✉️ Good Thought 8
Do you take the ride of a lifetime?
Welcome to Good Thought, a newsletter about fresh ideas for purposeful living in the 2020s.
I’m Aaron Nesmith-Beck. I founded Atman, one of the first legal psilocybin retreats, and my writing at Freedom & Fulfilment has over 1M pageviews. You can learn more about me here.
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Do you take the ride of a lifetime?
Concept art by Luc Steadman
You’re visiting a theme park, the best theme park in the world. The biggest, most colorful, most exciting, with the most rides of any theme park that’s ever existed.
But, you only get to visit this theme park once. At the end of the day, you have to leave, the gates close, and you can never come back.
You move through the entrance and immediately you’re struck by the sights, sounds, smells. People and activity everywhere. Wow!
You get your bearings a little. Someone hands you a map, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense. You start to wander around. There are crowds, couples, people on their own. After a few minutes, you start to get a sense of the place.
The theme park is full of rides. That’s what everyone’s here for. Some rides are big, some small, some you can ride with others, some you have to go alone. Some have long lines and others have no wait at all.
You try a few rides. Pretty fun! Some are scary though. Others don’t turn out how you expect.
You get deeper into the theme park. This place is huge! There are many more rides than you can fit into a single day. More experiences than you can experience. You realize you have to choose carefully.
There is one ride at the center of the park – huge, towering, it’s enormous! It might be the biggest ride in the whole park.
You try to get a look at what’s on it, but it’s hard to see. Most of the ride is surrounded by big walls. What goes on in there?
You walk up to get a closer look. The walls stretch up into the clouds. The ride looks like it could be exciting, meaningful, scary – definitely a lot of ups and downs! One thing’s for certain: this ride is unlike any other in the park. It’s totally unique.
There’s a short line, so you don’t have have to wait long to get on this ride. But the ride itself is long! Riding this one means you might miss out on some others. Hmm.
People are exiting the ride. How was it? You ask them. Some say it was the best ride in the whole park! Others don’t seem so jazzed. Some say they loved it, but they look like they didn’t enjoy it at all! Curious…
You can decide whether to take this ride or not. But remember, you only get to visit this theme park once. At the end of the day, after you leave and the gates close, you can never come back.
Do you take the ride?
This is basically the question of whether to have kids, for me. The theme park is your life, the big ride at the center is parenting a child.
Of course there are many considerations, but if you think of your life as a set of experiences that you have one go at – one visit to this particular theme park, as this particular person – I think the analogy fits.
So, do you take the ride…? Maybe you’ve already decided. Maybe you think you’ve decided, but you really ought to reconsider. Maybe you can guess my answer, based on how I’ve framed the question. And maybe you haven’t decided yet. Either which way, I hope this is food for thought.
Until next time,
Aaron
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“Everyone’s job is world-building, even if they don’t realize it.”
People like coherent purpose. We like stories because we appreciate clear direction and compelling story arcs. If you can create a world that’s more clear and compelling than the complex, ambiguous real world, then people will be attracted to that story. And when you invite those people into your world and give them purpose inside your world, and they accept that purpose, then they won’t ever leave. That’s how you get everyone pushing on your system problem all at the same time, without you having to be everywhere all at once.
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