They say that death and taxes are the only certainties in life, but that’s only half right. There might be, somewhere, a universe where taxes don’t exist; death will never not be an inescapable fact for each and every living thing. I don’t want to be a downer, nor do I want to sound glib. Death is so fundamentally alien to our living experience that it becomes an abstraction. I no longer remember the exact moment I realized, as a child, that I wasn’t going to be alive forever, but I remember how shattering and profoundly life-changing that moment was. My entire conception of the world changed in an instant. Even so, death remained an abstraction. I tried to imagine myself dead and failed, time and again. There is a bit in Tom Stoppard’s Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead where the titular characters – lovably dim and perpetually befuddled by a world that moves them around like pawns on a chess board, without warning or explanation – discuss what it might be like to be dead, buried in a coffin. I’ve always loved that dialogue because it captures so well my own attempts to grapple with the idea of death as an “event” of life.

But, of course, death isn’t that.

It’s not a milepost in one’s life, like a birthday or a wedding. You don’t arrive at it and then depart again, on to the next thing. Death isn’t a part of life at all. It is the dark side of the moon; always there but never seen. Until one day, it is. It doesn’t come. It just is.

My understanding of death – and life – profoundly shifted again when my mom died. I had lost family members and friends before; what made her death different wasn’t simply that she was one of the most important people in my life, but how and when it happened. My mom had just turned 66 when she died, barely six weeks after she received her pancreatic cancer diagnosis, which came as a thunderbolt out of blue skies. Other people in my life have battled cancer; some are still here, and some are not, but in every case, they were given options for medical treatment. We are so fortunate to live in an age when medical science is making amazing strides all the time; in many cases, no matter how scary a diagnosis might be, there is something that can be done, or at least attempted. Maybe it was mere luck that this had been my experience of life-threatening illness before my mom died, but I don’t think it’s an unusual experience for most people in the Global West, where quality of life and life expectancy are the highest they’ve ever been in the history of our species.

For my mom that didn’t matter, though. I will never forget the moment my dad called to tell me the results of her latest scans. I knew immediately that it was bad, but my mind didn’t – couldn’t – grasp at first what it meant. I remember asking my dad what the doctors said would happen next; my mom had had breast cancer years before, so I was familiar with the general treatment process – surgery, chemo, radiation, and so on. This time, there was silence on the phone. Eventually, my dad managed to speak: there was nothing to be done. The doctors hadn’t mentioned any treatment because there no treatment that could help. There would only be palliative care, when the time came. And still, my mind couldn’t – wouldn’t – understand what he was saying. I asked him over and over what he meant, what the doctors meant, what it all meant. It seemed impossible that there was nothing to be done. 

Over the next six weeks, I struggled to make sense of it. For the first time in my life, death was a fact. It could not be avoided, negotiated, put off. My mom’s diagnosis left no room for hope, the one thing that might have helped to blur the finality of the prospect of her death. This is what changed me. Up to that point, I had lived my life with the unspoken belief that most bad things in life could be, if not undone, then at least fixed; even if they changed your life, life still went on. I’d spent my life living in the land of Tomorrow Always Comes. So, perhaps, had my mom. At 66, she had no reason to think herself very old. She was a vibrant, brilliant, compassionate, generous, wonderfully multi-faceted woman; a defining presence in the lives of everyone who loved and was loved by her. She was so alive. Until she wasn’t.

Grief does a lot of funny things to us. It’s a shapeshifter. Like water, it takes the shape of whomever holds it; it penetrates even the most inaccessible parts of us; it transforms as it flows, leaving a sometimes-unrecognizable landscape in its wake. Of all the things it did to me (and for me), the one thing I will never regret is the way it changed how I understand time. 

It’s not only the young who live in the land of Tomorrow Always Comes. At 25, time stretched so far in front of me that it might as well have gone on forever, but you know what? At 35, that horizon felt like it had barely budged. Turning 40 didn’t bring it closer either; I was still living my life like there would always be another tomorrow. Another day to do all the things I wanted but didn’t have time to do today. Another day to try the things I’d always wanted to try but didn’t have time to try … not yesterday, or the day before, or all the yesterdays before that. If life did not, in the moment, feel anything like I’d hoped it would … well, that was ok, too. Some day – a day definitely still to come – it definitely would.

