There is a famous saying, “This, too, shall pass.” Whether you are going through good times or bad times, those times will change. The interesting thing about that is that it is a double-edged sword: if you’re suffering, you (of course) want them to change; if you’re are having a blast, you don’t want the fun or joy to end.
This post is a simple reminder that optimal behavior is to appreciate what you have while you have it and to look back on life events fondly rather than trying to recapture the magic with lesser recreations that never live up to the original. The funny thing is that you see this all the time with cash-grab movie sequels or reboots, reunion parties that resemble how you lived years ago, and people trying desperately to stay young-looking and fight aging with every trick in the book. Now, I’m not saying that there should never be a sequel or that you should abandon all attempts at skin care, but there are ways to go about these things that seem to most people to be the “right way” and “the wrong way” in terms of whether it will be beneficial or detrimental to you and your memories of great times gone by. We’ll go through some things in your life and how you can best respect them without trying in vain to keep the party going past its expiration date.
Maturity and Responsibility
The first good thing that naturally comes to an end is the luxury of being dependent on your parents or guardians. You need help to exist when you are a newborn, but eventually you grow up and become the caretaker, teacher, mentor, or authority figure to others. As such, the idea that you can just do anything without regard to anyone else or behave in ways that are irresponsible and might cause unnecessary risk or harm to someone else should be one that naturally goes away as you transition from childhood to adulthood and from child to parent. Yes, you may choose to live your whole life single and never have a family, and that is your right. But, eventually, you need to stop doing things like getting into fights (the older you get, the greater the consequences), abusing your body (the older you get, the less effectively it recovers), and spending your time, money, and resources recklessly. As such, the good times of being young, immature, and irresponsible will come to an end.
Relationship Dynamics
Your relationships evolve in ways that reflect how social species behave en masse for optimal reproduction: you are born with parents who are biologically wired to want to care for you, you may have siblings who will be a source of cooperation and conflict, then you join peer groups via school or other means where you gather friends with complementary personalities and interests, and then you find a mate, have children, and form a new nuclear family that your life revolves around. Again, these are typical and not necessarily required for you specifically, but the point is that along your life path, your relationships with others will change. People often transition from being an obedient child to an independent adult to a caretaker for their parents. They have childhood friends, high school or college friends, coworkers, other parents in the neighborhood, and then senior center friends. The friendships, what you do, how you relate, and what you give and get from them all change. You can occasionally have a high school reunion and relive your “glory days” of winning the state championship, but you can’t ever really continue that life. Relationships with others will come to an end, whether through changing life circumstances or, eventually, death.
Favorite Things
You might have a song that you listen to 5 times per day one month and then 8 months later you can’t stand it anymore. You might have a favorite vacation spot or tradition that dies out because the area changes or the tradition loses its meaning due to a change in culture or a loss of some sort. Everything from your favorite food, beverage, movies, TV shows, songs, activities, hobbies, sports, books, or even people might change over time. Yes, you might have that one book that you reread and enjoy every 5 years as much as you did before, but humans are biologically wired in general to get used to things—even bored with them—over time so that you are encouraged to seek new stimuli in order to continue your growth. Yes, you need some familiarity for safety, which is why many people will live in the same place or form a routine that makes their lives safer and more predictable, but you can’t do that for everything in your life. Eventually, a new technology, trend, preference, person, or event will come along and change your life forever, affecting everything that came before. As such, your great memories of watching your favorite movie for the first time will live on in your mind, but it’ll be hard-to-impossible to reproduce that exact same situation. Many of your favorite things will either change or, in the case of things like restaurants or other businesses that are susceptible to closure, come to an end.
Life Events
The “new home feeling” is pretty amazing, but it will fade. The “new car feeling” is similar. The new relationship. The new baby. The new school. The new friends. The amazing party. The perfect sunset. All of these events are wonderful and can affect your life in profound ways, but we get used to things or get over them over time. They will always mean something to you, but—like mentioned before about needing to adapt to grow—they won’t capture the same exact feeling over time. Again, if one stimulus caused the exact same emotional response every time without change, then you could just have one experience for the rest of your life and wouldn’t need any other ones. It’s why there’s no “happily ever after” in life in the literal sense: you need other emotions to properly traverse life. As such, life events will have a magical quality while they’re happening, but they’ll give way as new life experiences unfold.
Beauty, Fitness, and Health
This is arguably the scariest for most people: beauty fades, your body slowly breaks down, and your health fades until you eventually die. Life is an awesome experience, but it does come to an end. The thing to keep in mind is that beauty and fitness are actually temporary needs to reproduce and build a safe, comfortable environment. Once those are achieved, they are surprisingly not needed anymore. No one thinks of these attributes that way because everyone knows that they are treated better when they are more attractive and so they want to keep being desirable. But beauty is only meant to be used to attract a mate and have children, and fitness is only required to protect the group, an activity usually reserved for young men (see the military—specifically, infantry units—for the most obvious example of this). Once those two things—safety and reproduction—are secured, they’re not needed anymore and they are no longer useful for their primary use case (again, social standing is a secondary use case). Health is an unfortunate reality that eventually your body breaks down, but that is why humans and other animals reproduce: your offspring are your source of immortality because cells break down and people are likely to get permanent injuries or die from external threats as time goes on. As a result, the point of your health is to continue your life journey until it ends. It is wonderful to be young, healthy, beautiful, and fit…but it is far from necessary as long as you use them to secure the life you want while you have them.
There are more, but these will hopefully give you a few examples of how all good things come to an end. Yes, this might be a disappointing post, but we’re going to end on a positive note: it’s okay that all good things come to an end! They make room for new good things! If you see a new sofa that you love, you often can’t fit it in your house unless you get rid of your old sofa! If you find a new friend, you only have so much time in life and so probably have to cut out time doing other things. As such, high school ends so college or work can begin; old friendships end so new friendships can form; children move out of the home so that they can begin their adult lives. Every end is a new beginning (yes, it’s cliché…but it’s true). Things need to end so other things can begin. Even the most tragic of events like death are necessary. There’s a line in the movie In Time where one of the characters asks where you would fit all of the people if no one ever died. While said as a way to justify the time currency system that they had in that movie where some people were immortal and others had only a year, it is a real statement about how life is very cyclical so that some things and even people end so other things have their time. Life is a series of beginnings and endings to always keep you growing and evolving toward the next thing. If nothing ended, nothing could begin.
So if you are facing the end of any major, wonderful thing in life: from the end of your Super Bowl party for your favorite team to moving away from your friends to burying your parents, remember that it’s a natural part of life. It is natural to look back both fondly and sadly as you remember the wonderful moments in your life. It’s optimal to appreciate the past while looking forward to the future. But, arguably, the best approach is to look at the course of your life and plan to move on to new and different things instead of clinging too much to the past because you’ll never really be able to go back. Every Peyton Manning or Tom Brady finds his new business venture or broadcasting opportunity when his playing career is over. Every parent needs to look forward to days of joy with his or her child vs. reckless 4am parties with friends where everyone gets drunk. And senior citizens can look forward to peaceful retirement after years of “the grind” or child rearing. All good things come to an end, but all endings lead to new beginnings.