A small personal note before we begin.
I don’t usually like interrupting the philosophy with a request for money, but I want to be honest about where PHI is right now.
My laptop situation still isn’t solved. I’m continuing to save toward getting one, and in the meantime, I’m relying on cyber cafés to research, write, edit, and publish PHI.
This week, I’m trying to cover $50 in cyber café costs so I can keep working without having to pause the project.
If PHI has ever made you stop, think, question something you normally take for granted, or simply feel less alone in your own thoughts, and you’re in a position to help, I’d genuinely appreciate it.
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You don’t need to give a lot. Even a small contribution helps me keep the work going.
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Thank you for being here.
Now, let’s talk about something none of us can avoid.
There are things you can learn at twenty that you will understand completely differently at fifty.
There are things you can spend your entire life avoiding, only to discover that avoiding them never made them less true.
And there are things you may only understand when it is already too late to do anything about them.
These aren’t rules for living.
They aren’t ten steps to becoming successful.
They are simply things I think we should understand while we still have time.
1. Most of what worries you will eventually disappear
Think about something that consumed you five years ago.
A rejection.
An embarrassing moment.
Someone’s opinion of you.
A mistake you couldn’t stop replaying.
A person you thought you couldn’t live without.
At the time, it probably felt enormous.
Now?
You may barely remember it.
We have a strange relationship with the present. Whatever is happening right now feels permanent because we are trapped inside it.
But almost everything changes.
The embarrassment passes.
The argument ends.
The job changes.
The friendship changes.
The body changes.
The city changes.
You change.
This doesn’t mean your problems aren’t real.
It means you should be careful about giving temporary things permanent authority over your life.
One day, something that feels unbearable today may become nothing more than a memory you haven’t thought about in years.
And yet we sacrifice entire days to things that won’t survive the month.
2. Most people are not thinking about you nearly as much as you think
You walk into a room and wonder how you look.
You post something and check who liked it.
You say something awkward and spend the next three days replaying it.
You make a mistake and imagine everyone noticed.
But everyone else is usually busy managing their own insecurities.
The person you’re afraid is judging your appearance may be worrying about theirs.
The person you think has everything figured out may be terrified that everyone else has noticed they don’t.
We spend enormous amounts of our lives performing for an imaginary audience.
And eventually, most of that audience forgets.
This can sound depressing.
It isn’t.
It’s freedom.
You have been given permission to be less impressive.
To make the thing you actually want to make.
To wear the strange clothes.
To say what you actually think.
To change your mind.
To start again.
You don’t need to spend your entire life maintaining an image for people who are mostly occupied with themselves.
3. You will lose people you think you cannot live without
This is one we don’t like to think about.
Some people will leave because the relationship ends.
Some will leave because life takes you in different directions.
And some will die.
There is no philosophy clever enough to remove that fact.
The people you love are temporary.
So are you.
And perhaps that is precisely why ordinary moments deserve more attention than we give them.
The conversation you almost skipped.
The meal you were too busy to enjoy.
The phone call you said you’d return later.
The person sitting across from you while you were distracted by something happening on a screen.
We often imagine that the important moments will announce themselves.
They usually don’t.
A completely ordinary Tuesday can contain a moment you will one day desperately wish you could experience again.
You just won’t know it was important while it was happening.
4. You can spend your entire life becoming someone you never wanted to be
This one may be the most dangerous.
You can become successful at a life you never consciously chose.
You can chase money because everyone around you treats money as proof of worth.
You can pursue a career because your parents wanted it.
You can stay in a relationship because leaving would disappoint people.
You can spend years trying to look successful rather than asking whether you are actually happy with the life you’re building.
And because you’re making progress, nobody asks the most important question.
Progress toward what?
A ladder can be climbed very successfully while leaning against the wrong wall.
The frightening thing is that you may not notice until you’ve climbed very high.
So occasionally stop.
Not to ask whether you’re succeeding.
Ask:
Do I actually want the life I’m becoming successful at creating?
Those are not the same question.
5. Being busy is not the same as living
We have made busyness into a virtue.
“I’ve been so busy.”
It almost sounds like proof that your life matters.
But you can be busy for twenty years and never get closer to anything important.
You can answer emails.
Attend meetings.
Scroll.
Work overtime.
Run errands.
Make money.
Make plans.
And still never actually inhabit your life.
There is a difference between having a full life and having a full calendar.
A full calendar tells you where your time went.
It doesn’t tell you whether it was worth giving.
One day you will look back and realize that your life wasn’t made from the major events you kept waiting for.
It was made from Tuesday mornings.
Five-minute conversations.
Walks.
Meals.
Books.
Arguments.
Laughter.
Silence.
The moments you barely noticed because you were waiting for something more important to begin.
6. You are going to lose almost everything you own
Your phone.
Your clothes.
Your car.
Your apartment.
Your bank balance.
Your certificates.
Your photographs.
Eventually, even the body you’re so careful to maintain.