Someday, I would get around to All The Things.

I would get around to living my best life. 

One day. 

In fact, I had designed my entire life precisely around that guarantee. I had worked hard for nearly two decades – harder, at times, than I’d wanted to work, if we are being honest – and made some compromises that hadn’t always felt great, and missed out on things I still often thought about with regret, but it was okay because there would be a reward for it all at the end: the best life that I was going to start living … someday in the future. 

Here’s the thing: human beings can’t live every day as if they’re going to die tomorrow. It’s not healthy for our psyche, and it’s not healthy for our society either. A certain amount of future planning is imperative, and the only way we know how to do that is by imagining ourselves a future life. At the same time, too much living in the future can also be unhealthy. I used to be the kind of person who was always counting down to some future event: a milestone birthday, a party, a vacation – even just a shopping trip to the mall. In fact, I had to fill up my calendar with “fun things to look forward to” in order to get through the daily grind. Let me rephrase that: I needed to reward myself for simply living my daily life. Does it sound familiar to you? I know lots of people who are the same. In my case, it wasn’t the result of circumstances forced upon me. It was my choice to live like that. Let’s call it a side effect of being more future-oriented than was healthy for me. I had a skewed notion of the value of time. Today mattered less than tomorrow. Today existed to be exploited in service of tomorrow. 

But, of course, tomorrow is not guaranteed. You know how they say, one bird in the hand is worth two in the bush? I think about that a lot nowadays.

After my mom died, I didn’t start living like there was no tomorrow. I didn’t quit my job, start partying, or blow off my responsibilities. I did stop making plans for a while, though – months, in fact. Life suddenly seemed too unpredictable. What was the point of planning a vacation in six months’ time when someone could die in six weeks? And once I stopped making plans – stopped even looking at the calendar beyond the end of each week – I began to understand the meaning of living in the moment. It doesn’t mean every moment is fun or memorable, only that — good, bad or indifferent — it doesn’t pass unnoticed. Ok, maybe not every second of every minute of every day; I can get stuck in a book or an art project or a trip to the thrift store and lose hours. But you get my point. When I stopped thinking about the future all the time, the present suddenly came into focus. And in the present, I found myself.

I found other things too. Lessons, mostly.

Here’s a big one: you can’t start living your best life until you know what that looks like for you. And you won’t know that unless you get to know yourself well first. I mean really, really, LIKE FOR REAL know yourself. If your idea of the best life is (a) whatever social media tells you it is, or (b) having and doing everything under the sun that takes your fancy, you’re gonna run into trouble pretty quickly. The reality is that (a) and (b) are basically the same thing and you can’t have it. Sorry. Money is finite. Time is finite. We can’t have everything, and be everything, and do everything, all at the same time. We might be able to have and be and do anything from a very long (if not infinite) menu of options, but we have to make choices – and trade-offs. The more money, time, and effort we pour into one choice, the less we have to devote to others. The choices and the trade-offs shape our lives, for better or worse. To live your best life means to make choices that embody and create that life.

Here’s another thing I learned, living in the present: you can’t enjoy everything, all the time. And you shouldn’t try. Humans, it seems, have been hard-wired to have a happiness set-point (sometimes called the Brickman happiness baseline). Scientists have hypothesized that people have different set-points, which may be at least partially heritable and may be adjustable over a lifetime. This is relevant to our experience of pleasure in the following way: a pleasant stimulus – like getting a raise or buying a new dress – will generate a hedonic response above the person’s normal baseline (and register as happiness), while a negative stimulus will do the opposite (and register as unhappiness). But over time, the person gets used to the stimulus and returns to their happiness baseline. Nothing lasts forever: not the peaks, not the valleys. And the more we chase those peaks of happiness, the more we actually desensitize ourselves (by repeated exposure) to those stimuli that induce the experience of happiness.

Living in the moment doesn’t make me happier, but it allows me to be fully present in those moments of joy – to savour them, and then to let them go, knowing that they will come again. It also requires me to be present in those moments that feel difficult or even painful, rather than try to avoid them. I’m not going to sit here and tell you that hardships are a blessing in disguise; sometimes, they’re just really, really sh*tty and unfair. Sometimes, the difficult moments do represent opportunities to learn and grow. Even then, we don’t have to love them, but we do have to accept that – fair or not – they are part of life. And, like the highs, they too shall pass. In the meantime, there is today. And today counts.

