Advice on my birthday

Coming by Little Robert's tonight after choir practice, and as usual, there is a crowd of young smokers sitting around outside in those ratty theater seats he has out front. It is an now incontrovertible fact that smoking is hazardous to a persons health and statistically greatly increases one's chances of developing life threatening conditions. Yet they still smoke. It makes me wonder about their outlook on life and their future. Of course, young people have always considered themselves invincible. That's why they make good soldiers, have more car wrecks, and in general make unwise decisions.
                                                   

   It was hard to pick an image to put here, the pictures of people smoking are just so unappealing.
   Thankfully it's not nearly a common as it used to be.


But I wonder if there is not more to it than that. I suspect that our culture has instilled a new level of nihilism in our youth that goes beyond the normal definition. That is, not only the skeptical and cynical view that life is meaningless, but also perhaps that the future is so bleak that there is hardly any point in trying to prolong it as much as possible. As of tomorrow, I become officially an old man when I turn seventy. So far I've had a good life, and mostly by just plain old good luck, I have, so far, avoided catastrophic events that could have  changed my life for the worse. And, at my age, barring the pitfalls of old age, I will probably get through the next 10 or 20 years leading up to the final event, without experiencing too much of the existential pressures that threaten the younger generations. Now, with the wisdom of my age, I'm going to offer some advice to the younger generations who are on the fast track to becoming as old as I.

I'm going to use an analogy to "Pascal's Wager" which, in a nut shell, advises that, whether or not you believe in God, if you live a good life, and you never find God, then at least you will have lead a good life and you will have lost nothing. But, if you live a bad life and it turns out that there is no God, then you will only have lead a bad life, but if it turns out that there is a God, then you will have lost everything.

This principle can be applied to almost everything in day to day life. If we believe that we have a future, and we act accordingly, then the chances are that you may have a future and that we may avoid the existential threats to all of our futures. On the other hand, if we continue to act as if we have no future, then, individually our futures are in doubt, and collectively mankind's future is in doubt as well. Two other bits of advice as well: Quit smoking, and no tattoos above the neck.