Life Changes Fast

“Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. The question of self-pity” — Joan Didion

Joan Didion began her memoir “The Year of Magical Thinking” with the words above. The memoir is about the year that followed her husband’s death. While the quote is a nice metaphor for life, Joan was also being literal: John Dunne suffered a heart attack as they sat down to eat dinner together one evening.

Throughout that year, filled with self-pity and grief, Didion returned to those words often to emphasize how life and death do not wait until you are comfortable. They strike as they please — there is no such thing as good timing. “Life changes in the ordinary instant” she later clarified.

This is not to suggest that you have no agency, but rather to remind you of which things you have agency over.

You control:

• What you choose to do within your lifespan, NOT the lifespan itself.

• Which tasks and projects you undertake, NOT which ones will be successful.

• How you respond to life’s stressors, NOT what those stressors will be or whether or not you are subject to them at all.

There are many cliches that I think do more harm than good, like “You’ll find the one eventually” or “You will succeed if you keep at it for long enough”. These platitudes work under the assumption that everyone lives to be 100 years old.

Even the most ambitious of us may be better served in asking: ‘Will I be satisfied with my life if I never get what I’m after?” If this sounds defeatist or pessimistic, consider how Steve Jobs thought about his life. Jobs had a similar question he asked himself every day: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?”

Jobs used the certainty of his mortality to wash away the criticism that often stumps even the best of us. He learned, through getting fired from Apple & various terminal diagnoses, that no matter how intelligent or ambitious you may be, “life changes fast”.

But later in that very talk, Jobs gave some useful advice. He argued that if you are doing things you love, then even seemingly catastrophic events in life can only hold you back for so long. It’s like a kid playing a game, knowing the end will come in the back of his mind but not enjoying the game any less.

But I’m not talking about abstaining from all of life’s “games” entirely. Instead, I’m advocating for AWARENESS. Once you take a step back and see that most of the things you assume are mandatory are actually optional, you give yourself the power to pick and choose which “games” you want to opt into.

After all, life is full of too many games for you to play them all and remain sane. This culling of options means you will very literally be constructing a life on your own terms.

After all, is reacting to everything life throws at you with the same intensity really any way to live?

“The Year of Magical Thinking” is one of my favorite books from this year so far. It tackles grief, life, death, family, and writing in a beautiful way. Joan Didion is a writer’s writer. Check it out here.

The Steve Jobs excerpts come from his commencement speech at Stanford in 2005. I listen to it several times a year. It’s on Youtube if you want to give it a listen here.

May Joan Didion and Steve Jobs both rest in peace.