Life is about taking risk. We make daily decisions that involve big and small risk constantly.
Choosing to enjoy life today instead of waiting for tomorrow for that enjoyment isn't a failure, it's a choice. It comes with risk and tradeoffs.
Everyone thinks there's a magical line that everyone else should take that straddles that line between enjoyment today and tomorrow. That lines doesn't exist, and isn't even the same from day to day.
Looking back and regretting a lifetime of decisions is caused that the consequences from those earlier decisions. Once that weight becomes too heavy, the regret sets in.
IMO, the way to combat that is two-fold.
First, in the moment, be conscious of what the risks are, and if they are worth it. If they aren't, take pride in settling for less at the moment so you can safeguard your future. You're doing something hard and good, and it should feel good in itself to do it.
Second, when you look back, remember the joy you had at the time. It was judged, to the best of your ability, to be worth it at the time, and you should continue to feel warm and fuzzy from that joy today, even if bad things have come about as consequence for it.
For instance, like the author, I gained rather a lot of weight. Then I lost most of the excess. Then I gained half of it back. Every day is now a struggle to try to get my weight back down, and my blood pressure is back up so high I couldn't have dental surgery safely the other day, and I'm back on medication.
According to the author that's a failure, but I had a lot of really, really enjoyable meals. I ate the vast majority of them with friends and family. Many of them were either cooked by family, or were special occasions. Calling those meals "failures" now would be saying that it was a mistake to enjoy that time with my family and friends, and it absolutely wasn't.
> Choosing to enjoy life today instead of waiting for tomorrow for that enjoyment isn't a failure, it's a choice.
This conveniently papers over a critical mechanism of how biological brains operate: we do not choose 99% of our actions. It would be extremely inefficient and energy-consuming.
99% of our life we are on autopilot, driven by our habits engaged as response to sensory and internal stimuli.
Habits explain neatly concepts like addiction, while the choice story applied to concepts like addiction or self-destructive acts is reductive at best, and catastrophic on a societal level. Yet the majority of people, those that have been lucky not to have yet felt the grip of addiction, tend to have this opinion that addicts are just weak-willed idiots. This is not referred to you in particular, I am generalising based on common and frustrating opinions about addiction and recovery by well-meaning, but ignorant people.
Functionally and neurologically, there is no difference between a heroin addict and someone that has been going on a run every day for a decade. It's just that their autopilots have been trained to prefer a different action in response to similar stimuli, and brains respond and adapt much more readily to super-stimuli found in drugs and other destructive habits, than with natural and healthy "highs".
I recommend the book "The Biology of Desire" by Marc Lewis, an ex cocaine addict turned neuroscientist.
Hmm.. I’m torn because on the one hand, you’re definitely correct that a non-trivial amount of our lives is subconscious, which is different from auto-pilot in my pedantic opinion.
However, anecdotally I’ve found that whether you think you can do something or whether you think you cannot—you are correct. That is to say, I feel like admitting to the biological truth actually becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy which causes me to fall to my biological default.
However, if I reject that biological “truth”, I will more often find myself empowered by the notion that I can do anything I set my mind to, whether it be drugs or going for a run.
It’s the classic “mind over matter” phenomenon. Your fundamental beliefs can override your biological defaults, so I think it’s very important to regulate and review your beliefs.
I think you're totally missing the point. The point is that most of your actual lived life is simply stimulus and response. We actually have an extremely limited capacity for making reasoned choices - we just don't have the mental energy. So instead we learn to respond in a certain way to a certain stimulus (habit).
Here's an example from my life: I used to go the gym every Wednesday night after work. Several times over the course of this habit, I realized at the end of a long day that I would be better off going home and getting some rest, and decided to go home instead. In nearly every single instance I still drove to the gym, even though I had decided to go home. Because I was on auto-pilot. If we're talking about willpower, I would have say that it was my lack of willpower that led me to going to the gym and working out that day.
What you're talking about is a kind of willpower, which funnily enough has a biological basis also. Genetics seems to play a role, as do many medications. The marshmallow test seems to show willpower largely stays the same over 4 decades. Ozempic also seems to show you can artificially induce it. It's not mind over matter, it's having a mind primed to do it in the first place. It won't be as easily taught to someone who grabs the marshmallow instantly as a preschooler. We also seem to be able to induce it these days with ozempic, which is fascinating.
