The philosophy underneath the math.
Money is the easy part. The hard part is the question the money is meant to answer.
If you accept — really accept — that your time is finite, that the body is in slow free-fall, that the last decade of “more years” is usually the worst decade of all — your spreadsheets change shape. So does your calendar. So does the way you spend Tuesday morning.
This section is the philosophy. Stoic, Epicurean, Buddhist, secular, ancient, modern — whatever helps.
What you’ll find here
The Morality of Existence
- Why “more years” and “more life” are not the same metric
- Die With Zero: the Perkins thesis, fairly steelmanned
- Stoic praemeditatio malorum — premeditating your end as a daily practice
- The Epicurean argument that death is “nothing to us,” and where it falls short
- Bernard Williams on immortality: why you’d hate it after a century
- The medieval ars moriendi — what we lost when dying stopped being a craft
- Bioethics of advance directives, MAID, and the legal scaffolding that exists now
Bucket List Planning
- The bucket-list problem: most lists are someone else’s
- A method for separating novelty cravings from deep wants
- The energy budget: what your 50s can do that your 70s can’t
- Building a “minimum viable life,” not a maximalist one
- The single best filtering question: what would I regret not doing?
- Avoiding the trap of treating retirement as one long vacation
A reading list to start
- Bronnie Ware — The Top Five Regrets of the Dying
- Bill Perkins — Die With Zero
- Seneca — On the Shortness of Life
- Atul Gawande — Being Mortal
- Derek Parfit — Reasons and Persons (parts 2–3)
- Marcus Aurelius — Meditations (book 4 especially)
A fuller list lives in Resources.
Featured essays
(Posts tagged “Life Choices” appear below once published.)