Forrest Gump 2.0: Modern Life Is Like Frozen Pizza 🍕

Being alive in 2018 is to stand on the shoulders of giants who have made our lives easier, cleaner, longer, and straight up better.

Among some of the great inventions, I’ll mention plumbing, antibiotics, hygiene, phones, cars, electricity, flight, computers, and the internet.

Still, it’s not like all these inventions came without a cost.

Modern life is like frozen pizza.

Frozen Pizza Life vs. Stew Life

We’ve been reduced to living frozen pizza lives. The frozen pizza life is sometimes literal (shoutout to college students), but the metaphorical frozen pizza life affects almost everyone.

The past one-hundred years has been a progressive “speeding up” of almost all things in society — all at the expense of meaning.

In general, we…

• Write more, but research less.
• Eat more, but enjoy less.
• Read more, but reflect less.
• Connect more, but share less.
• And we eat more frozen pizza, and less stew.

You see, while the high speed of modern life is great for certain metrics of economic production, it’s not great for making stew.

And few things in life taste as good as stew.

Modern life moves at a breakneck pace. If something is too slow, our instinct is that it’s almost not worth doing it.

But it takes a long time to cook stew.

I’m almost not willing to write this article, because my snack addicted brain has had the insight and I’m happy about it. The act of writing is too damn slow.

Unfortunately, there won’t be any satisfaction until I’ve written something about it. While the insight is an amazing snack, I don’t think the insight is worth anything until I’ve shared it.

A recipe passed down through generations: Rice noodles with octopus 🐙

Stew usually takes quite a bit of preparation to make.

If I leave my ideas half-baked, I’ll feel good about the insight, but I’ll eventually have that empty feeling inside that it was all for nothing.

If I articulate the idea, write a post, and hit publish, I’ll feel somewhat satisfied. I’ll also know what I think.

Doing the work turns that snack insight into stew.

If you’ve ever made stew, you know it takes time to make good stew. In some cases, it takes experience across generations.

No one makes better stew than grandma because grandma’s been making stew for 50 years, and she learned it from her grandma who made stew for 50 years before her.

They know to do the work that goes into it.

They know to let the stew sit.

And they know that the stew will feed a family way more effectively than frozen pizza ever will.