I don't think Ozempic operates on willpower... it slows your digestion process, which makes you feel fuller longer and can make you incredibly ill if you overeat.
> 99% of our life we are on autopilot, driven by our habits engaged as response to sensory and internal stimuli.
This is such a critical insight, and over the years it was eye opening to realize gradually how much I judged myself for factors that I clearly cannot control. Which is not to say that I’m helpless, but more interested now in focusing on systemic factors that directly influence automatic behaviors.
Judgement is such a major cultural response to addiction, and also happens to be one of the primary impulses that feeds it. Addicts often turn to their drug of choice to feel relief from the shame…of their addiction to their drug of choice.
> I recommend the book "The Biology of Desire" by Marc Lewis, an ex cocaine addict turned neuroscientist.
Adding this to my reading list. In a similar category, Anna Lembke is a psychiatrist and addiction specialist who wrote a book titled “Dopamine Nation” that I found worth reading.
You say we do not choose 99% of our actions, but then you say that we are on autopilot. This is gonna blow your mind now: we are our brain, so if we're on autopilot we're making those decisions.
Your point flies in the face of decades of evidence in the field of cognitive psychology.
Our brain is not defined as "that which makes decisions". Brains do many things, in many different ways, and the vast majority does not involve anything that could be meaningfully described as "deciding".
For the particular distinction here, the book "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Khaneman gives a pretty detailed exposition.
Explicit decision making is slow, energy intensive, and unnecessary the vast majority of the time. And including all the implicit decision making in your definition would be like saying a leaf decides every way it tilts as it falls through the air off a tree.
> This conveniently papers over a critical mechanism of how biological brains operate: we do not choose 99% of our actions. It would be extremely inefficient and energy-consuming.
If we’re talking about the small, unimportant decisions then sure, I agree. But I don’t think the bigger decisions happen on autopilot — precisely because it would be very dangerous.
Speaking of addiction, relapses are never important decisions. Relapses are taking the wrong path (subconsciously because of habits and very strong neural pathways) at one of the thousands of different crossroads you come across in your daily life. This is why addiction is so terrible.
The first few days, the hardest ones, every single thing that happens to you (had a bad day, stranger frowned at me, stubbed my toe) is weighed and a decision is made. For a seasoned addict, many of these events have the automated response of ingesting your drug of choice.
Anecdote: I've quit smoking and any form of nicotine 3.5 years ago. I don't miss it. I have not relapsed once. Yet to this day, there are moments where I catch myself feeling that something is missing. That I have forgotten something important I had to do. A little soul searching later, and it's apparent I am just feeling that a cigarette right now be really nice. It completely sneaks up on me, but the first few months this happened dozens of times a day, the first few days even more. If your autopilot makes the wrong choice just once, you're back to square zero.
One thing I've personally found is, if I look closely, my small decisions often have big ramifications due to the chain of events or habits they kick off.
For example, the choice to open that one app leads to 30 minutes of scrolling leads to poor night's sleep leads leads to being on a later sleep schedule that week leads to not cognitively showing up to an important meeting that Saturday and missing an opportunity.
What we perceive of as 'big decisions' exist only within the conditions visible to our consciousness. Behind the scenes though those conditions are continuously shaped by small decisions amplified by the lever of the subconscious and our environment.
In other words, we're good at assessing the gravity of immediate conditions available to us, but we're bad at assessing internal and external processes and their effects. One reason why "know thyself" is such important advice.
Thus we'd be wise to make shaping conditions part of what we consider a 'big decision', perhaps even the big decision. This is another way of saying "we make our own luck".
I learned a lot about this kind of predictive modeling function of our brains from _The Experience Machine_ by Andy Clark. He was on Sean Carroll's podcast not too long ago and they had a great conversation on this topic.
> Calling those meals "failures" now would be saying that it was a mistake to enjoy that time with my family and friends, and it absolutely wasn't.
If gaining weight is the failure in this context, the mistake would likely be the excessive intake of food.
