In the early nineties a well known movie came out with a certain quote that is used to this day. The movie “Forest Gump,” Forrest Gump, starring Tom Hanks brought about the saying, “life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re gonna get.” Looking at this saying, a simple analogy is set up comparing life to a box of chocolates. For the sake of an analogy, it works fairly well, but when we dig deeper to uncover the comparisons that it holds, we find many things that disagree with it. “Life is like a box of chocolates” is used so often to describe the many surprises that people face in life, but when we go into an analysis of this quote, we find this to be untrue. We can say that life does throw us surprises but for the majority of a person’s day, we know what to expect. We have the day scheduled and planned out to maximize our productivity. When life is compared to a box of chocolates, it implies that life has a simple guide book showing you what to do, and at all times life is sweet and good. A better analogy would state that life is like the internet. It is always changing and updating itself. Life is never the same from one day to the next.

As stated in the first analogy, life is full of surprises, just like a box of chocolates. Life does hold a few surprises for us, but is our life made up of surprises, where each day we encounter new ones? By opening a box of chocolate, the assumption stated is that you do not know what each chocolate holds, yet do we not expect to eat chocolate? Also, the Whitman sampler or any other box of chocolates almost always contains a guide which tells you what each chocolate contains. Like the internet, life does not contain a guide book that helps us uncover what to expect or how to live our life. While the internet may have books that tell you how to navigate through it, there is no specific book that tells the secrets of the internet and what the future holds for it. People in their lives find their guidebooks from the wisdom of others and the mistakes others, but there never is that simple leaflet that you are able to open up and uncover what your life holds.

The Forest Gump analogy does hold true in a broad since because you truly never no what life holds from day to day. Accidents, deaths and other things happen. However, this is not a particularly good analogy because we as humans quantify everything including the unknowns in life. Humans plan, schedule, and do all those things to create order despite the knowledge that crazy things could happen. (Okay.Your point is that humans control a large part of their destiny, but the Gump analogy seems to imply otherwise.) People plan their lives to best fit their needs and in doing this know what each day brings and what to expect. Each day is not full of surprises, but has a few surprises thrown into the mix of our planned lives. From “Forest Gump”, the analogy says that you never know what you are going to get in life, yet this is not true. For the majority of your life you get what you work for, for example, those who work hard to get a good GPA, (Actually only those who do good work, which is slightly different.) whether it be in college or high school, and continually better themselves have a higher chance of succeeding. So while we can believe that each day brings about a wonderful surprise, we all know what our day holds in large and can only expect small surprises if any. Similarly, when you log onto the internet, there is almost always a purpose why you are getting on it. People schedule their time on the internet and almost always have a reason to be on, whether it be to do research or check e-mail. Those on the internet almost always know what they are going to find when browsing the internet. (But maybe that's not so different from what you've said about chocolates.)

When we dig deeper into the first analogy, we can use the comparison that because chocolates are sweet, then life also must be “sweet.” But we find this to be untrue. People’s lives are full of both fascinating and troublesome times. Similarly the internet is both a fascinating and troublesome tool. People can find it both difficult to navigate the internet or to go through life, while at the same time, other people find the navigation of life and the internet to be wonderful and fascinating. People naturally have bad and good days and it is impossible to claim that life is great, especially to claim that life for everyone is great. To make a better analogy using chocolates, we would have to use a more neutral word to describe the flavor of life, because it is neither bitter, nor is it sweet. Life is an individual thing and we cannot generalize everybody’s life as being good.

Unlike a box of chocolate, the internet is full of information that is being replaced or modified as in our life. It is the desire of humans to learn, and to replace old knowledge with new. We also change the way we live our life as we grow older according to the environment that we live in. Similarly, the internet is able to grow, become a broader and richer tool to use, and a box of chocolate has a predetermined shape, and unless you get a new box the size cannot change. Similarly a person is able to grow, whether it is in knowledge, faith, or anything else. People are able to gain more knowledge and expand their base of information in their life.

So while Forest Gump said that “Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re gonna get,” a better analogy to compare life to is the internet. As we have seen, life is not always “sweet” and wonderful, and there is no simple manual to follow to uncover what each life holds. Instead life is a large thing that is able to grow and change and has its good and bad points. Comparing life to items like chocolates or the internet helps to show the major differences between the two things along with the comparison that the analogies tries to set up. Life is a complex term to use in an analogy and trying to compare such an important and meaningful idea with a simple item usually does not fully define the word. Using a more complex item like the internet to compare life to helps create better boundaries for the word life that are correct.