As he stares at the gigantic iron gate protecting what once used to be Tokyo’s subway network, Shinra Kusakabe voices his amazement: “I can’t believe trains used to run underground.”

What seems to be a perfectly unremarkable comment in the year 2271 and the world of Special Fire Force Company 8 sounds a bit odd to those of us still living in the year 2024. “Trains run underground all the time. How could that ever not be normal?” Thank you! What a great follow-up question!

Take something so ubiquitous it’s almost boring, like a smartphone, roads, or the ability to order anything on Amazon, and imagine a world in which it has become a memory of the distant past. How would that world look like? What else would be different? Did the shift occur because we have evolved or because we have regressed?

Perhaps in the year 2271, the world’s knowledge will no longer be at your fingertips inside your pockets. Maybe communication will once again have to happen on pagers allowing only for a limited number of characters. Or, maybe, you can talk to anyone, anywhere, without needing a phone at all. Perhaps the high-tech lenses in your eyes can render perfect 3D-holograms to chat with right where you stand.

If roads were no longer a thing, would we once again struggle to cover long distances? Would we built specialty vehicles to navigate the terrain, or skip the ground altogether and use jetpacks to fly through the air? If we could no longer use Amazon, would it be because drones deliver everything we need right when we need it without us lifting a finger, or because global supply chains have vanished and we’re back to growing carrots and herbs in our own yard?

The possibilities and explanations are endless, and that is the point: We don’t believe it because we don’t notice its gradual progression from one day to the next, but in the end, anything can happen. Remember the eventuality of everything — for better or for worse — and don’t take today’s reality for granted. It might look very different in a few short tomorrows — perhaps so different even, we might one day say things like, “I can’t believe trains used to run underground.”

One week, my girlfriend was sick with the flu. I was happy to take care of her, but of course I was a bit concerned I’d catch the flu myself too. One day, I woke up and felt a bit funny, and I thought: “Oh dear, here we go. Now I might be living on borrowed time.”

I spent a good chunk of that day worrying about actually getting sick, and I tried to do various things to prevent it. I ate some fruit, took some vitamins, drank lots of tea. I also tried to get in some work on a weekend, just to make sure. But eventually, I realized: It doesn’t matter if your time is borrowed.

If you get sick, you get sick. And if you don’t, you don’t. In the meantime, you should do whatever you would do anyway. You can’t let a future that’s not here yet overthrow your plans.

It’s hard to draw a map these days. Once you’ve made the effort, stick to it. Keep charting your path, and deal with each obstacle as you encounter it. I’ve never seen him sick with the flu, but Hagrid from Harry Potter sure knew a thing or two when he said: “What’s comin’ will come, an’ we’ll meet it when it does.”

When he was a 21-year-old college student, Noland Arbaugh had a diving accident that left him completely paralyzed from the neck down. Today, he is known as “P1,” the world’s first cyborg, or by his alias “ModdedQuad” — all of which are references to him being the first patient in Neuralink‘s human trial of its “generalized brain interface.”

Within mere weeks of receiving the small chip implant into his skull, Noland has become able to do things no other quadriplegic can do. He routinely beats the Neuralink team at chess on his computer. He plays Mario Kart. He even stayed up all night one time, playing Civilization VI, one of his favorite video games, which he hadn’t been able to play with his usual persistence in years due to his disability.

And how? How does Noland does all of this? With nothing but the power of his mind. “It was like using the Force on a cursor,” he says, “and I could get it to move wherever I wanted.” Of course Neuralink requires software and a wireless connection to function, but now, wherever those prerequisites allow for it, Noland can control digital devices telepathically — and according to Elon Musk, the company’s founder, that’s only the beginning. From restoring speech to smell to motor functions, in theory, the possibilities are endless.

The road is still long, and Noland is only one of thousands who’d want and deserve this technology. And yet, already, he says: “It completely changed how I live. I’ve heard that people who stay up late at night, it can be a sign that they don’t have anything to look forward to the next day. That’s basically how I lived for eight years. Since I started doing all this, I’m in bed by 9-10 PM. I’m waking up at 6-7 in the morning, just excited for the next day — and that’s something that I never thought would happen to me ever again.”

If Noland’s words, tenacity, and spirit are anything to go by, the future will look a lot brighter tomorrow. For today, this Star Wars Day, we take pride in the fact that Yoda and his allies are no longer the only ones to wield the Force — and we’re grateful that, after chasing their vision for 50 years, even those of us who can’t walk at all are finally getting a chance to catch up.

If you could magically implement a workout routine for the rest of your life, would you rather be guaranteed to do ten push-ups every day or have a 50% chance of doing a 100-push-up session every three days? The math says the latter will get you more push-ups, but will it also make you healthier? Happier? Will it make you feel good about your workout routine?

