We only get one shot at the life we currently live. The phrase “You Only Live Once” – or “YOLO” as used online in the early 2010s – became a way to express that idea and justify certain decisions or behaviours. The belief is that if we only live once, we should take every opportunity we get – even if it means trouble down the road.
Over time, the use of YOLO has become linked to reckless behaviour. When applied too liberally, YOLO becomes a tool used to dismiss doing what is right in favour of what is easy. It is the mantra of the hedonist, indulging in overconsumption at the expense of security. At its extreme, YOLO encourages us to seek out easy pleasure, and avoid the pain that would lead us to success and happiness.
That being said, YOLO is an important philosophy to consider. We should always be thinking about how to maximise the potential for our lives. We should be encouraged to take calculated risks. However, we shoudl also live in a way that prevents us from being destroyed by them. Being critical about what matters allows us to create a plan to achieve it, ensuring that this lifetime is the best one we can live.
Welcome to the Work Series – my thoughts on how having the courage to take risks allows you to construct the life you always wanted to live.
The “You Only Live Once” Philosophy Explained
“You Only Live Once” is a philosophy that encourages boldness, and embraces the finite nature of existence. It puts a modern spin on age-old wisdom, borrowing concepts from the Stoics of Ancient Rome and Greece.
While it may seem like a shallow aphorism on the surface, it’s a surprisingly deep concept, with several principles built into it. And it seems that many of the positive aspects of YOLO line up with my personal philosophy in interesting ways.
Live in the Present
Life is happening all around us, right now. The past is gone, and the future hasn’t happened yet. YOLO teaches us that we have to act on our current wants and needs in the present moment. And to do that, we have to be present.
Perhaps you’re working a job you dislike that isn’t serving your needs. The YOLO approach would be to quit your job and do something else with your time. This would be a reckless decision (which we’ll discuss later), but the premise is clear: act in a way that allows you to live your best life now.
Be Courageous
“A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.”
– John A. Shedd
Those embracing YOLO know to be bold. They live life with a desire to try new things and take advantage of opportunities they find themselves in.
A lot of things that matter in life require us to be brave. Whether you are sharing content on social media or asking someone on a date, you have to be brave enough to own your actions.
A life well-lived is accomplishing by sailing into the storm and returning to harbour after your experience. It isn’t achieved by sitting on the pier and watching the ships roll in.
Life demands us to take control of our destinies, be courageous, and sail into the unknown.
Do Cool Stuff
Life is full of infinite experiences, many of which we can’t even comprehend yet. With so much available to say or do or feel, the YOLO mindset encourages its proponents to do as many of these things as they can.
Doing novel things introduces you to new people and helps you find your community. It teaches you new skills, which may help you in your personal or professional life. And most of all, it allows you to have fun differently to what you’ve done before.
Fun is one of the qualities of a life well-lived. Meeting new people, doing cool things, and getting out of your comfort zone allows you to find things that you enjoy. Eventually, even the act of doing new things becomes fun in and of itself.
Memento Mori
Memento Mori is a Latin term that translates to “Remember you will die”.
YOLO’s response to Memento Mori is to ensure that we’ll be proud of the life we lived once it’s over. If we only live once, we have to make that life count. We do this by avoiding stagnation.
An understanding that life is finite encourages us to keep moving. It staves off entropy by forcing us to continue to grow to meet our changing needs. And it lights a fire under us to ensure that we never allow our lifestyles to become unsustainable.
Yes, life will always have challenges. Luck will always play a role in whether we succeed or fail, and sometimes things are outside of our control. But by improving what we can control, we maximise our chances of success, allowing us to live a life we are proud of regardless of its outcome.
The Pitfalls of You Only Live Once
“You Only Live Once” as a lifestyle philosophy encourages risk-taking, new experiences, and an understanding that we have limited time to live. Unfortunately, it’s easy to take these concepts too far. Those who do develop bad habits, become trapped by their lifestyles, and endure long-term suffering.
