Would The Story of Your Life Be a Best-Seller?
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you are right tourist. im usually the one who likes wordplay but you beat me to it. Ironically I LOVE BIG DESSERTS too! that's why I'm overweight. 
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I can't take credit. It was in Randal Monroe's "Every Major's Terrible."
https://xkcd.com/1052/
The part I recited is somewhere in the next-to-last row.
https://xkcd.com/1052/
The part I recited is somewhere in the next-to-last row.
The more I think about this song, the more I like how the problem is phrased - and the more I think I should make another answer to this thread's OP.
"I've been to paradise
But I've never been to me"
To have a balanced life you really need to find out what is in the world. You also need to figure out who you are. But both objectives need to be worked on at the same time because each reflects the other, and each affects the other. The more you find out about the world around you, the more it changes who you are. The more you discover who you are, the more you understand about how you can use the world around you. To focus on one and leave the other undone is like building a house by piling a house-worth of bricks in a pile, then trying to organize it from the ground up, or by trying to build a house out of air and say you will leave the bricks for whenever you get around to them. You have to bring bricks in a few at a time and put them where they go as they come in.
If you focus on experiences and neglect self discovery, your life becomes a race to fill time with activity. (This has become a lot easier with smartphones.) Eventually you can't bear a single moment without something to occupy your attention. You will become either a globe-trotter or somebody perpetually glued to your phone (depending on available money.) You will not be able to tolerate quiet time, because you are not accustomed to introspection and eventually you grow to fear it... so you look for another knob to turn up the volume a little louder and drown your thoughts out.
If you focus on who you are and put the world on hold until you get the perfect job, find the perfect spouse, get the perfect life established, you will never get around to exploring the world around you. You will spend your whole life waiting until everything is in shape, promising yourself that someday you will do this and see that and go there... but you never will, because "everything is complicated right now, but maybe next year" until there are no more next years. You can know exactly who you are, but the longer you let the world slip by the harder it becomes to jump into the world, until finally you give up pretending you will ever make the leap.
I have known a lot of people who choose one of these, make it their whole life and wind up at the end of life bitter and disappointed. But I also know a lot of people who take both of them at the same time and have great lives. I have never known anybody to take one or the other and be happy, and I have never known anybody who took both at once and regretted it.
"I've been to paradise
But I've never been to me"
To have a balanced life you really need to find out what is in the world. You also need to figure out who you are. But both objectives need to be worked on at the same time because each reflects the other, and each affects the other. The more you find out about the world around you, the more it changes who you are. The more you discover who you are, the more you understand about how you can use the world around you. To focus on one and leave the other undone is like building a house by piling a house-worth of bricks in a pile, then trying to organize it from the ground up, or by trying to build a house out of air and say you will leave the bricks for whenever you get around to them. You have to bring bricks in a few at a time and put them where they go as they come in.
If you focus on experiences and neglect self discovery, your life becomes a race to fill time with activity. (This has become a lot easier with smartphones.) Eventually you can't bear a single moment without something to occupy your attention. You will become either a globe-trotter or somebody perpetually glued to your phone (depending on available money.) You will not be able to tolerate quiet time, because you are not accustomed to introspection and eventually you grow to fear it... so you look for another knob to turn up the volume a little louder and drown your thoughts out.
If you focus on who you are and put the world on hold until you get the perfect job, find the perfect spouse, get the perfect life established, you will never get around to exploring the world around you. You will spend your whole life waiting until everything is in shape, promising yourself that someday you will do this and see that and go there... but you never will, because "everything is complicated right now, but maybe next year" until there are no more next years. You can know exactly who you are, but the longer you let the world slip by the harder it becomes to jump into the world, until finally you give up pretending you will ever make the leap.
I have known a lot of people who choose one of these, make it their whole life and wind up at the end of life bitter and disappointed. But I also know a lot of people who take both of them at the same time and have great lives. I have never known anybody to take one or the other and be happy, and I have never known anybody who took both at once and regretted it.
REWRITE OF RESPONSE TO THE THREAD OP:
If a book were written about my life it might be in the self-help section. I'm not sure what I would put in it. Maybe somebody else would have to write it. But I seem to have, without conscious decision or deliberate effort, incorporated the tenth commandment and a lot of I Timothy 6:6 into my life, and I'm fairly happy with the result.
My life wouldn't be in the adventure section, because there isn't much adventure in it. It wouldn't be in comedy, though I do like to hear and make jokes. I'm not much on arts and crafts, nor am I big on sports, so my life wouldn't have anything to do with those areas of the book store. Self-help seems like self-aggrandizement, but that's the best place I can think of to fit my life in a book store. Quite without trying to, I seem to have found a way to be happy.
Of course I'm not perfect. The book would have to chronicle the times I ignored what I knew, because I thought something would make me happier, even though it went against what I know. But it usually didn't take me too long to get my fingers burnt and figure out why I'm supposed to avoid that.
There would have to be a BIG acknowledgements page. Most of what I have learned has been from watching others and seeing whether their lives turned out well or not. (Protip 1: Old cranky people are not to be considered successful at life. They got through life, but it turned them into bitter old grumps. Old happy people are much better role models.) (Protip 2: Learn from the mistakes of others. You'll never have enough time in one life to make them all yourself.) I have made some experiments with life myself, but when other people are already making most of them around me I'd rather see how they turn out for other people before I test them myself. So I have avoided a lot of bad things in life, and been guided to many good things, by watching other people.
If a book were written about my life it might be in the self-help section. I'm not sure what I would put in it. Maybe somebody else would have to write it. But I seem to have, without conscious decision or deliberate effort, incorporated the tenth commandment and a lot of I Timothy 6:6 into my life, and I'm fairly happy with the result.
My life wouldn't be in the adventure section, because there isn't much adventure in it. It wouldn't be in comedy, though I do like to hear and make jokes. I'm not much on arts and crafts, nor am I big on sports, so my life wouldn't have anything to do with those areas of the book store. Self-help seems like self-aggrandizement, but that's the best place I can think of to fit my life in a book store. Quite without trying to, I seem to have found a way to be happy.
Of course I'm not perfect. The book would have to chronicle the times I ignored what I knew, because I thought something would make me happier, even though it went against what I know. But it usually didn't take me too long to get my fingers burnt and figure out why I'm supposed to avoid that.
There would have to be a BIG acknowledgements page. Most of what I have learned has been from watching others and seeing whether their lives turned out well or not. (Protip 1: Old cranky people are not to be considered successful at life. They got through life, but it turned them into bitter old grumps. Old happy people are much better role models.) (Protip 2: Learn from the mistakes of others. You'll never have enough time in one life to make them all yourself.) I have made some experiments with life myself, but when other people are already making most of them around me I'd rather see how they turn out for other people before I test them myself. So I have avoided a lot of bad things in life, and been guided to many good things, by watching other people.
Maybe my life story would be called, "What I Have Figured Out So Far..." That's all each of us can tell, what we have figured out up to this point. Each generation builds on what the last generation has figured out, and goes on to work on a bit more of the puzzle of life.
Or sometimes a generation ignores what its predecessors have learned and thinks "We know better than those old fogeys." But that never turns out well.
Or sometimes a generation ignores what its predecessors have learned and thinks "We know better than those old fogeys." But that never turns out well.
M
Nah. I'd sell it for 0.99 on Kindle and have a handful fanatical followers, but it wouldn't be a best-seller.
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