YOLO Reimagined: Wellness Over Whim

by Heidi Brewer, LMFT

Image by Jernej Graj

One of my most memorable “YOLO*” moments occurred about a year after I graduated college. 

I drove with some friends to New York City for a concert—it was a musician we had been listening to nonstop and were excited to hear him live. But just as we were about to enter the venue, one of our friends realized he forgot his ID. He was being denied entry at the very moment the musician himself walked by. We called out to him for help and, incredibly, it worked. Not only did we all get into the show, we managed to get an invitation to the band’s afterparty. 

In the spirit of YOLO, we went to the post-midnight party and sat alone, awkwardly, in some stranger’s living room as the musician and his bandmates retreated to a private bedroom to smoke. We stayed for thirty minutes and drove home, half laughing, half crying from delirium. 

It’s a funny story, but whenever I tell it I usually leave out the part where I got home at four a.m. and had to wake up two hours later for work. To this day, I can still remember the body aches and nausea I felt from sheer sleep deprivation as I tried to get dressed in the dark. It was a new job and I was eager to prove myself, so the disheveled, baggy-eyed, un-showered look did not help. I spent the whole day wishing I was asleep.

The idea behind “You Only Live Once” is a powerful one—we do only live once. It's a poignant reminder to seize the day, acknowledge the fleeting nature of life, and the opportunity to make it great.

But lately I’ve been wondering about all the questionable decisions YOLO brings about and whether we’ve been misapplying it. Maybe it’s my mid-thirties talking, or maybe YOLO, in its deepest sense, is a call to wear some sunscreen. Because the flip side of YOLO is this: the stakes are actually really high if this is our one life to live. Let’s consider: “YOLO: make your relationships good,” “YOLO: get some sleep.”

I’m really not trying to ruin anyone’s fun, it’s just that if our YOLO-ing is becoming increasingly costly and exhausting, it may not be adding the value it advertises to our lives. YOLO has the potential to lead us to something extraordinary, not just erratic, if we let it.

The philosopher Dallas Willard wrote, “Discipline leads to freedom. A disciplined pianist is free to play anything they want.” True freedom, as it turns out, is not impulsively doing whatever you want whenever you want to—it comes through training ourselves to be the kind of person who makes healthy decisions, over and over again. 

A big part of that training is learning to set boundaries: not just with others, but with ourselves. Discipline often looks like knowing when to say yes to things that foster well-being, and no to the things that offer quick relief but keep us stuck. Sometimes discipline is just saying, “No thanks, brain, we’re not doing that today.”

A YOLO where we take into consideration our one chance at life, and focus on what matters most in the long run, can bring about immense freedoms. This new version likely means doing some less adrenaline-provoking activities along the way, like planning and saving, and sometimes saying no. It probably even means exercising when you don’t want to, learning to apologize, and eating enough protein. 

There is freedom on the other side of these disciplines when we look close enough. When we tend to our relationships over time, and make them good, we are free to be ourselves and ask for what we need. When our finances are in order—through hard work and living within our means—we have more housing options, the ability to outsource tasks, and to be generous. And, let’s imagine a YOLO that prioritizes physical health: we’d be free to go for a hike, chase after our grandchildren, and travel. 

I mean, honestly, with our one chance at life, do we really want to be wishing we were asleep?

You Only Live Once: make it good.

*For those unfamiliar: YOLO is an acronym for You Only Live Once and is frequently used to justify taking risks, in a Carpe Diem fashion, often impulsively.