YOLO Encourages Overconsumption
A YOLO philosophy focuses heavily on improving your life in the present. If you only live once, it makes sense to live in a way that makes you happy. This line of thinking would be reasonable, if not for modern life convincing us that we must spend money to be happy.
Suddenly, our desire to live a good life becomes poisoned by the endless nagging of consumerism. Societal pressure, marketing campaigns, and self-doubt convince us that the best way for us to live is to keep spending.
Whether it’s time, money, or attention, sacrificing these too heavily in the present will lead us to give up more than we bargained for.
YOLO Disregards Long-Term Planning
When we focus on meeting our base desires in the present, our future selves suffer.
Those embracing a YOLO mindset act in ways that detract from their future potential. The overemphasis on attaining present wants pushes long-term decision making further and further into the future.
Eventually, you run out of time to push these decisions further. All you can do is live with the consequences of this lack of planning.
It’s important to acknowledge the present and live in the moment. Spending your life preparing for a future that may never come is not a wise way to live. But there are great risks in living a lifestyle that avoids planning for the future – a trap that this mindset easily falls into.
YOLO Traps You In a Life You Don’t Want to Live
When you live for the moment, long-term planning goes out the window. We don’t notice the walls closing in on us until it’s too late. On top of that, this mindset also encourages us to live a good lifestyle now. Society encourages us that we must spend all of our money to do so. Those falling victim to this find themselves trapped in a prison of their own making.
Trading time for money is something that almost everyone will do at some point in their lives. For most of us, it’s something we’ll do for a large portion of our lives. The downside risk of a laissez-faire lifestyle is forced servitude.1 If you do not adequately prepare for your future life, you will be used by someone who is. Ultimately, you will be forced to live a portion of your life in a way you don’t want to.
This is the fate that befalls those who follow YOLO to its extreme: their one life is bogged down by forced labour. More hours in the day, days of the week, or months of the year will be spent in a way you hate.
If you only live once, it is your sacred mission to not live in a way that makes you hate that life.
Synthesising YOLO and FIRE
On the surface, You Only Live Once is an interesting lifestyle philosophy. It encourages living a good life in the present and taking charge of your destiny. However, its focus on the present leaves you open to suffering in the future.
This mirrors the Financial Independence Retire Early philosophy. At its extreme, FIRE front-loads your suffering by having you work and save as much as possible. Once you achieve your desired savings, you never need to work again. You are free to live the life you wanted to. The problem is that by focusing on saving and investing upfront, you never figure out what life you want.
Every lifestyle philosophy has challenges. None of them are perfect. Like many things in life, we need to take the best aspects of each and discard the rest. By blending multiple philosophies together, we can create something that works best for us. And I believe that there are valuable principles to use from both YOLO and FIRE.
We can adopt many tactics for improving our lives in the present:
- Being conscious about what it is you want
- Choose what you commit yourself to carefully
- Be willing to be different
Similarly, we can work towards a successful future by focusing on the following:
- Separate your earning potential from your time
- Dedicate time to learning new skills
- Live a life you don’t need to retire from
By fusing multiple concepts together, we gain the ability to create a life that’s perfect for you.
My Strategy
This blog – and the Scott On Fire Philosophy itself – is my ongoing work of documenting the strategy by which I live my life. This philosophy has allowed me to Choose Work I Love, discover what matters to me, and structure my life in a way that allows me to achieve my financial goals.
Modern life affords us many luxuries, but we also have to contend with changing essential needs. Money is so intertwined with our being that we cannot hope to exist without it. As a result, a life philosophy with money at its centre is paramount to success in the modern day. A strategy that does not consider the long-term value of money is doomed to fail.
As mentioned above, the pursuit of money for money’s sake is a hollow existence. Money alone cannot be the goal for how you engage with the world. It is a tool, and its acquisition is merely a byproduct of a life well-lived. A strategy that focuses on acquiring money to your detriment in the present is likewise doomed to fail.
The answer, therefore, lies somewhere in the middle.