One of the highlights of the week was getting the results of our municipal elections and feeling energized and happy as opposed to depressed. So yay for that. It was also neat to see how invested the kids were in the whole process (mind you, one of my son’s friend’s fathers was running for office, so he had a personal interest as well) which bodes well for their future civic engagement, I think. Whenever we talk about stuff like this, it always surprises me (in a good way) to see how opinionated and outspoken my kids are. I really love having opinionated kids. First and foremost, because they make really interesting and engaging people. I feel like my goal now, as a parent, is to nurture their critical thinking skills and their confidence in those skills, along with their intellectual curiosity and elasticity.

One of the lowlights of the week was forgetting a dear friend’s birthday. Making someone (especially a friend) feel unvalued is one of my biggest anxieties/fears – something I obsess about constantly in all my social interactions – and it feels awful when it actually happens. I am notoriously terrible for remembering dates (and names) and while I know why that is (cough, neurodivergent brain, cough), it doesn’t change the fact that I’m responsible for the unintended consequences. This was a painful (for both of us) reminder of that. [I apologized to my friend and we talked it out.]

I am nearing the finish line on the first draft of my current WIP, aka book #5. Honestly, with everything else going on in my life right now, I probably should have shelved this project till next year to give myself some breathing space … but I didn’t, and here we are. I pushed hard to get the first draft done in record time (it will need a LOT of work in revisions, lol) so I could wrap it up before November. Next week, I am expecting a couple of important developments vis-à-vis the publication process for A Party to Murder, so I will be switching gears and going hard into self-pub mode. I’ve got a draft of my first mailing list newsletter ready to go, which will include some fun updates.

Whenever I could steal a moment (hah!), I have also been prepping posts for the blog, diving into some heavier / more philosophical topics. Mostly, so far, I have a running list of ideas in my Notes app. But, hey, we are not in danger of running out of things to talk about here, that’s for sure. Once I clear up some room in my schedule, I’ll start putting pen to paper.

I had a moment of mini-epiphany this week, where I was able to clarify and reaffirm my purpose (aka what gives me meaning) and that has given me a boost of emotional/mental/creative energy that I’m excited to start putting to use.

So I’m leaving this week on a positive note, with lessons learned and new perspective gained, and hoping to bring that same vibe to what’s coming next.

Have a great weekend!

As a self-avowed materialist and maximalist (maxi-materialist?), it may seem surprising that I have any rules or limitations on purchases. More is more, right? Well, no. I am fortunate to live a life of abundance, but it has been built on intentional accumulation. Less gives me more: more enjoyment from the things I own, and more time to enjoy them. The most important thing that intentional spending has allowed me to do is to buy back my time. A few years ago, following a series of unfortunate events, I had an existential epiphany and decided to radically rearrange the architecture of my life, pretty much top to bottom. That included taking a step back – or rather, sideways – with my career and moving into a different role; a role that I love and, more importantly, that allows me to work part-time. It was a huge leap to make at the age of 41 (particularly as the former primary income-earner in the family); one that has transformed my life in the best way, and one that was only possible because of choices my husband and I made up to that point.

Being intentional is hard when you exist in a late-stage capitalist society. Capitalism does not respect individual self-determination. It might pay lip service to it, because that helps it sell its products, but that is not the same thing. Capitalism wants to influence (aka dictate) our personal decisions to serve its interests, not to enable us to make the decisions that best serve our interests and values. Asserting our values through intentional living (and spending) will always feel like swimming against a strong tide. It’s hard work! But the rewards are immense.

There are many facets to living with intention, but I wanted to focus on spending in this post because in a capitalist system, money is undoubtedly the biggest lever of control at our disposal. Money is the tool for building our best lives. Consequently, people focus a lot on its accumulation – and, to be clear, that is important (you can’t use something you don’t have) – but not nearly as much on the other half of the equation, spending. To hoard money is, in my opinion, to render money useless; a tool is a tool because it does something. A tool that sits in a drawer, forever, is useless. On the flip side, using (spending) money without intention renders it meaningless. A tool is useful when it serves a useful purpose. Throwing it around at random doesn’t generally accomplish anything worthwhile. And remember: money is a finite resource. You can swing a hammer around for decades without running out of hammer; at a certain point, you can run out of money if you keep spending it … and there will always be more and more and more things to spend money on. That’s capitalism, baby.

