Ambition isn’t the problem. Blind ambition is. When we chase success without asking why, we end up empty. But when ambition grows from personal passion, it becomes something entirely different: a compass for the soul.
Life
We usually treat time as an enemy. We complain that there’s never enough, or we dread how quickly it slips away. But time itself is one of life’s greatest gifts. Other creatures live mostly in the immediacy of instinct. Humans live in three dimensions: we remember the past, we savor the present, and we anticipate the future. Each dimension enriches us, making life more than a blur of moments.
We’ve all had days when life technically continued but felt empty, thin, almost pointless. Food was on the table, but appetite was gone. Time passed, but meaning was missing. In those seasons, we need more than existence. We need a reason to stay. For human beings, that reason often comes through aesthetic experience — the moments when life feels not only bearable but luminous, charged with significance.
Clichés offer half-truths. Life Savor offers wholeness. We need happiness and fulfillment, savoring and striving, acceptance of death and celebration of life. By breaking the slogans open, we recover a richer philosophy of living—one that does justice to the gift of life itself.
Most of us don’t realize it, but we live under a spell. Not a spell of enchantment, but of anesthesia. The very miracle of being alive—the staggering improbability of existing at all—slowly gets muffled until it feels ordinary, even boring. Richard Dawkins called it “the anesthetic of soporific familiarity.” What a phrase. It captures that strange sleepwalking state where life itself becomes background noise.
Life is not designed to be easy. It is turbulent, uneven, unpredictable. Some days feel like victory laps, others like collapse. To demand that we “always savor life” or “always feel grateful” is to set ourselves up for disillusionment. The truth is, no one can carry a sunlit perspective 24/7. And that’s okay. Because perspective doesn’t lose its value just because it isn’t always active. Sometimes, it’s enough to know that a helpful way of seeing the world is tucked in your back pocket, ready when you need it.
What if life ended at twelve, or seventeen, as it did for Sam Berns, who lived bravely with progeria and died a teenager? In that case, the moments of youth — the crushes, the games, the discoveries — are not rehearsal. They are the whole play. Childhood is not a practice round. It is life itself, rich with meaning in its own right, as real as anything we experience later.
We’re wired to crave belonging. For most of human history, standing apart from the tribe meant danger, even death. So it’s no surprise that in the modern world, the thought of standing alone can make our hearts pound. Conformity whispers safety; independence feels risky. And yet, paradoxically, some of life’s richest joys come not from blending in, but from daring to stand apart. Independence isn’t only about hard duty or lonely burden. Sometimes, it feels like freedom in its purest form: exhilarating, life-affirming, joyful.
Curiosity is honest. It ignores what we “should” want and pays attention to what we actually want to explore. That makes it a reliable compass for becoming ourselves. If we keep following the questions that quicken us, we end up in places that feel like home.
Left alone, everything falls apart. Wood rots. Muscles weaken. Friendships fade. Buildings crumble. Lives unravel. The universe tends toward entropy — disorder, disintegration, decay. And yet, here we are: building, loving, creating, striving. To live at all is to resist the pull of collapse. Every act of growth is a rebellion against the drag of entropy.
