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Essay

Life is like a ...

By Samantha Loong


人生はまるで・・・

クリスマスやお正月からの残り物であるチョコレートの詰め合わせを食べながら、筆者はフォレスト・ガンプの有名なセリフを思い出した。そしてふと考えた。現代生活において、「人生はチョコレートの箱、開けてみるまでわからない」は本当だろうかと。

Even though it's February, I still have an excess of edible Christmas and New Year's treats to finish. As I worked my way through yet another box of assorted chocolates, I couldn't help but be reminded of a line from the movie Forrest Gump: "Mama always said life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get."

And it made me wonder if this is still true for modern life. These days, you'd be hard-pressed to find a box of shareable goodies without some kind of guide. My box of chocolates came with a bilingual description of each finely sculpted chocolate, detailing in evocative language what filling lay within each glossy shape. Don't like caramel? Even if it's "a masterful creation"? Then avoid these ones. Like praline? Then choose those ones. With chocolates these days, you actually do know what you're gonna get.

Sometimes I wish that life really was like a box of 21st-century chocolates. It'd be nice to have all of life's choices laid out neatly in front of me, with a guide telling me what to expect from each one. With consumerism and the Internet making more choice available to more people, it's becoming ingrained in us to find out as much as we can about something before making a decision. In a way, our desire to know exactly what we're getting has resulted in a sort of stalkerish behavior when it comes to many things in life. Who hasn't tried to find out all they can about a new friend or potential date once they've connected with them on Facebook? Or feverishly looked up the menu of a restaurant they're going to in order to decide what they'll have before they even step foot in the establishment?

It's understandable that we do these things in order to avoid being disappointed or inconvenienced. But I'm curious to know if having all this information at our fingertips is degrading our ability to trust our instincts. Having too much information or choice can also lead to decision fatigue, resulting in poor decision making. Or analysis paralysis -- where you overthink everything, stress yourself out and in the end, make no decision at all.

Life certainly isn't quite like Forrest Gump's box of chocolates anymore. We might know what we're going to get, but we might not like it anyway. I prefer to think of life as a tarte Tatin -- a delicious tart that was conceived supposedly by accident in the 1880s by chef Stephanie Tatin. She almost burned the filling of an apple tart and then decided to make it upside down. Life is a bit like that: You might think you know what you're gonna get but end up making a mess of it. But sometimes, like Stephanie Tatin, all you need to do is flip your situation over, serve it anyway and realize that it's actually pretty damn good.



Shukan ST: FEBRUARY 1, 2013

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