The Wisdom Arrives Too Late
When you enter university and watch your seniors at their farewell, you hear them dishing out the best advice on how to enjoy college life. They tell you these are your best years, that you'll never get them back, so you should live them fully. But you, having just started, never get it. You resort to bickering over trivial issues. You wait to be rid of college life so you can enter adult life and start making money. Until it's your turn at the farewell, and you realise you're dispensing the same advice.
Most advice works this way. We only recognise the best way to live a certain phase of life once we're past it. When we're staring at the exit, when we know the best moments lie behind us. We wish we could reclaim that time so we could do it better, but life offers no second chances.
The same holds true for life in general. The best advice arrives in hindsight, because that's the only moment we realise the times we resented were the best times of our lives. Everyone says your twenties and thirties are your golden decades, but while you're living them, you never feel it. I never thought my twenties were anything special. I recognise that my thirties are better than my twenties, but I don't feel anything golden about them either. I'm still chasing some proverbial better future. We're all guilty of that.
Ask a couple who've endured a bitter divorce and now sit alone in their house, wishing they hadn't said those cruel things. They'll tell you not to let small arguments swell into bigger issues, because they will haunt you. They arrive at that conclusion on their own, but never in the moment, which is the greater tragedy, in my opinion. All they wanted then was to win the argument, to feel superior, without grasping what they were sacrificing to achieve it.
You have to keep one eye on what you stand to lose against what you want. There are always tradeoffs. Nothing in life comes without one; gain something, and you lose something else. You have to decide whether what you stand to lose is acceptable to you. You wanted to make money back in college, never considering that the price would be paid in lost time. You will never again have that same time, or those same friends.
You want to be wealthy, so you sacrifice everything to reach that destination, without realising that by the time you arrive, your golden years will be gone: the very years you could have spent experiencing life in vivid detail. We always arrive at the right conclusion, sooner or later. Some people stay bitter at first, but eventually they soften and accept their mistakes, or their lack of awareness.
You will never have everything in life. And that's a truth we all have to live with. So learn to enjoy life with whatever you have. Don't postpone your happiness because your life isn't perfect. Don't let great be the enemy of good. A good enough life is good enough to live.