Ok, enough philosophizing! Let’s talk about the 4 types of purchases I try to avoid in order to give myself the room (mentally and financially) to live (and spend) intentionally.

Occasion-Based Purchases

One of the strategies that companies have been leaning into a lot in recent years to sell us stuff is to tie product marketing to “special occasions”. This can be anything from specific holidays (Halloween, Valentine’s Day, etc.) to life events, whether rare or mundane (vacations, people’s weddings, girls’ brunch, date night, etc.). And that’s the thing to remember: anything can be turned into a “special occasion” if a company wants to sell you something bad enough. Do you always need a new thing, or multiple new things, for each of these occasions? I can’t answer that question for you, but I recommend that you ask it.

For me, this is the easiest category to ignore and cut out of my spending. It’s not that I won’t spend money on these occasions if they are things I enjoy, but the money is spent on the experience itself, not on accoutrements. If I need a bathing suit because I’m going on a vacation where I’ll be swimming, I will buy one – but I won’t buy a new one every time I go on a vacation. I will buy Halloween candy every year, but not Halloween decorations. [I actually don’t buy any seasonal décor because it’s not something that brings me joy, but I don’t judge people who love it and buy it, if they’re doing so in an intentional manner.] I love going to weddings, but I don’t think I’ve bought a new dress specifically for a wedding in … ever, actually. I have plenty of dresses, so I will not let the occasion of an upcoming wedding serve as an inducement to buy a new one.  

Keep in mind that, more often than not, special occasion-marketed products are offered at a cost premium. So not only are you being influenced to buy something that, quite likely, you wouldn’t have otherwise bought, you are paying extra for it.

Ego-Propping Purchases

I went back and forth on whether to reference “identity” or “ego” in describing this category, and if you’ve read my previous post on the self/identity conundrum, perhaps you might appreciate the distinction. I decided to go with ego because it gets to what I think is the root of the issue here: while we all, to some extent or another, buy things as an exercise in identity-making and/or identity-expression, there is a specific category of purchases that are driven by the need to influence how other people perceive us. This is different than saying: I love X therefore I buy Y. It’s saying: I want people to think I am X, therefore I buy Y.

In the first case, I am buying Y because it’s necessary to my own experience/expression of X. In the second case, I am not buying Y because it’s a necessary adjunct to my love of X, but because I think it’s necessary for other people to perceive me in a certain way. Here are some concrete examples from my own life to hopefully illustrate this point.

I buy books because I love to read and to have my own library. I do not buy books or have my own library because I want people to think I’m smart or well-read. I do not care if people think I’m smart or well-read. It’s nice if they do, but I find no value in spending any energy, time, or money trying to persuade them to do so.

I do not own a very nice car. My 2018 Mitsubishi Mirage is, for me, the perfect car. I paid for it in cash, and it gets me from point A to point B. That is the sum total of what I require from any vehicle – cheap, reliable, 4 wheels and an engine. I don’t like driving, and I don’t like cars, except as a necessary evil. I do not buy a luxury vehicle because I want people to think I’m well-off. I don’t not buy a small, basic, cheap car because I worry that people will think I’m not well-off. I don’t care what people think about my financial situation any more than I care that they think I’m smart.

If, for the purposes of this discussion, we define “ego” as that part of ourselves that is concerned with how other people perceive us, then I can definitively say that I do not, and have not for most of my adult life, made ego-propping purchases. And it is incredibly liberating. Chasing other people’s good opinion is a fickle, expensive, and ultimately meaningless endeavour. And, yes, that is me stepping up on a soapbox. Everyone has their own values. Spending your money based on their values leaves less time and money to devote to your values. That is the opposite of intentional.

And this is not, for the record, a question of one set of values being objectively better than another. Books are not better than cars in an absolute, objective sense. They are better to me, and that’s the key.

