The military museum and the daily news from Bosnia can almost make you think that war is what usually happens. Young men and women and children die. Politicians talk. Relief agencies try to help. And you do notice the museum has no pictures of victims, only heroes.
It's not that life is short, it's that we waste a lot of it because we are afraid to say no, because we don't have the confidence to say no because we don't have the discipline to say no.
I feel sure that by manufacturing disembodied worlds, worlds of our own, and that's what we mean by a metaverse, it's a location, let's not call it a place, a location where we exist only in avatar form and where our minds enter a reality not dependent on the material world. Then as we do that, we have unexpectedly created an opportunity for the dead.
And here's the thing about terror, although it may well be true of grief, too. It robs you of so much. It steals your soul. It takes your life. It robs you of so much. It steals your sense of yourself and your place in the world. And it murders time.
I think some essential part of me is still there. And here's the thing about terror, although it may well be true of grief, too. It robs you of so much. It steals your sense of yourself and your place in the world, and it murders time.
Prince Charles saying to me, "We'll forget her soon enough," explains why I end my final sentences that Diana will never be extinguished from our minds. It's a direct counter to what I had heard on that phone call.
We tend to think that bad things happen to bad people and good things happen to good people. And when a good person suffers, we're forced to confront the uncomfortable reality that the world doesn't work the way we'd like it to.
It's not about the Israelis actually. I don't look to the eye of the people of Gaza because I feel the pain of them. And they feel always that we all going to die. This is the reality. This is the only belief that I have in the meantime that we all going to die.
When historian Kate Bowler was diagnosed with Stage IV cancer, she became fascinated by the ways people try to impose order on events they can't control.
One day they will be out of office and eventually dead, while Zuckerberg, whose majority control of Meta's voting power makes his removal effectively impossible, could in fifty years still be ruler of his empire.
The universe has been falling apart billions of years longer than life, you know, started and began its its ultimately doomed but elegant rebellion against that. The the universe is allergic really to things being in formation.
I realized they are not about death figures into one sentence in the obituary they are really mini biographies they are stories of people's lives and what made them celebrated
On some of these trips, actually, when you get into the kayak, you don't even know. You stretch the spray skirt on over the cockpit and you don't know if that's the last time you'll ever be doing that and you sort of pray that it's not.
Soundtrack for the apocalypse is silent. We felt the weight of that total absence of sound when we arrived in the devastated neighborhoods of Altadena and the Palisades after the January 2025 firestorm. There was no sound of cars or children or people or pool pumps or electricity across the lines. Even the birds were gone.
My father got sick with a metastasized melanoma in his brain when I was 23, and he was still the center of our family. My brothers and I just adored him. He was like our higher power.
I really believe that just thinking about death that little bit more, especially for a story where we're safe, um it can just enrich every single day because you know in the back of your mind that's coming.
There's a subset of things that you're probably going to want to do in your 20s that actually cost a lot less money to enjoy when you're young than they will older when you're older. And also like you might not be able to do them when you're older.
Weeks of bad nights later, her mind had lost its grip. She forgot many things, including what you're supposed to do when you're thirsty. I figured once they treated her for dehydration, the gibbering stranger in the hospital bed would turn back into my sane 70-year-old mother whose only real health problem was a little high blood pressure. But I never saw that woman again.
In 2023, the last year that we have estimates lead took more lives than all active wars all natural disasters, all road accidents and HIV and malaria combined. Just from lead.
We are disconnecting ourselves from happiness when we disconnect ourselves from other people. I think we're locking ourselves out of real joy in a very finite life.
I think I'd had a sense of transcendence very strongly when my father died. And that led me on to want to get closer to the source of transcendence. And I thought, you know, religion maybe had the key.
People who have these experiences feel that they've encountered a reality that's even more real than the things we see and touch in everyday life. And what's especially interesting is that these experiences also appear to change people. They feel a greater sense of connection with others. They feel less fear about death.
Ask yourself, am I afraid of death because I won't be able to do this anymore? People in the abstract want to live a long time and then you look at how they spend their days and it's on some of the dumbest imaginable, right? They spend it gossiping. They spend it complaining. They spend it working a job they don't like.
People who have more of these experiences feel a greater sense of meaning and purpose in their lives. They feel more connected to other people, even strangers. They're less afraid of death. They're more likely to change their behavior in positive ways. And they report feeling a sense of awe or wonder at the world around them.
People who have more spiritual experiences feel a greater sense of meaning and purpose in their lives. They feel less fear about death. They tend to be more altruistic. They show greater resilience in the face of stress and trauma.
People who have frequent spiritual experiences — who regularly feel a sense of awe, or feel that they are in the presence of something greater than themselves — tend to be happier, more generous, and more connected to other people. They are also less afraid of death.
New York is the latest state to legalize medical aid in dying. Stephen Dubner speaks with the governor who signed the law, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, a death doula — and an ethicist who thinks the very idea is wrong.
I think a lot of millennial music is united by this sense of deep sincerity. Um this feeling of carefree freedom and this kind of almost careless attitude in a sense. This kind of like live fast, die young ethos.
You have to be really careful when you reach that peak, as it's always cold, you're often alone, and there's only one direction to go. And it occurred to me right then and there that I didn't want to peak until the day before I die.
Will Durant spent his whole life worrying that he was a failure. He wrote 13 volumes of The Story of Civilization over 50 years, a project so vast it seems almost incomprehensible. And he was worried he was a failure.
When Junger nearly died from a ruptured artery, he experienced something unexpected: he saw his dead father, and felt completely calm and unafraid. The experience didn't make him religious, but it made him think that the human brain may have evolved to make death easier — that the terror of dying may be much less than the terror of anticipating it.
People are really comfortable with the number of people who die on the roads. 40,000 people dead, 1.2 million globally and avoidable in many cases, isn't something upon which we share collective outrage or even moderate discomfort.
I was on Interstate 5 in over in the Pacific Northwest where I live and one of those big trucks that's got all the chickens in it like bombing down the highway and I looked at it and a chicken looked into my soul.
I have almost like this superstitious thing that if I were to actually do an elective surgery to look younger, I would immediately get, my cancer would come back, or I would get Parkinson's, or it's almost like, recently I was thinking about, my dad loved that ancient fable, Appointment in Samara.
But there was a kind of corrosive anxiety, I think, about not having more. And you know, in some ways this is a very specific story about one boy who was a fabulist and who died too young. In other ways, I feel as though there are elements of this story that many of us would recognize.
