At one point, a friend who had gone to study abroad in Budapest called me, and mentioned, excitedly, a Hungarian saying he had learned. He told me it meant “life is a cheesecake,” and then he said “remember that.” At that point, someone in the background piped up, or maybe he just spontaneously remembered, but he corrected the translation to “life is not a cheesecake.” This disappointed us both, because life is a cheesecake, and it’s good to remember that.

But what does it mean for life to be a cheesecake? Unfortunately, I was unable to find the original Hungarian phrase, and, by extension what it’s supposed to mean (please let me know if you know of it). So I have taken the liberty of decoding it myself!

Because cheesecake is frequently chocolate-flavored and chocolate is never cheesecake-flavored, we model cheesecake as chocolate with additional properties. These additional properties mean that “life is a cheesecake” is a more complete model of life than “life is a box of chocolates.” Prior work has shown that life being a box of chocolates means you never know what you’re going to get (Gump et al, 1994). Life being a cheesecake must then mean both that and something else that is entirely up to you. Therefore, “life is a cheesecake” implies that life involves agency in addition to the known elements of mystery and chance. Also it implies that life can be delicious with coffee.

So remember: life is a cheesecake.