Archive
Category: Life Choices
Stoicism, mortality, and the philosophy beneath the math.
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Why Buddhism Beats Productivity Culture on Death
Productivity culture has nothing useful to say about death. Buddhism has had a coherent answer for 2,500 years. Here is what the two traditions disagree about, and why the older one is right.
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Atul Gawande’s Most Uncomfortable Lesson
Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal (2014) is the most-recommended book on aging by doctors who work with the dying. Most readers miss its most uncomfortable lesson: that the medical system is engineered to prolong dying, not living.
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How Long Are You Actually Alive? An Honest Audit
You have 78 years on the calendar. Subtract the sleep, the commute, the doomscroll, the meetings about other meetings. What is left is your actual life. The math is harsh.
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Hedonic Adaptation Cuts Both Ways
The same psychological mechanism that makes you tire of your new car will, very quickly, make you stop missing your old salary. Why this matters for the FIRE plan.
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The Five Regrets of the Dying, Re-examined
Bronnie Ware spent eight years as a palliative care nurse and identified the five regrets patients voiced most. The list is famous. Here is what it actually says when you read it carefully.
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Die With Zero: A Critical Reading of Bill Perkins
Bill Perkins’s Die With Zero (2020) is the closest mainstream argument to SuicideFire. A serious reading: what Perkins gets right, what he gets wrong, and the move he can not quite make.
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Why Your 75-Year-Old Self Is a Stranger You’re Paying For
Derek Parfit’s 1984 argument about personal identity over time has a brutal implication for retirement planning: the person you are saving for is mostly a stranger. Here is what that means for the math.
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The Tyranny of the Bucket List
Most bucket lists are someone else’s idea of what your life should have meant. A defense of small, particular, possibly boring last things — and an attack on Machu Picchu as a life milestone.
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The Things You Can Stop Wanting
A good life is not only built by getting what you want. It is also built by deleting wants that were installed by people who profit from your restlessness.
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The Job Is Not the Cage. The Identity Is.
Most people who say they are trapped by work are trapped by something stranger: the identity work gave them. The badge comes off before the self-image does.