That's Life

Hunter S. Thompson, at the age of 20, gave this piece of advice on life to a friend. He started with the Hamlet quote on choices:
“To be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles…

And indeed, that IS the question: whether to float with the tide, or to swim for a goal. It is a choice we must all make consciously or unconsciously at one time in our lives…A man who procrastinates in his CHOOSING will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance.”
Thompson recommends avoiding setting goals for life:
“Beware of looking for goals: look for a way of life. Decide how you want to live and then see what you can do to make a living WITHIN that way of life.”

While Thompson’s advice makes sense, it is very hard to follow. That is why most people tend to look back and feel that if only a few choices had been made differently, life would have been so much better. But Alex Balk disagrees:
 “If we are honest with ourselves we can admit that, for the most part, we were going to wind up exactly where we did no matter what.”
Not true, you argue. Life has those blue pill or the red pill choices, a la The Matrix, you say. Not so, argues Balk:
“You've fucked up your life through an accretion of small details, not by one or two enormous errors.”
That is why Balk concludes that:
“It is pointless to pine for a do-over; you would just do it over badly.”

Balk (sadly) may well be right, because as he points out:
“For most of us the John Lennon line about life being what happens when you're making other plans seems academic at first but, as the years go by, passes through phases of being something funny, something clever, something understandable and then something cruel.”

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