Time spent with friends and family would not be the mistake.
This might have come off a bit harsh.
Temperance, as you suggest, is a beautiful thing. It's hard (for me, especially), but sometimes we just have to put down the fork and politely decline that second, third, or fourth pancake.
I wasn't particularly overweight before but I attribute about ~10lbs of weight loss this year to realizing that:
- When at a dinner with family or friends, I never _have_ to finish something. Most of the time the host will be happy to package my leftovers to take back home when asked. That last part makes it clear that I like and appreciate the food even through I didn't finish it in the moment.
- If I buy food at a restaurant, I don't have an obligation to finish it to get my moneys worth. And again, I can just save it for another meal if I want.
- I don't have to eat snacks just because the host put them on a table at a party.
For some reason our brains think that just because food is _there_ we need to eat it, but that's generally not true.
I don’t actually think temperance and logic like this moves the needle significantly for obese people. When you’re obese you need to lose 50, 70, 100+ lbs, not 10. You’re looking at fundamentally changing relationship with food at multiple levels to the point where it’s unrecognizable. I don’t think small changes in habit like this are in the same ballpark as what obese people need to become a normal weight, in the same way that I don’t think taking the stairs instead of the elevator is in the same ballpark as someone who wants to become a professional athlete.
> When you’re obese you need to lose 50, 70, 100+ lbs, not 10.
You have to lose 10 at some point. The way you're putting it, it looks like losing weight would be some kind of drastic sprint with a finish line. I don't think it can happen that way. You have to lose weight and continuing changing your habit to lose 10 more, and the others 10 after, until it stabilises at healthy weight, then you start your healthy life, but it's not a finish line, the effort continues by fighting unhealthy habit for the rest of your life.
I don't think anyone is suggesting that the same tricks will work for everyone. I've never been chronically obese so I wouldn't know what goes on in someone's mind at that point.
However I do know that it moved the needle significantly in _my_ life by changing my relationship with food so it's valuable to me. Losing the extra ~10 to 20 lbs of weight people gain in adulthood is something that people do struggle with even if it's not as dramatic as someone fighting obesity.
I've seen a handful people close to me go from 100lb+ overweight to a more comfortable 10 to 20 (or 50). And I think what GP described is a fundamental change to the relationship with food: You're (consciously at first) changing the definition of what needs to be consumed vs what is being consumed without need. They've all from what I've observed gone through this change.
They said that when you're really big, the first 10 lbs is the easiest to lose, and can come from taking stairs and changing snack habits. It's the last 10 lbs that requires the diligent workouts and very strict diets.
Indeed, walking punches way over expectations for keeping weight off. You have to do a good hour of a walk, but an hour walking is probably better than a rushed workout of similar time.
Good on you! Something I preach to my children is that success comes from showing up every day to do a little and not from a sudden burst of a lot. Well done.
I turn 50 this year and have committed to doing 50,000 pushups before 2024. It sounds like a lot, but after the first month, doing 200-300 a day isn't really that difficult (when broken up into smaller sets). Honestly, it's a LOT more of a mental challenge than a physical challenge.
Sunk cost fallacy. You aren't getting that $7.50 back. The question should actually be "do I want to, for no reason at all, feel like shit for the rest of the evening?"
(This assumes you aren't deriving any pleasure or utility from eating that last 25%. If you are, then that's one side of the cost/benefit analysis. But the initial cost of the food is irrelevant not matter what.)
Yeah. I suppose sunk cost fallacy here would be "I should eat it all to avoid wasting money." I guess you're sort of actually psychologizing OUT of that. It's still a bit fallacious, since the correct cost of the decision to not eat is actually $0, not $7.50, but I guess lying to yourself about that could be a useful mental trick.
Indeed. I doubt anyone ever got fat by eating food they didn't like.
The issue becomes all the worse when food is designed to make you want to keep on eating. Bonus points for it giving you that sort of hunger-like feeling 2 hours after your meal.
I realize everyone has different dietary needs, so I'm not saying this is for everyone, but it's very, very rare for me to finish a meal at a restaurant in one sitting. I used to, but leaving and feeling stuffed got old.
