Originally Posted by jayeff

I am daily reminded of my mortality, so the question comes up regularly. The snag is that I still don't know how to answer it. It's easy to say I wish my health hadn't gone down the toilet, but otherwise how do you measure your life?

I have done things, been places, met people. Lots of good times and no disasters. But I find myself asking whether that is all there was supposed to be. If so, it seems kinda pointless, because ultimately none of that stuff matters to anyone except me: and come to that, only to me at the time it was actually happening.

Originally Posted by jayeff

Yes. Except that committment in this context isn't of the sort, I said I will do it, so by hook or by crook I shall do it. It's that when two people are sufficiently important to each other, "making it work" is the only option they can consider. At its core, a relationship cannot be something which was beaten into submission.

As you wrote, successful business people make decisions quickly: often almost in an instant, knowing that the idea is good. But it is conviction rather than committment which makes them stick with an idea for a while, tuning the execution until they get it right, or are forced to admit that this time their instincts were wrong.

Personal relationships are often initiated by hormones, need, circumstances, etc and then we complicate matters further by going through a kind of dance at first, presenting ourselves as we want to be perceived and seeing what we want to see. Later, when the real personalities confront each other, they can be very different. And of course people, especially young people, change. If anything, they are more likely to grow apart than closer together.