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The thing about choice is that all choice involves loss.
On a certain level, this is easy to understand, even as a child or adolescent. The time I spent eating ice cream and reading hot novels today cannot be taken back and applied to carrot sticks and exercise. The time I spent learning to swim cannot be changed to time spent learning to ride horses. On the more abstract levels, I think it's more difficult for us to understand: the time spent mastering one kind of art or building a certain relationship cannot be swapped for knowledge of another field or the intimacy of a different relationship.
Time is a finite quantity for most of us, and the choices we make about how to spend that time are made in the context of a zero sum game. Some young people try to rig the game through sleep deprivation, drugs (caffeine, nicotine, speed) or other substances, but the idea that sleeping less in the short term = more time in the long term is a lie. The damage to our concentration, attention, and ability to learn and do new things, not to mention the damage to our health, that drugs and sleep deprivation cause mean that as much time is lost as is gained.
When we're young we are full of potential, and making decisions about how to use that potential can hurt. It hurts because those decisions block off parts of our potential. But if we don't make those decisions, we lose all our potential.
I get frustrated because I've seen a lot of art that glamorizes uncommitted potential, or the act of making that first choice. But I've seen very little art that shows us how to become reconciled, in an adult way, to the fact that all choices come with regrets. The fact that a choice includes regret doesn't mean it was a bad choice, or the wrong choice. A lot of art shows us the person who is crippled by their regret over a choice they made - longing for the lover who "got away", sadness about choosing one career over another. Art rarely shows us that the alternative to that kind of regret can be the sadness of having no lover, no career, no path at all. Robert Frost has his poem about the Road Not Taken, and it's true that it is a sweet kind of longing to look back at those other paths and imagine who we would be if we had walked them. But a lot of people just stand there, frozen, at the fork in the road.
I like to fantasize about what might have been if I'd done something differently, I think we all do. The spirit of the staircase. The one who got away. If I'd only known. But y'know, I've never met anyone who looks back with regret and says "if only I'd taken no action at all."
On a certain level, this is easy to understand, even as a child or adolescent. The time I spent eating ice cream and reading hot novels today cannot be taken back and applied to carrot sticks and exercise. The time I spent learning to swim cannot be changed to time spent learning to ride horses. On the more abstract levels, I think it's more difficult for us to understand: the time spent mastering one kind of art or building a certain relationship cannot be swapped for knowledge of another field or the intimacy of a different relationship.
Time is a finite quantity for most of us, and the choices we make about how to spend that time are made in the context of a zero sum game. Some young people try to rig the game through sleep deprivation, drugs (caffeine, nicotine, speed) or other substances, but the idea that sleeping less in the short term = more time in the long term is a lie. The damage to our concentration, attention, and ability to learn and do new things, not to mention the damage to our health, that drugs and sleep deprivation cause mean that as much time is lost as is gained.
When we're young we are full of potential, and making decisions about how to use that potential can hurt. It hurts because those decisions block off parts of our potential. But if we don't make those decisions, we lose all our potential.
I get frustrated because I've seen a lot of art that glamorizes uncommitted potential, or the act of making that first choice. But I've seen very little art that shows us how to become reconciled, in an adult way, to the fact that all choices come with regrets. The fact that a choice includes regret doesn't mean it was a bad choice, or the wrong choice. A lot of art shows us the person who is crippled by their regret over a choice they made - longing for the lover who "got away", sadness about choosing one career over another. Art rarely shows us that the alternative to that kind of regret can be the sadness of having no lover, no career, no path at all. Robert Frost has his poem about the Road Not Taken, and it's true that it is a sweet kind of longing to look back at those other paths and imagine who we would be if we had walked them. But a lot of people just stand there, frozen, at the fork in the road.
I like to fantasize about what might have been if I'd done something differently, I think we all do. The spirit of the staircase. The one who got away. If I'd only known. But y'know, I've never met anyone who looks back with regret and says "if only I'd taken no action at all."
