.043

I once told a friend that most of the wisdom I've attained on life as I see it has come not through experience, but through observation: the consequences of the mistakes my friends have made, and the rewards they've reaped from the opposite.
He told me that by doing so, I wasn't living life the way I ought to.

I argued by asking, "Then in what way 'ought' I to live? The trouble of using experience to navigate my way through living is that the effect of my decision-making comes first, then the lesson; not always will I have the ability to fix the first of the two."

He then responded, "Then, what right do you have to wish to exist as distinctly independent, if the life you choose to live is not your own?"