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.
I can't go on. I'll go on. And I really did not know how I could go from I can't go on to I'll go on. And that's when I started thinking about this idea of devoting myself to everyday joys or like cultivating these tiny victories, like just having a different metric for what would make me happy or also how I could stay engaged in life?
Legacy is for everyone but you. This beautiful cemetery, this is for the people who loved those people. It doesn't do them any good. But what of the time they wasted? What of the wrong things they valued? You want to think about how you're spending your time now. Are you living now? Are you appreciating it now?
Our deathbed selves are so attuned to our core values that when we really take the time to envision and relate to who we will be in that moment when the veil between this life and the next gets thin, we act according to what really matters to our soul.
Mortal danger was actually, I think, a core part of the appeal of the sport in those early days. These guys were gladiators. They were risking their life every time they got in a car.
4mo ago
Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.
