Archive
Category: Life Choices
Stoicism, mortality, and the philosophy beneath the math.
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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 Memento FIRE. 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.
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The Spreadsheet of Your Remaining Tuesdays
There are roughly 780 Tuesdays between me and the day my knees give out. I counted last night. The number changed how I felt about this morning.
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Bernard Williams and the Tedium of Immortality
There’s an essay by Bernard Williams, from 1973, that argues you shouldn’t want to live forever. Not because you can’t. Because you’d be bored to madness. The strongest serious argument for the position SuicideFIRE quietly assumes.
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Why Accepting Death Can Sharpen Your Life
A Stoic argument for treating mortality as a regulator on a Tuesday morning, and why the financial math only works once the philosophical work is done.