Back Yourself Financially
Attaining wealth is non-negotiable. The wealth I refer to is not a boastful kind of wealth; it is the wealth of security, independence, and freedom. Avoiding wealth – and the means to create it – only serves to damage you and your loved ones in the long run. Understanding how to gain and retain wealth is essential.
Place appropriate emphasis on earning a good wage and maximising the value of your time. We only live once, so we must always be considering how best to utilise our time. Money can be acquired in the future, but time cannot – an emphasis must always be placed on time.
The world is constantly changing. Right now, we face massive destabilisation of jobs due to Artifical Intelligence. If you are not learning new skills in addition to what you use in your job, you risk your job being wiped out entirely. The skills you acquire feed into your ability to earn a living.
The combination of these concepts creates a positive feedback loop, that allows you to create a stable financial foundation. This foundation serves as the starting point for creating the life you desire.
Become Mighty Enough to Achieve What You Want
Money alone will not get you what you want. You must use the independence that money offers you to develop the skills necessary to transcend your circumstances. And you can do this much sooner than waiting for your full FI number.
Your first goal is to ensure your life runs at a profit. Then, use the profits to fund time off, services, or courses that increase your skill set. Then, use those skills to command a higher income. Increasing your skill set offers you opportunities that are responsible for giving you the agency to change your life.
This is why focusing solely on money fails; it doesn’t offer the personal growth necessary to reach your ideal life. Becoming truly mighty happens along the journey of life, and can’t be put off until you reach the massive goal of Financial Independence. Instead, use the benefits of your money sooner to live your ideal life now.
Design and Live Your Ideal Life
Work doesn’t end once you attain your retirement number. Instead, work should form a holistic part of your lifestyle.
Work isn’t something we should be running away from – it’s something we should engage with on our own terms. Waiting to change your life until after FI doesn’t make sense if you want to continue working.
I find that a lot of discourse surrounding FIRE routinely antagonises work. That the purpose of pursuing this goal is to rid ourselves of the need to work. I see this as a huge flaw in reasoning.
Work is not the enemy – it’s a necessary part of life. Removing the need to overcome obstacles robs you of meaning and growth, and causes us to stagnate and wither away. The only thing FIRE really does is allow you to choose the challenges (work) you put before yourself, instead of your boss deciding that for you.
I see the pursuit of FIRE as climbing a mountain: an incredible, and in some cases, impossible goal. But many on the path find that once they achieve it, their lives aren’t much better than they were before. When you reach the summit after achieving Financial Independence, instead of looking down on the world and all you have achieved, you may find that you have climbed the wrong mountain.
We only get one chance at this life. Use your gifts to your advantage, and save and invest wisely to design the life you always wanted to live.
Closing
Despite YOLO and FIRE appearing to be at odds with each other, you can combine the two to create a philosophy that is more than the sum of its parts.
Embrace the idea of living a life you love now – but do so in a way that doesn’t sacrifice your future.
Continue working towards your goals – financial or otherwise – while creating a life you love in the present.
There’s no one size fits all strategy to use to get through life. You can’t read a book and find the answers to live the way you want to. Instead, take in ideas and philosophies from every source: modern or ancient, mainstream or esoteric, and even from people you may disagree with.
Perhaps YOLO on the surface is a wasteful and excessive lifestyle. Or to those convinced saving money is the only option, perhaps YOLO contains the secret to happiness.
Thank you for reading.
If you liked this piece, consider sharing it with a friend or a group you think will enjoy it. This helps me grow my audience, and is the best way for you to support my writing.
If you’d like to read more, check out previous posts on the blog, and follow me on X @ScottOnFire, on my Facebook page Scott On Fire, and on my YouTube channel. You can also sign up to my newsletter to get even more content, delivered straight to your inbox.
- “Forced” isn’t wholly correct; we do not have people telling us what to do. Slavery in the modern day is much different to the past. However, our risk is threat of destitution, and inability to access food, water, and shelter in a dignified manner. This is what ultimately forces us to work and earn a living. ↩︎