Researchers: ‘YOLO’ is sound life advice
“Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die” — Isaiah 22:13; “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may” — Robert Herrick; and “YOLO” — Drake.
For as long as humans have been human, we’ve been reminding one another that life is short and we’d best make the most of it. Today, thanks to a team of academic researchers from Cambridge, Cal State and elsewhere, we’ve finally got some hard evidence that “live every day like it’s your last” isn’t just a dank Instagram meme — it’s also sound psychological advice.
For their experiment, the researchers gathered two groups of undergraduate students. They asked 70 students to “imagine having only 30 days left before moving away and to intentionally engage in activities and spend time with people they will miss after they are gone.”
A control group of 69 students was asked to simply record a detailed journal of their activities over the same time period.
At the beginning of the study period, the two groups of students rated themselves identically on this measure of fulfillment. But the students asked to imagine only 30 days left in their surroundings became “more motivated to plan, do and enjoy activities” like spending time with friends or visiting special places, the researchers found.
By the time of the final assessment, six weeks after the start of the experiment, the students asked to focus on a scarcity of time rated themselves as significantly more satisfied with their lives than those who simply filled out time diaries.
“College students who were prompted to savor the next 30 days showed steeper gains in well-being over time than students in the control group, thus supporting our prediction that framing time as limited helps people derive greater happiness from their surroundings,” the authors write.
Why would this be? In the researchers’ words, it’s unclear whether the experimental condition “prompted people to engage in more pleasant activities or because it prompted the active appreciation and enjoyment of those activities.” It could be that thinking of your time in a place as limited makes you go out and do more things to enjoy your time in that place.
The researchers characterize their findings as “preliminary evidence” and call on others to replicate their work with other populations.
If the findings validate the qualitative work of thinkers as diverse as Dave Matthews and the Nihilist Arby’s Twitter account, it suggests there’s something real here.