I’ve been doing a daily workout for more than four years. I don’t do it to get stronger, look better, or prepare for some athletic event. I do it so I know I’m moving a little bit every day. After 1,000 days, I no longer have to track it. When I’m sick, I do the minimum, and when I’m healthy, I do my target numbers. Sometimes, I experiment and try new exercises. Most of the time I don’t — but I never have to think about my workout. I know it’ll always get done, and that feeling is priceless.

Consistency beats effort because no single session, no matter how momentous, can guarantee you’ll show up again tomorrow — but with consistency, in the long run, effort is guaranteed. Your big break may not happen today, or tomorrow, or even when you think you need it the most, but like flies drawn to the light, greatness will quietly accumulate.

Choose consistency, forget the when, and let the universe do its thing.

Last night, I lay awake for three hours, unable to fall back asleep. I had many thoughts. Only one of them was interesting: “All these thoughts, my entire reality, is coming out of my brain.” Every moment I spent worrying, every idea I had, every story I told myself and every random rabbit hole I chased down in those three hours — it all started from a three-pound lump of flesh between my ears. Fascinating, isn’t it?

It made me wonder how the damn thing keeps going. Not just restlessly during those three hours, but consistently every day. How can one tiny, organic machine create billions of worlds, one for each of us, and then continue to evolve that world thought by thought, second by second, for decades? Talk about a supercomputer. And yet, I seem to have so little control over it.

“If I could get this thing to settle down, I’d be sound asleep again in a minute. Shouldn’t I be able to do that? Just tell it to calm down and go back to sleep?” I think I should. I think everyone should. Good tools come with manuals, don’t they? Why not this one? Why can’t it work out of the box?

What’s more, I’ve meditated every day for the last four and a half years. Isn’t that how we’re supposed to get more control? Wasn’t that enough training? Apparently not — because the tool is actually an ally with a mind of its own, quite literally, in this case — and the training never ends.

I don’t wish sleepless nights upon anyone, but know that sleepless nights are not the end of the line. They’re simply your strongest comrade-in-arms having a hard time. You can show him or her compassion. You can try to coax them into settling down. But you can’t make them do everything you want, and that’s a struggle you share with eight billion other souls on this planet.

Keep training your brain, but most of all, remember to respect, love, and care for it.

Yesterday, my grandfather told me that his great-grandfather, a man who must have been born around the year 1870, used to do a lot of walking. The Franco-Prussian war had just ended, and there wasn’t always a lot of work to go around in his tiny village.

Skilled at playing the violin, he offered to give lessons to folks in the city, which they gladly took him up on. There was only one problem: The city was 15 kilometers away, and cars wouldn’t even be invented until 1886, let alone mass-produced and affordable. So he walked. That’s an eight-hour round trip for perhaps an hour or two of paid employment. But back in the day, that’s how it worked.

My grandparents did a little less walking but still quite a lot. Grandma routinely walked three kilometers to catch the train to Kaiserslautern, a bigger city with more opportunities to work. She remembers ladies with egg baskets sitting next to her, carrying a hundred of them on a two-hour commute just to get to the market and sell their wares.

Grandma also walked to and from school, of course, and by the time she got home, it was often early afternoon. “Today we’re harvesting potatoes,” her father might have said, so off to the field everyone went. After a few hours of digging, it may have been grandma’s turn to feed the horses, and then, well, “Remember to do your homework!” That’s one of the few things that has stayed the same across her generation and mine: Every morning on the bus, someone was trying to finish their assignments.

I only walk to work when I want to. A 15-minute walk to WeWork used to be a planned and welcome luxury for me. Now, with an office in my apartment, I don’t have to leave the house at all. I might go on a stroll after lunch or meet a friend for some co-working, but by and large, my commute is zero minutes, zero kilometers. What a long way we’ve come — literally!

I’m not the perfect grandson by any means, but whenever I do spend time with my “elders,” I realize that much of my comfort ultimately goes back to their commitment. It is their steps that led to decent work, decent pay, and the decent life my parents enjoyed, their sacrifice in turn enabling my sister and I to live even more “decently.”

Of course, modern work also has its challenges and demands. Some might prefer a daily four-hour hike to endless Slack messages and brain-draining meetings. But good things happen when we mind our elders, and bad things when we don’t.

Every day, you can turn on the news and see some warlord or dictator somewhere, driving their country into ruin and suffering under the pretense of eternal glory. When you google their names, you might find the year they were born, and when you see the number, you may realize they appeared just in time to forget the lessons of their forebears. How could a child born into prosperity post-WWII possibly know about the dangers and pain of countries fighting? Often, they can’t, and that’s why some come to believe that it’s a perfectly sensible thing to try.

