Does thinking about death make you live better? The honest answer is: sometimes, and not automatically. Research on mortality awareness has documented two very different reactions to confronting the fact of death, a defensive one that narrows a person, and a more constructive one that seems to open them up. This piece looks at what
Most people use joy and happiness as if they mean the same thing, but they describe something meaningfully different. Happiness tends to be circumstantial, tied to what is happening right now. Joy runs underneath that, steadier and less dependent on the day going well. The distinction matters because chasing the wrong one can leave you
Most people who start over solve the practical part faster than they expect: a new job, a new routine, a new place to live. What takes longer is the part nobody warns them about, which is the absence of anything that feels like it matters. This piece walks through why purpose doesn’t return the way
Most people go looking for meaning in the places they were told it would be, in achievement, in status, in arriving somewhere they had been working toward for years. What I watched, across twenty years of sitting with people at the end of their lives, was that meaning almost never lived there. It lived in