An apple a day keeps the doctor away, although studies have shown that sugar is sugar, even if it comes from apples, which suggests maybe you shouldn’t be eating apples, since studies have also shown that sugar is toxic even at very low levels in rats, causing irreversible damage to both the brain and reproductive organs. But also if you’re going to go “whole hog” on quitting sugar, you risk becoming one of those people who can’t eat at restaurants and dourly refuses birthday cake, etc. And that might make you socially isolated, which studies have shown is almost as bad for your brain as a diet of Twizzlers and industrial-grade particle board.
Actions speak louder than words, although participation in social media is becoming crucial aspect of applying for jobs and launching one’s career, so if you’re the all-action type that cringes at the idea of self-promotion, well then you’d better start applying for blacksmithing apprenticeships, because your notion of accomplishment is so quaint as to actually be medieval. But at the same time, if you spend every hour of every day curating your dumb Tumblr, you’re never going to develop any actual skills and will eventually be exposed for the fraud you really are, your abundance of Twitter followers only serving to make your breakdown even more public and shameful.
A rising tide lifts all boats, cracking your boat in half because you forgot to adequately lacquer the bottom and rid it of the embarrassingly thick forest of barnacles that has now taken hold and will continue to thrive while your poor skiff rots away on the sea floor and you remain on land, never to know the majesty of transatlantic boat travel.
They say a bird in hand is worth two in the bush, which is all well and good until you consider the tragic opportunity cost of retaining your one mediocre bird while ignoring the other, better birds, which probably aren’t all that much harder to catch and are there, right in front of you, just waiting to be plucked from the bush and grilled right up.
Any port in a storm…is an okay thing to think if you want to be one of those pathetic people who never endured a big squall and so remain stuck in a state of perpetual adolescence until they wind up timidly online dating from their parents’ basement at age 40.
Sure, all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, but what if all this anxiety about being yet another cog in the capitalist machine is actually just a front for reluctance to fully engage with your life, or clinical depression, or an ultra-capitalist urge to do the best and most lucrative work instead of gradually finding quiet fulfillment in whatever perfectly good job you wind up with?
They say don’t put all your eggs in one basket. But what if it’s, like, a really cool basket, and seems to be the best basket for containing your eggs? And you don’t have that many eggs anyway, and, frankly, egg creation can be an exhausting process that, if hurried, leaves you nutrient deficient. Better to plop them all into a single high-quality basket made of some kind of Amish wicker. Plus, if you think about it, a lot of terrible things could happen if you’re trying to wrangle multiple baskets. Even aside from acts of God that could destroy you and your prudent number of baskets, there’s always the possibility that negotiating all of them could ironically make you more likely to trip, so instead of successfully carrying your one perfectly good basket full of eggs you wind up with literally hundreds of baskets bouncing every which way, eggs smashed all over the ground, bleeding yellow yolk onto the sidewalk.
Nothing ventured, nothing gained. But you know who has no problem venturing? A sociopath, that’s who. And you don’t want to be a sociopath, or wind up with some kind of STD after a drunken romantic liaison, do you? Do you?
