If it tastes good it’s bad for you.
Don’t ask me why.
The things that keep you alive will sound boring.
Sleep. Water. Walking. Vegetables.
The things that quietly ruin your life will often arrive wearing bright packaging and immediate gratification.
From time to time you will replay embarrassing moments from eleven years ago.
Nobody else remembers them.
They are busy replaying their own…
You will clean your house so visitors think you live like that all the time.
At some point you will walk confidently into a room and completely forget why you went in there.
You will stand still for several seconds pretending you are thinking deeply.
You are not.
Your brain has simply left the meeting.
You will put your phone somewhere safe and immediately lose it.
You will accidentally open your phone camera and briefly experience the worst angle ever discovered by science.
You will think becoming an adult means feeling like you know what you are doing.
It doesn’t.
Most adults are simply children carrying car keys and lower back pain.
You will think happiness lives somewhere ahead of you. Next year. The promotion. The holiday. The bigger house. The moment life finally settles down.
Life never settles down. It just changes shape.
You will spend years trying to become impressive. Eventually you may discover something:
Peace matters more. Presence matters more.
You may realize a lot of things look easy until you actually try to do it yourself. So try not to judge people until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes.
You will spend years chasing happiness only to discover it was hiding in ordinary things all along, if you could just pay attention and put your ego aside.
You will worry enormously about things that never happen.
You will survive things you thought would destroy you.
You will think you have ages.
You don’t. So eat reasonably. Forgive quickly. Pick your phone up less. Go outside more.
And when life gets strange — which it will — remember:
Nobody really knows what they’re doing. Some people just think they do.
In everything you do, try to stay calm, slow down and do it with care. You’ll make less mistakes and you’ll get it done right.
At some point somebody you love will leave this world. Nobody prepares you properly for that.
One day they are part of the background of your life.
A voice.
A laugh.
A chair they always sit in.
Then suddenly ordinary things hurt.
A song.
A smell.
An empty space at Christmas.
You will discover grief is love with nowhere to go.
You will realize some moments only reveal their importance after they are gone.
The last family holiday where everyone was together.
The last ordinary conversation.
Which brings us to a the most important rule…
Do not postpone your life. Do not spend twenty years waiting to become yourself.
Do not keep delaying joy until you “deserve it.”
Go outside more.
Tell people you appreciate them.
Laugh at yourself.
Take photos occasionally.
Not of everything.
Some moments belong fully in your eyes.
Read books.
Build things.
Learn difficult things.
Protect your attention.
The world will happily consume your entire existence with forgettable distractions if you let it.
And one more thing…
You think you have more time than you do. Almost everyone thinks that. Until suddenly a decade disappears.
Then another.
Then you hear music from years ago and realize time has carried enormous parts of your life away while you were busy worrying about nonsense.
That realization hurts. But it can also wake you up.
Because today still belongs to you. This strange day. This ordinary day.
This completely forgettable day that may one day become a day you would give everything to experience one more time.
You can live more in one week than most people live in one year, if you’re brave, honest and you remember you’re alive.
Never forget that.
Welcome to Earth.
It is heartbreaking.
It is beautiful.
Nobody understands it.
And somehow that makes it even better.
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