Whatever your ancestors can teach you, every now and then, go out of your way to remember it. It may not even be a literal detour you’ll have to make, and it’ll likely save you plenty of walking down the road.

I have a million things to do and don’t know where to start. So, instead of doing any of them, I cleaned out my parents’ TV cabinet.

Behind the two glass doors, I found old DVDs, some custom-burned CDs — one with a broken case — and dust. Lots and lots of dust. I took out the movies, checked the web to see if they’re worth anything, and chucked a good 80% of them into the trash. I removed the plastic splinters from the broken case, rearranged everything, and wiped away the dust.

After I closed the glass doors again, I, too, felt a bit cleaner. Calmer. More organized. I still won’t be able to do everything on my list today, but I’ve since managed to do some of it without freaking out — and that’s worth more than the best plan that never gets put into action.

When you don’t know what to do, clean something. Folding the chaos in a battle you know you can win might not end the war, but it’s enough of a morale boost for you to keep fighting the good fight.

It’s a great question — mostly if you answer it without overthinking. What are a few simple tenets that come to mind? Don’t try to articulate a perfectly thought out theory. Don’t look for something complicated. List the rules that first pop into your head. Chances are, if your subconscious has them locked and loaded, they’re the ones who most affect your behavior from one day to the next.

Here are some of mine:

1. Work hard. Effort is not everything, but without effort, nothing turns into anything.
2. Be nice. Hard work is not an excuse to be a mean person. It may separate you from some people, but it doesn’t elevate you above anyone. Treat everyone with kindness and respect.
3. Be as honest as you can. Nobody makes it through life without lying, but only lie if you must — and when you do, do it for the right reasons.
4. Whatever you are, be a good one. It’s okay to only be a few things. A supportive partner. A generous mom. An available friend. No one can be all of those at once, but everyone can be one of them on any given day.
5. Don’t worry. It might sound impossible, but you used to do it, remember? In fact, you used to be completely unable to worry about the future. Tomorrow is only scary if you think about it too much. Instead, how about you…
6. Enjoy the moment. Presence solves nearly all problems, because right now, most of them don’t exist. Savor whatever you can savor that’s right in front of you, and live one minute, one hour, one day at a time.
7. Have no expectations. To most people, the phrase “low expectations” has a bad connotation. They think it means waiting for failure or a bad experience. To me, “low expectations” sounds wonderful. When you go in without demands, everything becomes a pleasant surprise. But if you can and prefer, have no expectations. Don’t make plans for how things should go at all when approaching any particular situation. Resolve to let life play out as it intends to, and you’ll stay open to new paths while handling outcomes the way they ask to be handled — because you’ll wait until you actually know what they’re about.

What is your basic life philosophy? It’s a great question to answer in writing, revisit, and compare notes every year, but most importantly, just ask it. Even if you answer only in your head, you’ll learn something about yourself — from how you see the world to how far you’ve come and where you’d like to go.

What is your basic life philosophy?

The Kinder Überraschungsei, which translates to “Kid’s Surprise Egg,” is one of Germany’s most popular sweets for children. It’s an actual egg made of two thin layers of white and milk chocolate, wrapped in a fine, colorful aluminum foil. When you break the egg’s two halves apart, inside, there’s a little plastic container that holds a toy.

Usually, the toy is some kind of gimmick. It might be a little plastic car you must assemble from three parts, perhaps with some stickers to put on. It could also be a puzzle or an animal. But sometimes, if you’re lucky, you’ll get a figurine. The figurines are high-quality, made from one piece, and there’s always a set of several of them to collect. I still remember the slogan: “In every seventh egg!”

Today, I was strolling through a small town that reminded me of the place we used to live in when I was eight. Suddenly, Kinder Überraschungseier popped back into my head. Next to the little town square, there was a grocery store. It was less than a ten-minute walk from my house. So, often, the neighbor’s kids and I went there and hunted for Kinder figurines.

We went into the store, counted the eggs on display, and picked every seventh one. We shook them and listened, trying to determine whether the egg contained multiple small parts or just one heavy piece. We even figured out that you could weigh them on the scale designated for fruits and veggies, and that there was a sweet spot where it was most likely you’d get a figurine. 32 grams, by the way.

After I returned home that night, I happened to browse my go-to classifieds platform for deals on Pokémon cards. I found some underpriced offers and saved them for later, and I realized: Finding a no-brainer deal on Pokémon cards now gives me the same feeling opening a Kinder Egg and discovering a figurine used to give me a quarter-century ago. Everything has changed, and yet, I’m still a collector. Always have been, it seems.

It’s nice to discover what has been there all along — but sometimes, ironically, that requires trying something new. Yes, always continue to reinvent yourself, but remember that finding yourself is also a job that never ends.