Adulting is an exercise in imperfect choices.
I realize this is disappointing news, particularly to those of you who were, like me, the ambitious, most-likely-to-succeed type growing up. And I wish it weren’t so—I really do. But it is not only something I’ve come to know as true beyond doubt. It’s also a surprising doorway to freedom.
I should have gotten this bit of wisdom through my head at a much younger age—about 11, I think. That was when I went horse shopping with my grandfather. I didn’t know the first thing about the animals, but even at that age I had an eye for beauty and proportions. When Grandpa asked me what I thought about the white horse he was thinking of buying, I told him that I’d prefer the chocolate colored one, if I had my pick.
Grandpa laughed. “Well son, you don’t have your pick. The brown one isn’t for sale. The white one is.”
I don’t remember the conversation after that. Likely, it involved an excruciatingly long back-and-forth on price between my grandfather and the seller. I remember standing on the fence and watching the horses while the men did their thing.
We went home with the white horse.
I can’t say whether that particular animal did exactly what Grandpa bought it to do or not. He cursed it the same way he cursed his old horse, Buddy, which nobody took as a reflection of either’s actual worth. All I know is that he had one horse before, and then he had two afterward—not the addition I would have picked, but the one that was available to him.
An imperfect choice. Welcome to adulting.
I know, I know. This sounds a whole lot little settling for less, and perhaps it is. But my kids put “a jet pack” at the top of their Christmas lists for nearly a decade and never got it. What they did get was virtually everything else further down the list. They weren’t about to reject the Sea Cow Lego set to stand on a principle.
My point: the path to happiness runs through making the most of available options rather than dwelling on impossible ones.
That reality hit me hard in 2016, when I had the first (and so far only) major medical scare of my life. I became violently ill in the spring and again in the fall, dwindling down to about 2/3 of the fairly average size I’d been beforehand. In that diminished state, I didn’t want to believe the diagnosis the doctors gave me, nor did I want to spend the rest of my life dependent on a drug to maintain my health. But if I chose not to take the drugs, the rest of my life might not have extended to Christmas. An imperfect choice, but also a clear one.
That same year, America elected Donald Trump for the first time, thanks largely to his ability to convince people that there were no good options. A similar thing happened in 2024. He managed—God knows how—to convince people that Harris’ flaws were so bad that there was no good candidate. Millions of voters stayed home, content to make no choice rather than vote for the imperfect.
How’s that working out for us? Try asking Comrade Musk. I’m sure he’s willing to give you your opinion.
But my point isn’t who is running the country, at last not in this newsletter. The point is who is running our lives—making choices every day about what we will say, do, consume, tolerate, resist, bless, and curse.
That means you and me.
Being an adult involves so much active negotiation with the world and ourselves. The path to happiness is paved with the results of those negotiations. If we only allow for the perfect, the road will crumble. We will miss out on great things because we are stuck on an ideal.
Need proof? Spend some time with an old married couple, long disabused of their notions of happily ever after. Watch them bicker over their morning coffee or haggle over what to eat for supper. Get each one alone and listen to the complaints about how loudly she snores or how after 40 years he still can’t do his own dishes. And then, when one of them dies, watch how shattered the other is, not because paradise was lost, but because they no longer have the person who understood them as they moved together through this imperfect world.
What would that long, glorious life have been like if the demand for perfection kept them from ever getting together? Generations would have been poorer for the loss.
I could go on, but you get my point. Well, one of them anyhow.
The other is this: recognizing we have only imperfect choices also teaches us grace, which is perpetually in short supply. Grace doesn’t prevent us from seeking justice, but it does forbid us on passing judgment on those who are doing their best to live within an ethical framework. It allows us room to put up with another’s faults and sets a reasonable expectation that they will put up with ours. Grace says, You don’t quite live up to the standard, but neither do I, and we’re still in this together.
I forget that sometimes, watching the world burn.
But the deeper truth is that, despite the pervasive horrors that surround us, there is a certain level in which the imperfect choices we face are not a bug to our existence, but a feature. They are how we learn to be better people, how we enter into our most meaningful relationships.
They are how we learn love, and how we sustain it.