Every once in a while I’ll read something that restores my faith that writers are important. Something that’s so true, so authentic, and so universal that it needed to be written, and read, by as many human beings as possible. This is that in a nutshell.

I listen to conversations. A lot. Hell, one of the reasons I live in this city is because it’s the perfect fix for my eavesdropping fetish. And I’ve learned that a hefty chunk of what passes for conversation in the human race is judgment. We talk nonstop about what other people are doing — who they’re marrying, who they’re sleeping with, what they’re eating, what they’re buying — as if it matters. Everything is assigned a judgment, be it right, wrong (usually wrong), good, bad, etc. — she’s not raising her kid right, he’s just using women, he’s not saving his money the way he should. As if there was some Great Universal Gauge in the sky that teetered back and forth over “Right” and “Wrong” for every possible action. Bullshit, right? But we act like it’s true.

The thing is, we do what we do. And whatever we do means we can’t do something else. For instance, I ate chocolate cake for dinner last night (to all the vegetable Nazis — you know who you are — save your judgment. Your disapproval won’t make a single Brussel sprout pass my lips). The fact that I ate chocolate cake means I cannot have eaten a steak. I cannot have eaten a salad. Or any other thing. It’s over. Done with. If I got married last night, I can’t go on a date with a new guy tonight. Or tomorrow. Everything we do erases the doing of other things. Economists call this “opportunity cost” — it’s one of the few concepts they get right (Sorry Cochrane.)

And it hurts. It hurts to lose options, and close doors, and eliminate possibilities, and make mistakes. It hurts for all those people who know that if only they’d signed a 30-year fixed mortgage for a higher rate instead of being talked into some “No income no asset” financial atrocity by a blood-sucking broker from Hell, they wouldn’t be losing their houses right now. But they did, and they are. Whether it’s right or wrong becomes less relevant — either way, it’s still happening.

And at some point hopefully we realize that at the end, there’s no winning in life. Even if you’re rich and white and have some fancy education and are surrounded by just-as-rich-and-fancy white people. Even if their TV is a bigger screen or more pixels or their children got into the snootier preschool. Even if you land the most attractive husband/wife and have the cutest wedding photos. We all fuck up, we all have the occasional misery and failure (some of us lots of failure — but that keeps life interesting), we all have moments of triumph (even if it’s just over waterbugs) and at the end of the whole game we all die. Whether it’s “right” or “wrong” or “good” or “bad,” it happens to everyone. Even the billionaires.

But in the meantime, I’m gonna eat me some friggin chocolate cake.