First, the puddles: when a kid walks by a puddle, he/she stomps it. There’s a simple, instinctive drive to do the thing that gives the most immediate pleasure.

I’m reminded of the classic 5th-season Simpsons episode “Bart’s Inner Child”, in which a self-styled self-help expert, played by Albert Brooks, urges Bart to just “do what [he] feels like,” i.e. pay no attention to consequences. The whole town of Springfield jumps on board the bandwagon. Mayhem, of course, ensues. The moral, taken in isolation, is that short-term grasping can ruin long-term happiness, especially when one considers the sum of both one’s own personal happiness as well as the happiness of those around us.

But is this *always* true? Is there a threshold at which, having suffered the pangs of regret following hundreds or thousands of lost opportunities for short-term, revel-in-the-moment happiness, we actually end up on the wrong side of the equation? Our sober, duly considered choices that are intended to bring long-term happiness end up being, in retrospect, not so happy at all?

Insert your domain of choice here: Career, relationships, religion, hobbies, friends, etc. etc. etc. The ageless recommendation to work hard to prepare for the eventual winter, probably best explained in modern terms by Max Weber, fails us if winter comes and we still find ourselves unsatisfied.

Is there somewhere a 50 year old man, sitting alone at his desk, contemplating his 10,000-item stamp collection, and thinking What. The. Fuck? Or is there a woman on her deathbed, who has followed dutifully the tenets of a particularly restrictive church, having a personal realization that there is no God? Can you imagine a woman who, having made the safe choice in her youth by marrying a good provider – even if he was a little boring –, wakes up, post-menopausal and wild with anxiety that she has lived her whole life on the wrong side of a choice made twenty years earlier?

I suppose that this is one of the – well, if not *fun*, at least *interesting* parts of being human – nothing is predictable, nothing is preordained, and every day we’re confronted with choices, large and small, whose net effects can be monumental.

If you have never had the pleasure of reading 20th-century American humorist James Thurber, you might want to visit your local library and pick up Fables for Our Time, which is Thurber’s modern take on historical fables. I liked this description of Thurber’s work I found in a critical essay by Ruth Maharg:

Thurber demonstrates the complexity of life by depicting the world as an uncertain, precarious place, where few reliable guidelines exist.

Indeed. What guidelines (unconscious or otherwise) are you operating under? Should you spend some time thinking about them? Hit me up in the comments.