Archive
Category: Life Choices
Stoicism, mortality, and the philosophy beneath the math.
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The Anti-Bucket List: Experiences You Can Gladly Skip
Freedom includes refusing experiences you only wanted because culture put them on a laminated list.
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A Good Enough Tuesday Is the Real Goal
A life cannot remain a peak experience. The real test of financial independence is whether an ordinary Tuesday feels inhabitable.
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The Half-Day Life: Retirement Does Not Create 24 Free Hours
Sleep, care, maintenance, and health consume much of every day. The usable half is where retirement succeeds or disappears.
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Your Retirement Horizon Is Not Your Life Expectancy
Life expectancy is an average, not an expiration date. A useful plan separates financial longevity from healthy, active time.
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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.