All I Need to Know in Life I Learned from Ramen

Not having had time to cook proper meals for the past week or so (I never lived like a college student until I went to grad school), I have been eating a lot of ramen. Call me unsophisticated, but I actually quite like the stuff. I mean, it’s noodles and massive amounts of salt—two of my favorite things! But regardless, feeling philosophical the other day, I realized that ramen offers a whole host of valuable life lessons. For instance...


I only ever use half the packet of seasoning.
*Life lesson: you can, indeed, have too much of a good thing.

Every packet of seasoning comes with a single, tiny piece of dried parsley.
*Life lesson: one green fleck does not a serving of vegetables make.

I can tell when the ramen is perfectly cooked just by the feel of the noodles against the spoon.
*Life lesson: if you do anything often enough, you will become an expert at it (or, I suppose, stop doing it).


Some people like their ramen soupy, some people like it with an egg, some people (like me) like it without any extra water in the bowl.
*Life lesson: to each his own, and each will establish “his own” no matter how few the options might be.

I once left a bowl of cooked ramen on my desk while I had a lengthy conversation with a flatmate. When I returned, it was cold, congealed, and inedible.
*Life lesson: you can mess up anything, no matter how simple.

My ramen package boasts that it contains 0g of trans fat.
*Life lesson: anything (I mean ANYTHING) can be marketed as health food.

Anyway, that’s just a little food for thought (pun fully intended) to get you started thinking about where you’ve gotten your own life lessons. You might be surprised what the mundane and quotidian elements of life have to teach us—I just wrote a whole post about ramen! Anything is possible!