Ordering Life Like Dinner: Choose What Truly Nourishes
“I don’t like fish,” I tell the waiter without hesitation. “I prefer chicken.” Clear, direct, unapologetic.
“What do you want from life?” someone asks at a party. I pause, deflect, offer socially acceptable responses about career goals and family happiness. Anything but the raw truth about what actually drives me.
The contrast is striking. Food preferences cost nothing to declare. Life preferences cost everything.
When someone asks about favorite cuisines, I answer immediately. When they ask about life priorities, I perform elaborate diplomatic dance to avoid revealing preferences that might make others uncomfortable or expose my own uncertainty.
Food honesty is safe territory. Dietary choices feel personal but not threatening, individual but not political. Saying “I hate vegetables” might get eye-rolls but won’t destroy relationships or career prospects.
But admitting “I hate small talk” or “I prefer solitude to social gatherings” carries social cost. Life preferences implicitly comment on others’ choices in ways that food preferences don’t. When I say I don’t want children, someone hears an indictment of their decision to have them. When I say I don’t eat meat, they just think I’m picky.
We’ve created a world where the honesty hierarchy is inverted. We’re most truthful about appetites that matter least, most dishonest about hungers that shape our entire existence. We’ll argue passionately about restaurant choices but stay silent about relationships slowly draining our life force.
The restaurant menu offers thirty options, and we confidently point to what we want. The menu of life offers infinite possibilities, and we order what we think others expect us to want, then spend decades choking down choices that don’t nourish us. We perform enthusiasm for careers that bore us, relationships that deplete us, lifestyles that feel like elaborate costumes we can’t take off.
The irony cuts deep: imagine telling a waiter, “Just bring me whatever everyone else is having.” Yet that’s exactly how we approach major life decisions—conforming, performing, pretending our preferences align with social expectations.
Maybe food honesty is training ground for life honesty. The same muscle we flex when stating dietary preferences without elaborate justification—that’s the muscle we need for bigger declarations. The person who can say “I don’t eat meat” without defending themselves might eventually say “I don’t attend networking events” with equal confidence.
Both require the same fundamental skill: knowing what nourishes us and having courage to choose accordingly.
But here’s what makes food honesty easier: the stakes are low, consequences minimal. Order something you don’t want, and the suffering lasts an hour. Choose a life you don’t want, and the suffering compounds across decades. The waiter won’t remember your order tomorrow. Your life choices echo through years.
Still, the parallel holds. The confidence to say “no cilantro” is the same confidence needed to say “no, I won’t abandon my boundaries.” The clarity to know you prefer spicy over mild is the same clarity needed to know you prefer depth over breadth in relationships. The courage to order differently from everyone else is the same courage needed to build a life that looks nothing like what’s expected.
Perhaps we should treat life choices with the same straightforward honesty we bring to restaurant menus. Not hostile, not apologetic, just clear. “This is what works for me. This is what I need. This is what makes me feel alive.”
The person who knows their own appetite—literal and metaphorical—and honors it without shame is practicing quiet revolution. They’re saying: my needs matter, my preferences are valid, my life is mine to design.
What nourishes us? What depletes us? Can we say it out loud? Can we choose accordingly?
The waiter is waiting. So is life. Both are asking what we want.
The question is: are we ready to answer honestly?
