. You wouldn’t gorge yourself like you would if you had a one-hour time limit, but the uncertainty would keep some pressure to eat quickly.
You would strike a balance between eating lots of options quickly while also saving room to try more.
That is the same way I believe we should approach life. We are presented with endless options of cool stuff to try and have to grapple with the fact that we only have a limited amount of time to try it.
You can be pretty confident that you have 70 years to live, but it is a small but real possibility that you could die this year. So you should not waste a second, but you shouldn’t destroy your ability to enjoy a probable future for the sake of a certain present.
You should eat lots of food at the buffet, but not so many that you’re going to be sick and slip into a food coma while you could still be eating.
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