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How to Avoid Dying Old and Bitter
Or being young and bitter, for that matter
One day you’ll be gone.
It might not be the most pleasant thing to think about. But you already know that nobody can live forever. Chances are pretty good that death has touched your life in some way already. You likely have a family member, spouse, or friend has already moved on.
The Stoic philosopher Seneca wrote: “We are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it.”
But knowing “how to use it” is the key, and it’s different for everyone. But the real challenge is figuring out what to do with the time we have, it having the guts to do it.
Here’s a hard truth. As we get older, we lie to ourselves more.
We tell ourselves we can’t afford to try new things, that the cost of failure is too high. People will laugh at us, we think. We have an image to protect, after all. Besides, all those big dreams are for idealistic twenty-somethings. Not us — we’re realistic. As my grandfather used to say, “I’m too old of a cat to get scratched by a kitten.”
So we stop trying.
We give up on those dreams we had when we were young, and tell ourselves the lie that they…
