If you live long enough, you'll experience everything. — Robert Torricelli

If you live long enough, you'll experience everything.

Author: Robert Torricelli

Insight: There's something both comforting and unsettling about this idea. On the surface, it suggests that time is the great equalizer—that if you stick around, you'll eventually face joy, loss, failure, weird coincidence, and redemption. Most of us can already feel this truth in our bones. The friend who seemed invincible gets knocked down. The person we wrote off surprises us. Life has a way of cycling through its scenarios. But here's where it gets interesting: this isn't really about fatalism or acceptance in a lazy sense. It's actually about resilience. If you genuinely believe you'll experience everything given enough time, then today's crisis isn't the end of your story—it's just a chapter. The bankruptcy, the rejection, the loneliness, the embarrassment—they're part of the full deck, not proof that you're broken. This reframing can shift how we handle difficulty. Instead of thinking "this shouldn't be happening to me," we can think "this is part of the human deal." The flip side worth considering: knowing you'll experience everything also means your current high won't last either. That's not depressing if you let it breathe. It just means paying attention now, to the good and the hard alike, because both deserve your presence while they're here.