If you ever want to see the Circle of Life play out in real time, head over to the DMV. You’ve got 16-year-old kids getting their first driver’s licenses. So excited, so nervous. With their parents, so proud and terrified. And then you have old folks likely getting their last driver’s licenses. Not excited, not nervous. And without anyone with them because all their friends and family are dead.

As we begin this new year and new decade, most of us are going to be in the midst of taking stock of our lives thus far and the year/decade that just was. And though life can never be a perfectly packaged film, we can make plans to live the next decade with some sort of clarity and purpose. Making plans of this nature is the default human setting unless you’re a sociopath, a nihilist, or Kathleen Kennedy.