There’s always a lesson in lunch

I was chatting with a friend last night who has recently gone through the whole ‘what should I do next in life?’ phase.

After talking about what all the options had been for him, we landed on a really interesting behaviour. There seems to be a strange difference with the way we view the future, time-wise, to the way we view the past.

While that might seem an obvious thing to say, when you look at how this plays into our decision making, it can actually have quite a bit impact.

Have you ever found yourself saying ‘the last two years have just gone by so quickly’ or ‘I don’t know where the last year has gone’? Probably. I say it most weeks, years and sadly now birthdays.

But flip that and think about how we consider the future; it’s the opposite.

Making a decision like changing countries, houses or jobs feels like a massive deal. It’s as though the future is permanent.

I suspect a part of this comes from the way we traditionally looked at jobs, whereby you were in them for 10+ years and that was that. Nowadays that’s simply not the case.

Do you know what? I even find myself thinking like this with food. I’ll um and uh over what to get for lunch as if it’s the last thing I’ll ever eat. I rarely think that three hours later I’ll have another appetite lined up, and so on.

While making decisions about what to do with our future is something we shouldn’t be overly flippant about, we seem to forget that nothing is ever set in stone.

I can’t help but wonder if we could look to the future less as a big, scary, permanent thing and more of an experiment, just how many different things we might end up doing.

Basically, I wonder if sometimes we are too cautious.

Yes, I’m speaking from the position of not having children or a mortgage so this attitude simply won’t translate to some people. And I’m not underplaying that when you are in that boat, it takes over. But surely there is some midway point between risk and pragmatism that makes decisions about our future less daunting.

As humans we enjoy a sense of certainty, and ironically that’s the one thing in life we’re most certain not to have. Even the perfect plan very rarely goes the way we think.

However, if we remember that the future isn’t permanent and take more of a chance on the lesser known, surely we’d end up saying yes to more opportunities.

Maybe the lunch thing is worth revisiting. It might seem like a big deal at the time, but give it a few hours and not only will the decision of what you chose to eat be less consequential, you’ll probably be peckish again. Kind of a valid analogy.