Memento Mori

This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression - and with all this yet to die.
—Ernest Becker

Friends,

Here are five things I’ve been doing/exploring/thinking about this week:

1. I’m now reading the classic Denial of Death by Ernest Becker, and it’s a doozy. Maybe everything we do—the very foundations of our societies and ways of living—are all nothing more than an attempt to avoid thinking about our inevitable death. And as I grow older, that’s never sounded more true.

2. The first time I saw this short exerpt of a video interview with Steve Jobs, it struck me like a hammer. In about 90 seconds, he explains a simple, life-altering fact: we all have the power to shape life. I’ve watched this several times this week.

3. I’m not afraid of elevators, but many people are. We imagine a cable snapping and plunging many stories to our death, right? It turns out elevators aren’t made that way, and are probably much safer than you realized.

4. Thinking about the top five regrets of the dying that Bronnie Ware, a former hospice nurse and author of Top Five Regrets of the Dying, described. If you’re like me, you can relate to all of them.

5. If I could only give people one strategy for having more time in their life, it’s what Tim Ferriss says here, which is essentially “find and eliminate your inefficiencies, and find and multiply your strengths”.

Life is what we make it, always has been, always will be. —Grandma Moses