and since i have never said ‘youth must end,’ youth will not end

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and... See more

So there has to be some year where you decide: in this part of my life, I know what I value. I am choosing; I am committing. And now I’m thinking of another idea I came across years ago—it must have been after I’d finished my bachelor’s, when I first started working as a designer—about devoting a year to going deeper, not wider.

The explicit premise of the optimal stopping problem is the implicit premise of what it is to be alive. It’s this that forces us to decide based on possibilities we’ve not yet seen, this that forces us to embrace high rates of failure even when acting optimally. No choice recurs. We may get similar choices again, but never that exact one. Hesitati

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