THE NOBLEST THING ABOUT HUMANITY...

You ever notice that people spend their entire lives trying to get more time? Not enjoy more time. Not appreciate more time. Just acquire it. Like it’s real estate.

Everybody’s trying to save time. Save time with this app. Save time with this service. Save time with this gadget. Save time with this life hack. And for what? Nobody ever reaches the end and says: “Well, good news. I saved fourteen years. Now what?”

The strange thing is that time is the one thing people claim is valuable while treating it like pocket lint. A guy will spend three hours researching the cheapest airline ticket to save twenty-seven dollars. Three hours! The man has essentially informed the universe that his existence is worth nine bucks an hour. Then he feels victorious:
“I beat the system.”

No, the system beat you. It just let you keep the receipt. That’s adulthood, by the way. As a kid, adulthood looks amazing. Adults can stay up as late as they want. Eat whatever they want. Spend their money however they want. Then you become an adult and discover that nobody wants to stay up late, food has consequences, and the money already belongs to other people. The greatest trick adulthood ever pulled was convincing children it existed. Because when you get there, you discover there are no adults. Just older children with passwords. That’s all.

Somebody says, “I’m a senior executive.” No, you’re a ten-year-old who survived. You’re still confused. You still don’t know what you’re doing. You just learned some industry terminology.

Human beings spend their youth imagining that wisdom arrives all at once.
Like a package. One day a truck pulls up.
“Congratulations. Here’s your understanding of life.”

Instead wisdom arrives the way a roof leaks.
Slowly. Inconveniently. Usually during bad weather.
And often after expensive mistakes.

People love certainty. That’s another funny thing.
Nobody knows anything, yet everybody has strong opinions.
You ever notice that?

A guy who can’t find his car in a parking lot has detailed theories about geopolitics. That’s confidence. A man spends fifteen minutes walking around a shopping center pressing the panic button on his key fob, then gets home and explains the future of civilization. And we’re supposed to take notes.

The older I get, the more I trust uncertainty. At least uncertainty is honest.

A person who says, “I don’t know,” has already demonstrated more wisdom than a person who says, “here’s exactly what’s going to happen.”
The future has a long history of embarrassing those people.
History itself is mostly the record of confident people being hilariously wrong.
And yet every generation thinks: “Not us. We’ve figured it out.”

No.
You’ve just upgraded the software. The bugs are eternal. Human beings have always been the same. A Roman citizen could walk into a modern shopping mall and understand almost everything immediately. Vanity. Status. Food. Entertainment. Debt.

The only confusing part would be escalators.
Which, frankly, are confusing to everybody.
What a strange invention.
An entire species looked at stairs and said: “Too much dignity.”

People think technology changes human nature. It doesn’t.
Technology just gives human nature better equipment.
Social media didn’t create narcissism.
It gave narcissism a camera crew.
The internet didn’t create outrage.
It simply solved outrage’s distribution problem.
Before the internet, a crazy guy stood on a corner yelling.
Now he has a logo.

People say they want authenticity. That’s not true.
People want authenticity as long as it’s convenient.
The minute somebody is authentically confused, angry, frightened, or complicated, everybody gets uncomfortable.

Human beings love complexity in novels.
In actual people, they prefer bullet points.

That’s why friendship is so rare.
Friendship is one of the few relationships where two people gradually discover how weird each other are and decide to continue anyway. That’s beautiful.
Romance gets all the poetry. Friendship does all the heavy lifting.
A friend is somebody who knows the entire story and still answers the phone.
A friend is somebody who hears your latest disaster and says: “Ah. Another chapter.”

And that’s another thing nobody tells you.
Most of life isn’t about solving yourself.
You don’t solve yourself. You’re not a crossword puzzle.
You’re a weather system.
Some days clear. Some days storms.
Some days a complete mystery to professional observers.

People spend years trying to become the perfect version of themselves.
What a terrifying thought. Imagine succeeding.
Imagine waking up one day and thinking: “That’s it. No improvements necessary.”

You’d be unbearable.
Imperfection is doing a lot of work around here.
It’s the reason people laugh.
It’s the reason people forgive.
It’s the reason stories exist.

Nobody gathers around a campfire to hear about a man whose life proceeded exactly according to plan. That’s not a story. That’s an appliance. The interesting lives are messy. The interesting people are contradictory. The interesting memories are usually the ones that seemed annoying at the time. That’s the great scam memory pulls on us.
When you’re living through a moment, you’re busy evaluating it. Is this good? Is this bad? Is this important? Then twenty years later you discover that your favorite memory is some completely insignificant afternoon. Nothing happened. Nobody got promoted. Nobody achieved anything. Nobody optimized a process. You were just there. Talking to somebody who’s gone now. Sitting on a porch. Driving nowhere. Laughing at something that wasn’t even that funny.

At the time it felt disposable. Later it becomes priceless.

Human beings are the only creatures capable of missing something while it’s still happening. We’re always leaning forward into the future or backward into the past. Meanwhile life keeps trying to hand us the present. And we keep saying: “I’ll look at it later.”

Then one day you get older. Not old. Older.

And people start talking about age. As though age is a disease. Everybody wants to live a long time. Nobody wants to get old. That’s the deal. Those are the same thing. It’s like saying: “I’d love to travel to Paris, but I’d prefer not to go to France.”
There are certain terms and conditions involved.

The truth is, getting older is strange. You start losing things. Hair. Energy. Patience. The ability to sleep in a position that would embarrass a folding chair. But you gain things too. Perspective. Humility. An appreciation for ordinary days. And perhaps most importantly, the realization that almost everything people spend their lives worrying about is ultimately nonsense. Not because it doesn’t matter. Because it doesn’t matter as much as they think. The argument. The status. The image. The approval. Most of it evaporates. What remains is usually very small. Who loved you. Who you loved. Who made you laugh. Who showed up. Who stayed. That’s about it.

And when you really think about it, that’s a relief. Because for a long time I thought life was some grand examination. Turns out it’s more like a long, confusing dinner party. Nobody knows exactly why they’re there. Half the guests are pretending to understand the conversation. The seating arrangement makes no sense. The host is nowhere to be found. And eventually everybody leaves.

But for a little while, if you’re lucky, you sit next to somebody interesting. Somebody makes you laugh. Somebody tells a story. Somebody pours you another drink. And somehow that’s enough. Life starts to make more sense while you realize civilization is a giant group project where nobody wants to admit they forgot their part.

And still, despite all that, people keep going. People fall in love. They make friends. They raise families. They tell jokes. They plant gardens. They help strangers.
Which is remarkable when you think about it.

Because we’re temporary creatures living on a rock spinning through an indifferent universe, armed with incomplete information, declining warranties, and passwords we can never remember.

And somehow, every morning, people wake up and say:
“Maybe today will be better.”

And that’s either the noblest thing about humanity ... or the funniest.