I've found if I stop early, it turns out it was only my brain that wanted more food. Physically, I've had enough and am satisfied. I just need to give my brain time to catch up to my body.
Additionally, I drink a lot of water with my meals. This helps prevent overeating.
Lastly, it's always great to get two meals (dinner and tomorrow's lunch) from one restaurant dinner.
And in general it's easier to have the snacks simply not be there, than to try to resist eating them. The habit of having random food and snacks lying around the house for 'just in case' is not a good one if you care about your health or weight. Unless of course you are actually required to eat frequently due to medical conditions.
There's a hack that solves "the problem" in general: "non-judgment".
We get so inculcated with comparing, contrasting, thinking about "better", "not as good as", "worse" ... it's THE recipe for all manner of negative psychological states, emotions, etc. There are basic biological drives, of course, but both implicitly and explicitly we are taught minute-by-minute, starting from not long after birth, to JUDGE EVERYTHING. Parents - "good/bad boy / girl", school - grades / social status / toys, work - "star employee / slacker" ... It's a set up for every imaginary "treadmill" that exists - consumer, achievement, etc.
All illusory.
It takes some conscious work / effort, to undo. But, I found, ultimately, that I was able to undo a hell of a lot of that crap in a shorter time than I expected. Several weeks worth of work with Jon Kabat-Zinn's 7 pillars of mindfulness, etc... can make a big difference, in my experience.
Getting out of the habit of having to have "an opinion" / "judgment" about every single F'ing thing that IS ... That just IS, until we have to categorize, compare, pick apart, judge, ... let the moronic inner critic - amalgamated, in part, through years of inculcation via others, intentional and not - dissect every molecule of existence until the minutest shred of simple BEING, JOY, etc. in any MOMENT is reduced to ash ... getting out of that habit is the greatest gift I've ever been given.
I still judge, I still fall into traps / stupidity ... I'm still human - hell, this comment has enough judging in it itself, even more simply implied / denotational ... but, I'm so much further out of the mire of crap our heads tend to get filled up with than so many people. It's both tremendously more comfortable, and yet also saddening to see so many still so trapped - by the same kinds of shitty thinking I was trapped by for years.
Everything you wrote here resonates pretty deeply. And as a child of fundamental religion, these judgements were not just social, but existential.
My path to something better has been Sam Harris’ Waking Up app, as well as exploring the Dzogchen analytical framework for exploring the ways we constantly engage in this labeling/judging was mind bending and eye opening (a guy named James Low does a talk titled “Everything as it is” that unlocked some things in my brain).
I feel the same way about this - it’s a gift. Nearing 40 and experiencing relief from lifelong struggles with painful patterns of thought for the first time. These are ideas worth exploring, and are all solidly grounded in rational thought, which was something I mistakenly thought I’d have to leave behind to explore this kind of contemplative path.
It’s interesting to me to see this comment, because “today” is very much the focus in recovery circles. If you’ve ever been to AA or any of the other 12-step programs you’ve probably heard someone say something akin to “one day at a time”. In general, though, it is important to note that part of what makes an addiction an addiction is the lack of willpower to overcome it. So if you tell an addict “it is a choice” they’ll ultimately agree with you, knowing that in the moment of their failure it very much did not feel like one.
For those of us who have had to make drastic life changes in order to make “making the wrong choice” difficult or impossible, there’s definitely an amount of life planning (and before that, honesty with self and others) that has to happen in order to balance the scale and turn those forks in the road into ones we can look at and say, “Today, I’ll make a good choice.” For some there are ways to reset and never look back, and I’ve seen it happen. One good choice can be the difference. For others, as you mention, there are daily choices, and it continues to take effort to make the right one every single time.
There's the saying that "we are free to do what we want, but not to want what we want". I'd guess that at the moment of a lapse, the drug/alcohol is all an addict wants. Changing that want into something else is the hard part and also depends strongly on the environment.
It's a good saying, but something leaving in exposition. Each addict is different, but frequently the drug/alcohol is not what the addict wants.
Think of the addict in relapse more as saying “yeahhhh gonna let loose and party hard and have a lot of fun and go wild and crazy.” The overindulgence is the point, the feeling of freedom and abandon.
