Life is short!

Life is short. That is a fact of life. However, it is impossible to understand this simple fact as a teenager. As a teenager you look at senior citizens and you know you will never look like that. You look at people like your parents—people in their 30s and 40s—and you cannot imagine ever being that old. The thought of looking just two years down the road is probably difficult to comprehend. 


Most teenagers naturally feel they are immortal. That is one of the great advantages of being a teenager. This feeling of immortality will last perhaps into your 20s, then it will vanish as reality sets in. Since it is impossible, I won’t attempt to convince you that you, too, will one day be 60 or 80. However, let me try to give you an analogy to help you understand why you feel the way you do about life.

Say you are standing in a desert. You are standing next to a gigantic tank that holds 30,000 gallons of water. The tank is full to the brim. This is your drinking water. Every day you drink about a gallon of water.

Let’s say that someone walks up to you and says, "Hey, can I have a gallon of water?" Your response would probably be, "Sure, why not?" In fact, if someone asked you for 100 gallons of water, your reaction might be the same. You’ve got 30,000 gallons after all, and there is nothing for you to do with it but drink it. What do you care? If you spill a little water, it doesn’t matter either.

As you go through life drinking about a gallon of water a day, you begin to notice something. Each day it doesn’t seem like you are taking anything out of the tank, but over time you can see that the level in the tank is getting lower. You look in one day and the tank is only half-full. Then it is only a quarter full. Then there is only an inch in the bottom of the tank. At that point, how much would a gallon of water be worth to you? Quite a bit, because now you can see that your water is scarce: you can see the end of the supply looming in the near future. One fateful day you extract the last drop from the tank, and you realize that today is the day you will die. You are, after all, standing in a desert. And that night you die.

The number 30,000 is significant. If you assume you will live to be about 82, there are 30,000 days in your life. Right now your tank of water is full. If you are 15 you have only used about 5,500 gallons, so water seems to be plentiful. In fact, the supply of water seems to be infinite and you feel immortal. However, each day you live you drink a gallon from your tank, and there is no way to add any more once you use it.

What you often don’t realize as a teenager is that there are a lot of easy ways to put holes in your tank or spill large quantities of water on the ground. As you are spilling the water you don’t really care because you have so much water it seems infinite. However, you can easily spill 20 or 30 years of water as a teenager. That water will be extremely valuable later in life. When you get older there are going to be lots of important things that you will want to enjoy: your children, your grandchildren, your spouse, your friends, your retirement. At that point water will be extremely valuable to you, and you will realize how foolish you were to spill it as a teenager. But at that point there will be absolutely nothing that you can do to get it back. You will die way too early.


Since we now understand the life is short, dont waste any of it. The following are two of the most common ways for people to waste life.

Smoking

One of the best ways to shorten your life is to smoke. If you take up smoking as a teenager, you might spill perhaps 10,000 of your 30,000 gallons of water.

Two other good reasons not to smoke:

An average smoker who starts at age 15, dies at age 60 and smokes two packs a day will consume 657,000 cigarettes. 657,000 cigarette butts is disgusting.

Assume each cigarette costs a nickel, and assume the money wasted on cigarettes was instead deposited in a mutual fund earning 10%. The value of the money wasted on cigarettes during a lifetime is about $500,000. If you assume cigarettes cost a dime each the value exceeds $1,000,000. There must be a better way to spend that money.

Besides that, cigarettes can significantly shorten your life. Although you likely don’t care about that now, you most certainly will in the future. That is a fact of life.

Drugs are Worthless

And then there are drugs and drug addiction: marijuanna, heroin, cocaine, amphetamines and all the rest. No successful person uses drugs. That is a fact of life. Drugs make you stupid for long periods of time, and that limits your potential for success.

The promise of drugs is a "high" or a "feeling of euphoria." For example, heroin causes a euphoric "rush." I have heard it described as "better than sex." I have heard it described as "like being in heaven." All kinds of things. The problem is that the feeling always comes at a cost once the high ends. The cost is a feeling of depression of greater magnitude. You cannot have the high without the despair or depression. You can safely ignore anyone who tells you otherwise. So you are forced to either maintain the high or absorb the despair. Unfortunately, the despair lasts far longer than the high does. So what have you gained?

What, you might ask, is the point? If the high is always followed by despair, what have you gained? In fact, you have lost. The euphoria is addictive and causes you to crave it.

There simply is no value, or point, in getting started with drugs. Simply walk away from the people who tell you otherwise.

Another important point about life being so short, is it really allows very little time to mend any broken relationships that have resulted from your words, actions, or deeds.  Many adults today, often wish they had said things, forgave, or performed an act of kindness for someone in their lives who are no longer alive.  When you consider those around you, remember....There may be no tomorrows.