the funnel of life
I know I’m probably channeling INDEXED here, but hopefully I’m not ripping off one of his ideas outright. Even if I am, hey, Photoshop!
Major decisions are on the horizon for me; decisions that could very well determine how the rest of my life plays out. It’s a lot to ponder, and it’s got me thinking about how life is like a funnel. At the very beginning, your possible paths are wide and varied, but as life goes on your options inevitably narrow down.
It’s like a make-your-own-adventure book where you have to rip out the pages as you read them. Want to be a mathematical genius? Better hope you get saddled with good neural plasticity at birth. Violin prodigy? You (or your parents) should make that decision by age three. World-class athlete? Commit yourself to the sport by ten. What college would you like to attend? What city would you like to live in? What party will you be voting for? Getting married anytime soon? Options, options, options, getting smaller all the time. Eventually the decision path dwindles down to just one destination, and it’s where we all end up.
Then again, this may just be my quarter-life crisis talking. There’s always a tendency to think that your next big decision is going to be the most important, irreversible one you ever make, but that’s rarely the case. Things aren’t written in stone. My predecessor at this research job left the field to become a professional event planner. Isaac Asimov wrote sci-fi as a means of procrastination in grad school, and he ended up becoming a literary legend. His adviser once famously told him, “The problem with you, Asimov, is that you can’t write.”
So who really knows where the future will take any of us? For now all I can do is stare at the curve ahead and hope for the best.
Yeah but if you had as many options now as you did when you were born you would never be able to narrow them down enough to make a decision about anything.
Also, pretty graph. And I think the author of Indexed is a she.
The graph forced laughter to burst from my mouth. This has been on my mind for a long, long, long time. That skull-and-crossbones really sneaks up on you.