YOLO

Recently I heard about YOLO as in, You Only Live Once. The implications are clear. Forget about getting it right the next time; you may not get a next time. It follows that you had better get busy because, as we are so often told, life is too short.

Some of you know my thinking, which is life should be long enough, if you live it right. There is a big difference however, between enjoying life fully and racing everybody around to grab all you can…so others don’t get it first. As with so much else, your attitude matters considerably more than the length of time you get in chronological time.

Somewhere around the mid 1700’s Adam Smith revolutionarily proposed that life is expansive and we need not feel life is a zero sum game, as had been previously thought. In other words life is not a pie which will be exhausted if we don’t get and grab what it offers first, ahead of others competing with us for a limited benefit.

Instead, Smith felt that man is capable of increasing and building upon what we see now and creating new things which make it possible for ourselves, and everyone else also, to build upon and add to what we had before.

When we believe that we can take whatever we are given, add whatever life throws at us to work with, deal with and that whatever obstacles we have found, we can feel confidence that we should be able to use our brains to live a good, even prosperous life, regardless of what life throws our way.

If we are more pessimistic, however, we might be inclined to doubt our own abilities to overcome the obstacles in life, especially if we think that other people are both untrustworthy and think only of their own interests and what benefits them. Such a view likely perceives life as full of challenges and probably makes them feel that it is hard to overcome all the trials and impediments they expect are inevitable.

You can think that you only live once, so you need to take all you can from life, because this tough place forces you to give as good as you get and struggle for every single thing from birth to death.

Alternatively you can think that you only live once, in this glorious, multi-faceted and extraordinary place so you want to savour and enjoy and contribute to making it even better for yourself and those around you.

To me how you live, depends inevitably in the choices you make about whether life is bountiful and good, or difficult and filled with a never ending series of challenges and obstacles. 

As with so many things, whether you enjoy the fact that YOLO, you only live once, or not, still comes down to how you decide you feel about life and the way you decide to live it.