Archive
Tag: mortality
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Eight Podcasts That Actually Discuss Mortality Honestly
Most podcasts avoid the topic that should be at the center of their audience’s lives. Eight that don’t.
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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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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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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 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.