YOLO

One need not delve too deeply into the meaning of this phrase. The acronym no longer serves to remind one of the fleeting nature of human life. Now it has become a routine — yet enthusiastic — response to demonstrate support, excitement or even just amusement at an event. But I do have a brief discourse to offer on the subject. YOLO, as I see it, can be invoked primarily in two ways. On the one hand, it’s saying, “Life is short — you ought to try new things.” In fact, the demo version of The Strokes’ song was titled “I’ll Try Anything Once.” As an ideology for how to approach life, I’m all for it. The sort of ‘grab life by the horns’ approach that encourages indulging your whims without reservation is one I can endorse. I feel it embraces a good deal of joie de vivre and optimism toward the opportunities of life.

I have some reservations about the second application of YOLO. The other side of the YOLO perspective is one that seems to assign special value to new experiences as opposed to proven good experiences. This again comes from the sort of “I’ll try anything once” part of the idea: It implies that you ought to try new things, not just stick to things you are already familiar with and know you enjoy. I hesitate to throw my weight behind this side of the YOLO pursuit. Having a favorite book doesn’t diminish the value of other books. Nor is rereading a favorite any less valuable than reading a new book. Too serious a pursuit of YOLO may lead one to begin making such comparisons and trade-offs.

Over extended breaks, I often nanny for five- and six-year-old brothers in Nashville. Their version of YOLO — though not once have they ever termed it that — is not an approach of maximizing the number of experiences over a limited amount of time, but instead the amount of enjoyment. We have spent weeks together in which we visited the local science museum three days in a row. Even the most in-depth exploration of Nashville’s children’s science museum can take no more than a few hours. Three full days provide more than enough time to visit and revisit every exhibit. But their philosophy is not one of “That was fun, let’s check it off the life to-do list and move on.” It is instead a “Wow, that was fun once, it will be even more fun to do again.” And, as it turns out, one visit to the space simulation room — which is otherwise no more than a dark room of mirrors and fiber optics — is hardly enough to soak in the experience.

Here, however, I have to insert a qualification. YOLO in such a sense — of encouraging a new, perhaps wild, experience — has recently been employed in a ‘no shame, no regrets’ sense. While I do think there is value in the YOLO mantra justifying deviations from one’s own norms, we must remember that there are both positive and negative experiences. Not all new explorations are good, and YOLO need not be applied as an attempt at retroactive justification.

While I obviously see the value of gaining a wide variety of experiences, I’m always struck by the pure and simple hedonistic value of these boys’ approach to life. I don’t doubt that it’s the result of being young, and that as they get older they’ll feel more pressure to subscribe to the “check and move on” approach. But I think there’s a nice quality to their style of ‘You Only Live Once’ ideology — one that avoids both the problems of overvaluing new experiences and retroactive application. Having only one shot at a full and happy life places value on both the ‘full’ and the ‘happy.’ Given that we’re trying to gain the greatest amount of pleasure over these two types of fulfillment but are constrained by time, we ought to endeavor to satisfy both types of enjoyment by experiencing new things, increasing the ‘fullness’ of our life and indulging in the pure and simple pleasure of a repeated favorite.

Lily Alberts is an economics major from Nashville, Tenn. She can be reached at lalberts@princeton.edu.