When I was 12 or so, a younger man full of vim, vigor and vitamins. Well, probably not vitamins. 12 year olds are not generally known for their nutritional regimes, and in that respect (and perhaps only that respect), I was quite a typical 12 year old.
As I was saying, when I was about 12, my mother took me and my sister on a family vacation to San Diego. One of my strongest memories of this trip was a snack bar. I asked for a bag of Lays potato chips. Specifically, I asked for the large bag, despite it being more expensive. When I received the bag, I was disappointed. It was mostly air!
For years I kicked myself for the extra expense, thinking that I should have gotten the small, as it would have had the same amount of chips in it! I’m sure my mother had forgotten this incident the moment it transpired, the extra 75 cents or whatever it was being meaningless on a vacation. But it was only recently that I realized the small probably did have fewer chips in it, and that I would have spent the last twenty years thinking “Man, I should have opted for the bigger bag, the small was a ripoff!”
A better blogger would tie this tale into current events, or extract from it a worthwhile moral. Those performative buffoons on LinkedIn would tie this into B2B sales, or an advertisement for their own labor. I’ll do neither. This is just a story to know me better. If you simply must squint and squeeze until a lesson or constrained metaphor pops out, let it be this: sometimes both options are bad. Less cynically, it’s easy to find disappointment however you frame an outcome. Maybe, with effort, we can find joy there instead.