Episode 01: Choose Off a Different Menu

[00:00:00] Seth: I once went to a Chinese restaurant with a friend of mine that happened to be Chinese. And when we, when we got to this restaurant, the waiter came up and brought out the menus and my friend said, No, no, no, no, no. Bring out the Chinese menus. I had no clue all this time that I'd been going to Chinese restaurants and I wasn't even eating Chinese food.

So, obviously the waiter came back and brought back an entirely different menu from which my friend proceeded to tell me which, which was what and what I should get and it was great. I had a real authentic Chinese dining experience. You know, life is sometimes the same way. Sometimes we don't know it, but there's an entirely different menu for us to choose from.

We have the freedom to make choices. Even in confinement, we can make choices. You know, life presents. Each person in life, their own individualized menu and that menu consists of what life expects. We are going to want to choose from what we don't always realize is that the menu is not absolute. You may think that the menus largely dictated by how much wealth we have a poor man, for example, may not have the option of chartering a private jet to take a trip to Europe.

But yeah, even a poor man has options. If tomorrow you had no resources, no money, no family, you might think that you really are limited to just a few options, finding a job or withering away and dying. But in reality, you could go and attempt to forage in the forest. You could beg. You could find a soup kitchen.

You could go to a church. You could, You know, maybe start selling drugs, make friends with someone. In a lot of ways, a man with nothing has more options than anyone because he no longer has anything to lose. So even in the media that we consume, we are often presented just a simplified menu. You may think that the news you watch is all that is newsworthy because otherwise it wouldn't be news.

But in reality, the news that we're watching is selected for us by just a handful of editors that are. ultimately making the choice of what is newsworthy. You know, there's some obvious things like catastrophe is pretty much always newsworthy. It's always gonna be a winner for them, but they're really driven by two things.

If you're an editor, one, you need to get people to spend the time to actually read your stuff. So you got to hook them with something. And the second motivation is to. influence people. I mean, if you want people to think the way you think, are you really going to show them that news article that might contradict your worldview a little bit?

Probably not. And so outside of catastrophe, you have a lot of editorial decisions that are just purely based on what they want you to see. And to a lesser extent, what they think their audience expects. The way you're currently living your life is probably the same way you've seen most people around you live it.

But in reality, you've probably only seen a handful of people's intimate lives. So you really don't have a great sample size. And on top of that, just because everybody's doing it doesn't necessarily make it right. The lives we lead are often laid out for us by what we see our parents do and what we see our friends do.

For a lot of people, the menu of life that they order from seems to follow a similar pattern to the following. You graduate high school. You go to college. You get a job. Maybe you get a loan on a car that's too expensive for you. You move in with someone. You save up so you can pay for that super expensive wedding after you've been living with the person for five years already.

You get married, you have a kid, you pay off your student loans, hopefully at some point you pay off your house, you retire, and you just pray that your children have children so that you can have grandchildren. Not everything on that life menu is necessarily bad, and that's not really what I'm trying to argue here.

Getting married and having children, in my opinion, is a total net positive. Everything else, though, is debatable. The point here is you don't have to choose off of the menu you're given. Maybe once or twice in your life it's worth thinking about how you could improve upon that menu. Maybe asking for a different menu.

See, the sky's the limit as far as your options go. You know, four or five years ago, I chose to adopt a fairly restrictive diet based on what I determined was going to be the healthiest long term for me. Consequently, 90 percent of the restaurants out there do not even have something on the menu that I can eat.

And the other 10 percent have like two or three things that I can choose from. And on top of that, if I was being completely serious about the way I eat, I would probably cut out restaurants altogether. So, I have had to figure out how to order off the menu, literally, in the sense of food. Does it take more thought?

Absolutely. Does it taste as good as what is on the menu? Sometimes. Mostly no. So why do it? Because I opted to choose off a different menu in life that I think is going to bring me closer to where I want to be. See, you don't have to order off the menu that's given to you. You may feel like when you get home, you need to turn on the TV, because that's just what you know to do in order to relax.

You may feel like you need to drag your kids around to a million different extracurriculars to be a good parent. It may seem like when you're really sad or feeling down that the thing to do is to go and get drunk at a bar. It may seem like you should send your kids to college. It may seem like you need to have a house in the suburbs with a white picket fence.

A lot of these things are just things that people do and we do them because everybody else does it, which isn't always a bad thing, but sometimes it is because you got options. And look, if you do the same things that everybody else is doing, you're going to lead a life the same as everybody else.

There's nothing necessarily wrong with that, but most of us hope to live a life that's a little more interesting, I think. Maybe some of us hope to get a little more out of life. And I'm going to talk a little bit about that in just a second, but I'm going to talk a little bit about what I think is the most important thing in a person's life than what they see their peers achieving.

Maybe, maybe their, their own vision of what success even looks like is completely different from what everyone else's opinion is. You know, in some ways I kind of admire people living on the streets. Obviously, a lot of these people are.

Struggling from major drug addiction and other problems. But I do think that some of them have just realized that they just, they can't live in houses. It's just not comfortable for them. They just don't like it. And there is in a way, something to admire about the person that's bucked all of society's Teachings on Success.

And I don't know that these people are actually happy. I would not be happy that way. And I'm not entirely sure that these people are happy that way. But I wonder sometimes. If maybe some of them are. Because their lives are simple. They take them day by day. They may not be exciting. But in a way, I mean, actually, their lives are probably very exciting.

For better or for worse. But it makes me wonder sometimes. So a lot of what's on the menu is there because it's a good option. Yeah. We've probably all heard the phrase, don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. So we don't really need to throw the menu out, but in a lot of ways, the menu that we're getting.

I think a better way to start thinking about this menu in the first place is, who's presenting it to us? And then we need to decide how much we trust the person, the people, the entity that's telling us what the menu is. And then finally we need to think hard on whether or not there's any possible different options out there that might actually make our lives better.

And ultimately the biggest question is the menu that you're ordering off of. Keeping you down or is it lifting you up? So think about that. The next time you make some choices, think about what your options really are. Sometimes when you have a, an unlimited menu, it can be a little overwhelming cause you don't know where to start, but start here.

Decide if it's keeping you down or lifting you up, then you've taken the first step.