Friendship (or Any relationship) is a Choice!

There is nothing worse you can do to violate the sanctity of your life than to stay in a relationship which you know you should not.

How many of you have stayed in or are in a relationship “just because”. Just because you have kids, just because you can’t remember a time when you were not friends, just because you are partners in a business. There are be many “just because”s.

From my personal experience, when I was in my 20s I had this belief, and in retrospect I don’t really know why, that friendship was something that just happened and then that was it, you are friends. I used to treat my friends as family. But when you really think about it, family is a group of people that life gave you. Call it fate, chance, or karma, you didn’t have to make the choice of having your family - it just happened and you just accepted it. People say that friends are the family that you choose. I never really understood that until I crossed 30.

You can choose to not be friends with someone. It does not make you a bad person, it does not mean you are abandoning them. It just means you are choosing you over others. What it really comes down to is values. If your values are in conflict with the people you have relationships with, be prepared for pain. And you only live once, why take that pain when you have a choice to simply not.

YOLO means something different

YOLO stands for You Only Live Once. What YOLO literally stands for does not change. The meaning behind YOLO does. Generally, people in their 20s and teens treat YOLO to mean do something crazy while you can, go on an adventure, take some risks, live in the moment.

After you reach 30, YOLO starts to mean something different. It is not a sudden change, but a gradual feeling of long time coming. YOLO starts to mean stop doing things rather than taking more things. Sure, in doing so, somethings that you used to do will be replaced by newer things.

For me personally YOLO has come to be, I don’t want to waste my time and energy doing something that I don’t enjoy doing, whether it be doing work that I don’t enjoy or doesn’t really benefit me in the long run, or being around people with questionable(or just different) values, and doing more of the things that I enjoy doing.

Hangovers and Health Becomes Real

I have not experienced this as much because I just naturally stopped drinking as much as I used to when I was in my 20s. But I have heard from people that I know, that their hangovers have become more pronounced. Also, back pain and knee problems are usually the most common things I now hear from people in their 30s. It’s not the kind of things that 60-year-olds might say, but it’s that annoying nagging stiffness that keeps showing up. This could be because most people now-a-days will end up working at a desk in front of a computer, at least 5 days a week and around 52 weeks a year.

Privacy matters

The most common argument against privacy is that “I have nothing to hide, so I don’t care”. The train of reasoning is fundamentally flawed. It rests entire on the opposite side of privacy. Either you respect your own privacy or you don’t. You can not like privacy and then when your data is in the hands of the government or some large faceless corporation say ” I don’t have anything to hide” or “I’m not a criminal” or “I’m not ashamed of my choices or public life”.

Let me ask you this, Would you put a camera in your in home and then put is live for everyone to see?

That is in essence what you are already doing when you use social media sites, or post a video, or photo and geo tag it. It is almost unbelievable the type and amount of data that people, companies and governments have on you. In your eyes you might not be doing anything wrong and therefore you don’t have anything to hide. But can you say the same about the people or companies that have access to your data?

And even if we assume that no entity that has access to your personal data will ever misuse that information, privacy still matters for the sake of privacy. There should be no reason or justification to want to have your privacy.

There were many reasons, but yes, privacy was one of them when I decided to delete all my social media accounts. It was a year prior to the whole Facebook indecent.

Privacy matters because of what idea of privacy stands for.

If “someday” has not come yet, it probably won’t ever

It is very common to hear people say 30 is the new 20. What it really means is that in the past people made life altering decisions in their 20s, and were quite settled in or with those decision in their 30s. But people are now taking longer to decide what to do with their lives. People are getting married much later in life, making their minds up about their careers and finances after their 30s and so on.

30 Things You’ll Learn after 30

Friendship (or Any relationship) is a Choice! There is nothing worse you can do to violate the sanctity of your life than to stay in a relationship which you

posted: 2018-05-06
updated: None