I liked the way Craig Ferguson put it in American on Purpose, he said that if he could drink alcohol “socially” the limited way other people do, it wouldn't be interesting to him in the first place.
This is also why people get addicted to casinos, it's a similar “woooo, party!!” desire. People who are addicted to junk food also have this, they call it a “cheat day,” the idea is not that I slipped myself an extra Oreo, but that I decided to slip myself the extra Oreo and then declared it a cheat day and then ate puddings and cakes and pizza and guzzled soft drinks and “wooo, party day, calories don't count”...
One typically doesn't “change that want,” one buries it. It still keeps coming up as an “I am overwhelmed with the boring tedium of adulthood can't I go back to being a reckless kid and partying all night?” and you say “Look, having fun is why we have playing that guitar in the backyard or lifting or jamming out to music or planning a week off in Colorado, we have to do the less intense adulty fun things that build us up now, because we know what happens when we do the reckless childish fun things that tear down (and have torn us down, over and over and over and over again)... and we have to grow up so that we don't lose everything and die alone in a ditch.” So you bury the want, not allowed to want “woooo party time!!”, because you have hit rock bottom several times now and you know that you don't have an ability to have a healthy relationship with that internal party-fiend, because he will react to the stress of money being tight by wanting to gamble more, will react to the weight gain by having more cheat days, will react to the hangover by looking for a cider in the fridge. Can't give him a foothold in your life again.
There's enjoying things, and being a servant of pleasure.
Plato puts it well in Gorgias; where he makes an analogy of two men tasked with keeping jars filled with wine, honey and milk.
The first man has jars of good quality, and is able to fill them up and they stay full and then he can go on about his life and be happy, the task of keeping them full causes him no grief. The second man has cracks and holes in his jars, so the pleasure always leaks out and he needs to spend every day topping them up in order to avoid misery. He's completely enslaved by the task and it's causing him daily grief to keep them full.
I think the moral of the story is that if you find yourself in that situation, you should repair or replace the jar instead of spending every day in a futile struggle to keep it full.
It's more useful to view resolve, moral continence, self-control as things that you do rather than things you have been granted.
I think you can enjoy some potato chips and some short videos, but I have my doubts about how many you can consume in a row while maintaining enjoyment.
My experience is that the enjoyment one feels with the first few bites quickly transforms from seeking the pleasure of continuing, into avoiding the pain of stopping.
If you could wave a magic wand and give someone a day to do whatever they want to do no one would be choosing chips and TikTok.
I don't think many people really enjoy it. It's just less painful than other things, or they don't have the resources to do what they actually want to do, or their choice requires something that's not possible right now... Chips and TikTok is the fallback, not the first choice.
What’s the issue with "chips and TikTok"? It’s virtually free, requires no new equipement and can be done anywhere. Depending on how your feed is curated, you can learn more things in five minutes on TikTok than the same duration on HN or any other website.
OP's take on this resonated with me deeply. Throughout my life I've held the belief that, "I generally choose the right path." That's helped me in five decades of life to never be overweight, never smoke cigarettes, never do an illicit drug, etc. Your take on this topic does not come across as helpful or beneficial to me:
First, in the moment, be conscious of what the risks are, and if they are worth it. If they aren't, take pride in settling for less at the moment so you can safeguard your future.
I think it's important to forgive ourselves when we don't choose the right path. Shame isn't good for anyone. But to take pride in it? I don't believe that's helpful at all.
Calling those meals "failures" now would be saying that it was a mistake to enjoy that time with my family and friends
This really sounds like a rationalization. You could enjoy a healthful meal with family and friends. But you're likely addicted to sugar, fat and salt like most people are. So you need a bunch of sugar, fat and salt to be satisfied by a meal.
A decade ago I had slightly high triglycerides. I stopped all obvious sugar cold turkey for a year. It was brutal for two weeks - craving soda and all kinds of other sugar. Then an amazing thing happened... I stopped craving sugar. Fruit and other food started to taste amazing! Imagine getting as excited about eating a clementine as you used to get eating chocolate cheesecake.
