Young and Hot
Daily Meditation 461–6/1/2023
One day, you’re a 22 year old with a slender waist, tanned and exposed midriff complete with bellybutton piercing, an attractive face, and beautiful hair…
But before you know it, you’ve aged into your midlife, doubled in weight, become a parent, and decades of stress compiled onto you, covering you in a layer of ever increasing wrinkles, “naturally dying” your hair grey (which is very beautiful, to be honest), and making all your once supple features sag.
And the men are arguably not better off!
THIS IS LIFE!
“It’s your life and it’s ending one second at a time,” as Tyler Durden once said.
On its face, this sounds depressing, no?
One day you could be a muscled stud who can pick up any woman of your choosing…and then in a few years riddled with smoking, a few too many beers too often, and other choices, rapidly age into a hair, bulbous ape-like shade of your “young and hot” self.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean you should go out partying, snort cocaine, drink a lot, and sleep with everything that moves while you’re “in your prime.” You aren’t Bill Clinton.
“Your prime” is a state of mind — not a point in time. You control time via your perception.
You don’t need to hit the gym every day, mind every calorie and ignore pizza for the rest of your life while abstaining from relations.
You just need to be a bit more mindful each moment of each day.
While you cannot fight the wrinkles, greys, and some general entropy from the unstoppable march of time and our inevitable, impending deaths, you can win back time by remembering to make…
Better decisions slightly more often in the hundreds of small “nows” that compile to make the minutes of the hours of the days of your weeks.
You don’t need the free donuts every time they’re available.
You don’t need a beer with every dinner.
You don’t need to sleep in every weekend.
You don’t need to sit and enjoy 1, 2, 3 hours of The Office reruns every night.
But you can remember “I’m going to choose to make a better choice, now,” and opt for a fast, a glass of water, rising a bit earlier to hit the gym, or enjoying a 20 minute walk.
Make your prime last the rest of your life. You won’t be “young and hot” forever. But you can make better choices more often to improve your overall life.
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These are distillations from my coming book “YouDaimonia: the Ancient Philosophy of Human Flourishing.”