None of these things are wrong to enjoy.
The problem begins when we confuse having something with being something.
You can own a beautiful house and still be miserable inside it.
You can have very little and still experience an extraordinary life.
Material things are useful.
They can make life easier.
They can create comfort and opportunity.
But they cannot answer the question of what your life was for.
At some point, the accumulation stops.
There is no storage room attached to the grave.
You leave with nothing you managed to keep.
But you also leave something behind.
The effect you had on people.
The things you created.
The memories you gave someone.
The courage you inspired.
The damage you caused.
The love you gave.
That is a different kind of inheritance.
7. You don’t get to know when the last time is
This may be the cruelest feature of being alive.
You rarely know when something is happening for the last time.
The last time you see an old friend.
The last time you sleep in your childhood home.
The last time your parents tell you to be careful.
The last time you walk through a familiar street.
The last time you hear someone’s voice.
The last ordinary conversation before someone becomes a memory.
If we knew something was the last time, we would probably pay attention.
But life doesn’t tell us.
It simply keeps moving.
That means the only way to appreciate the last time is to understand that every time could be one.
Not so you become paranoid.
Not so you spend your life terrified of loss.
But so you stop treating everything familiar as permanent.
Familiarity is one of the greatest disguises impermanence wears.
8. You are running out of time even when you feel like you aren’t
When you’re young, death feels like an abstract event belonging to other people.
There will always be more time.
Later.
Next year.
When I have money.
When work settles down.
When I’m less busy.
When I’m ready.
But “later” is one of the most dangerous words in the human vocabulary.
Because later feels like a place.
It isn’t.
It’s a possibility.
And possibilities disappear.
The older you become, the more you realize that life isn’t simply about how much time you’ve lived.
It’s about how much of that time you actually inhabited.
You can live eighty years and spend most of them postponing yourself.
Or you can become fully awake to your life much earlier.
Nobody knows how much time they have.
That’s why the question isn’t:
“How long do I have?”
You don’t know.
The better question is:
“What am I doing with the time I know I have?”
And then there is the final thing.
The thing underneath all the others.
9. One day, you will not get another chance
There will be a final opportunity to apologize.
A final opportunity to say “I love you.”
A final opportunity to make something.
A final opportunity to change direction.
A final opportunity to tell someone what they meant to you.
And eventually, a final opportunity for everything.
Death doesn’t only mean that your life ends.
It means your ability to revise your life ends.
No more correcting the sentence.
No more adding another chapter.
No more saying:
I’ll do it someday.
This is why death is such an uncomfortable teacher.
It doesn’t tell you exactly what to value.
It simply removes the illusion that you have unlimited time to figure it out.
And perhaps that is enough.
Because if you knew that your life was infinite, nothing would have to matter today.
Everything could wait.
But it isn’t infinite.
You are here.
For now.
And the people you love are here.
For now.
The ordinary day you’re living is here.
For now.
That means something.
Not because the universe has promised that your life has a grand purpose.
Not because everything happens for a reason.
Not because you are destined to become extraordinary.
But because this is the life you actually have.
And there is no guarantee of another one.
So perhaps we should stop asking only:
“What do I want from life?”
And occasionally ask the harder question:
“What is my life asking from me?”
Maybe it is asking you to stop postponing the conversation.
Maybe it is asking you to leave.
Maybe it is asking you to stay.
Maybe it is asking you to create something nobody asked you to create.
Maybe it is asking you to forgive someone.
Maybe it is asking you to forgive yourself.
Maybe it is asking you to finally admit that the life you’ve been chasing isn’t yours.
I don’t know.
Neither does anyone else.
That’s part of the terrifying beauty of being alive.
You don’t get the ending first.
You have to live your way toward it.
And eventually, whether you are ready or not, the world will continue without you.
Someone else will sit in your chair.
Someone else will walk through your neighborhood.
Someone else will use the things you once owned.
Your name will become less familiar.
The conversations you had will become memories in someone else’s mind.
And eventually, even those memories may disappear.
That isn’t necessarily a tragedy.
It may simply be what it means to be human.
We are temporary.
So are our mistakes.
So are our victories.
So are our fears.
So are the things we love.
Perhaps the point isn’t to somehow defeat impermanence.
Perhaps the point is to stop demanding permanence before allowing something to matter.
You don’t refuse to love someone because they will die.
You don’t refuse to watch a sunset because it will disappear.
You don’t refuse to listen to a song because it will end.
Maybe life works the same way.
It doesn’t have to last forever to be worth experiencing.
And you don’t need to understand everything before you begin living.
But while you still have the chance, there are a few questions worth carrying with you:
Who are you becoming?
What are you postponing?
Who deserves more of your attention?
What are you giving your limited years to?
And perhaps the hardest one:
If you knew you had less time than you think, would you live differently?
You probably would.
The uncomfortable part is that you already know you don’t have forever.
You just don’t know how much you have left.
So maybe don’t wait for death to teach you what life was trying to say all along.