I reframed the topic in my mind to, "I just don't eat those things." which was successful. Thoughts of, "I won't eat those things for the next two weeks and then I'll do what I want" just exhausts your will power and leads to a roller coaster of weight gain and loss.
I don't really know anything about physiology or nutrition, but when you learn physics you do have to learn about the difference between simple linear systems and complex feedback networks, and then you see the Metabolic Pathways chart[1] and that proves that we are the latter, a complex feedback network.
One lesson about complex systems is that you don't change them by finding something “wrong” and “fixing it”, in the traditional sense. The problem is that there was a feedback loop keeping it that way and whatever you did just enabled that feedback loop to work harder at fighting your change. The weight-loss interpretation of this would be the failure of fad diets, I guess?
What you do instead is that you find a way to pin the output out of its range and then work backwards, or disconnect an input or so. “I need to live a life without sweets,” sounds like it was your disconnected input.
A second lesson about the complex system is that for the one thing to change, everything must change. All of the feedback loops that kept the system in state 1 need to reconfigure and reorganize themselves to accept state 2. Which means there's a period of breakage, one could even call “mourning,” where the system has not yet managed to reconfigure itself and limps along trying to get the new thing going. You just wanted a cleaner house, but in order to get it done it turned out to not require haphazard two hours cleaning sessions, no. Instead you needed to start waking up at 7 AM to have the time to empty the dishwasher before you go to work so that your spouse, who will forget about the dishwasher if it is not left open and inviting, can put the kids’ dishes in it, this causes a chain reaction where the kitchen countertops are not covered with dirty dishes so that becomes the natural room for the kids to draw in when they come home from school, which leads to them choosing to do their own homework, which leads to them having time at the end of the day to clean up, which allows everybody to go to bed early in a clean house... which is the ONLY reason you can, night owl though you are, get up at 7AM to empty the damn dishwasher. Everything had to reorganize to accomplish the goal and that took chaos and difficulty.
Obviously, you cannot be omniscient. The idea is that you have to accept that you made the best decision with the information you had at the time. If that information changes, make new decisions.
Well, this is why "it boils down to" this. You can't control what other people do; you may have influence, sometimes, but never control. You can't blame people for what they do, if you live with the assumption that 'most' people are making the 'best' decisions with the information they have available at the time of making it; where 'best' means something that could be an entire book.
Every decision boils down to one of four types of decisions (philosophy 101):
1. inconsequential and routine (what color shirt to wear)
2. inconsequential and once-in-a-lifetime (what color shirt to wear _today_)
3. consequential and routine (which route to take to work)
4. consequential and once-in-a-lifetime (who to marry)
The thing is, 1 & 2 can be and usually are consequential; it's just that you lack the ability to detect the consequences. Usually. I met my wife, on the beach, with some friends. The decision that led there, I thought, was inconsequential at the time.
But yes, your information will always be imperfect. I have scars all over my body from doing things that should have been fine. I've nearly died and somehow escaped (or been rescued from) the situation too many times to count. You have to live with consequences and not all consequences are knowable in advance; and for that matter, not all consequences are bad.
Genuinely asking, how so? I've had my bouts of depression and burn-out in my life, but even then, I just assumed it was an unforeseen consequence of some action(s) and got treatment.
This is also the boiled down version though, so I'm kinda curious what you see in it and how it could influence the bigger picture.
> Choosing to enjoy life today instead of waiting for tomorrow for that enjoyment isn't a failure, it's a choice. It comes with risk and tradeoffs.
That dichotomy is not always true. There is a percentage of people that can enjoy their youth (travel, parties, ...) and still get a plentiful future. Other people needs to renounce to everything now just to survive to tomorrow. So, not always a choice there.
> Choosing to enjoy life today instead of waiting for tomorrow for that enjoyment isn't a failure, it's a choice. It comes with risk and tradeoffs.
100% this. It's not as black or white as people make it.
That being said, there is some level of diminishing returns for how much enjoyment you can get from something (e.g. eating), and how much of a tradeoff (e.g. gaining weight). You can maximize it (be selective in which foods you really like - and the people you want to be around) and minimize the tradeoffs (eating in a day 2 meals instead of 3). That's if you want to take a sabbatical and maximize the enjoyment out of life. If you want to grind, focus on yourself, etc and push yourself to the limits - you need to be outside that comfort zone. You spend more time putting yourself in uncomfortable situations at the cost of spending less time with friends and family.
Life is all about balance.
Sometimes you take high risks and push yourself further
Sometimes you take low risks and enjoy the benefits from the work you put in
With every high comes lows
All good things come to an end
But you won't get anywhere in life without taking risks
> First, in the moment, be conscious of what the risks are, and if they are worth it.
Is that a happy life? For every decision you take, every thought that crosses your mind, making a concious cost-benefit analysis?
> According to the author that's a failure, but I had a lot of really, really enjoyable meals. I ate the vast majority of them with friends and family. Many of them were either cooked by family, or were special occasions. Calling those meals "failures" now would be saying that it was a mistake to enjoy that time with my family and friends, and it absolutely wasn't.
Perhaps it wasn't the meals that were the failure, but the lack of compensating physical activity? Discussions of body weight issues seem over-emphasize blame of too much on food and diet and neglect sedentary lifestyle and lack of physical activity. In other words, barring serious medical conditions (many of which are treatable once diagnosed properly), you can have it both, enjoy good times with friends that includes eating really tasty food as well as not into health-affecting weight issues.
This rationalization is not meaningfully different than those given by the obese (or drug addicted) to maintain their habits. For instance, "This milkshake sparks joy", or "everything in moderation including moderation" (only, no two people agree on what 'moderate' is).
I believe you had enjoyable meals with friends, but to be honest, are those by themselves happening often enough to gain a problematic amount of weight? What if you would find the habit to balance these events with some counter measure (be it going to gym, eating more fruits and vegetables at the rest of those days or weeks). I think the point of OP still holds, the "failures" are habits. What failure is, is subjective, but if you are mindful of what you do when -- your habits, you know what to label a failure and what not, and when to steer/change an intention. Easier said then done though.
Yup, tradeoffs, all the way down. Sure, you can exercise afterwards, but then you give up something else. It might be de-stressing time in front of the TV, or chat time with friends and family. Or it might make you tired and achy for the rest of the day, lessening the fun there.
It's easy to say "just balance it", but all of it has been attempting to balance things, and some people, including myself, repeatedly chose the side that had risks and consequences later so that they could enjoy the moment.
A lot of enjoyable meals with friends and overweight is not necessaraly correlated.
There are a lot of social gourmets that have normal weight. Usually overweight comes from cheap garbage fastfood, sweet drinks and low physical movement.
Excellent food has often low calories and small portions.
I lost you in the first line. Why is life about taking risk? Like is about eating, playing , having fun, etc. Why emphasize risk? Some silicon valley mantra?
Choosing to enjoy life today instead of waiting for tomorrow for that enjoyment isn't a failure, it's a choice. It comes with risk and tradeoffs.
Everyone thinks there's a magical line that everyone else should take that straddles that line between enjoyment today and tomorrow. That lines doesn't exist, and isn't even the same from day to day.
Looking back and regretting a lifetime of decisions is caused that the consequences from those earlier decisions. Once that weight becomes too heavy, the regret sets in.
IMO, the way to combat that is two-fold.
First, in the moment, be conscious of what the risks are, and if they are worth it. If they aren't, take pride in settling for less at the moment so you can safeguard your future. You're doing something hard and good, and it should feel good in itself to do it.
Second, when you look back, remember the joy you had at the time. It was judged, to the best of your ability, to be worth it at the time, and you should continue to feel warm and fuzzy from that joy today, even if bad things have come about as consequence for it.
For instance, like the author, I gained rather a lot of weight. Then I lost most of the excess. Then I gained half of it back. Every day is now a struggle to try to get my weight back down, and my blood pressure is back up so high I couldn't have dental surgery safely the other day, and I'm back on medication.
According to the author that's a failure, but I had a lot of really, really enjoyable meals. I ate the vast majority of them with friends and family. Many of them were either cooked by family, or were special occasions. Calling those meals "failures" now would be saying that it was a mistake to enjoy that time with my family and friends, and it absolutely wasn't.