Life Upgrade Purchases

This category is, in some ways, connected to the previous but it also connects to another aspect of capitalism. Capitalism is predicated on the idea of constant growth, which is also sometimes presented as constant progress. We are told that everything, from population-level history down to the individual, follows an ever-upwards trajectory. To live is to constantly improve. If we’re not moving up, we’re failing.

There are many problems with this kind of thinking, about which we could talk for days and weeks. For the purposes of this post, I will stick to one facet of the issue which is the culturally-ingrained expectation that we continually upgrade our standard of living as soon as it becomes financially feasible to do so. Get a promotion and a raise? Buy a fancier bag, a better car, a bigger house. Why?  Because (A) it’s progress, and progress is the highest goal, and (B) more expensive things are inherently better, and you deserve better, don’t you?

You do deserve better, but you should also get to define what that means to you. A bigger house has its advantages, but it also has costs – not just in terms of purchase price and maintenance expenses, but opportunity costs. A bigger house requires a bigger (ongoing) investment of money, time, and energy. Making that investment comes at the expense of other things. Are those things also (or more) important to you as the big house? If so, progress might look different for you. Progress might not look like a bigger house but, say, more vacations. Or it can look like more of the same old, same old.

Here is something to consider: the less expensive your daily life is (relative to your income), the more control you have over it because fewer of your decisions will be dictated by demands that are “locked in”. A smaller house leaves me with more money, time, and energy to apply to other parts of my life which, for me, might be just as critical to the architecture of my ‘best life’ as the house.

And here’s something else to consider: the Diderot effect. The French philosopher bought a gorgeous new dressing gown, then realized that everything else he owned looked shabby by comparison, and he suddenly felt the urge to replace those things with nicer, more expensive versions. This is a universal experience, and one that is very hard to resist. What it means is that there is always a danger that, in “upgrading” one part of our lives, we open the door to a desire for other upgrades, and on and on.

Here, please let me emphasize that I do not advocate for living like a pauper (unless you like that sort of thing) or never buying nicer things than you currently own. What I’m saying is that it’s important to be mindful of the factors at play, and their impact on your decisions. Upgrading for the sake of upgrading – without considering how the decision aligns with your values and your vision for your ‘best life’ – is a risky proposition. Proceed with caution.

Emotional Regulation Purchases

I’ll be honest: this was the hardest category for me to get under control. Especially during that period of my life when I had not yet achieved a clear vision of my ‘best life’ and a clear articulation of my personal values. Those things are a wonderful bulwark against emotional (dys)regulation purchases. They are both anchor and compass in a world that comes at you very fast and hard, and tosses you around like a ship in a storm. Before I had a clear vision of what I wanted my life to look like, I was often very dissatisfied with my day to day. And because I had nothing to work towards (i.e. no sense of purpose), I looked around for things that could provide a burst of satisfaction in the moment.

You know what I’m going to say next: capitalism loves to offer us little treats. They’re packaged as rewards for our hard work, but they primarily serve to keep us working hard. (A) because they cost money, and (B) because they don’t actually really satisfy our true need (for purpose) so we keep buying more and more to fill the hole.

Life needs meaning, and meaning comes from a sense of purpose. Purpose requires intention. Intention takes effort. The way our current world works, we are given very little time and space to make that effort. We are tired, over-scheduled, over-worked, stressed out. It’s easier to buy something to feel good in the moment, then to try to find the time and mental energy to think about what would make us happy in the long run.

While I did, in the past, make plenty of emotional regulation purchases, I was lucky – their negative impact was minimized by several factors. One, I had a stable and comfortable income, which gave me a bigger cushion to manage the impact of my “little treats”. Two, as noted, I was not buying things to impress other people or upgrade my life, which meant that my “little treats” were, in the scheme of things, relatively inexpensive. [Shopping secondhand for most of my adult life helped a lot too.] So the dents were small, relative to the cushion. That being said, the best thing I did for myself, was to address the underlying issue – that was far more impactful than either (A) getting myself a bigger cushion, or (B) buying cheaper “little treats”.

One last thing to add here: one of the ways in which I managed “losing” 40% of my income when I switched to a part-time role was by drastically reducing my “little treat-ing”. And it was surprisingly easy to do because – and this is key – by that point I had rearranged my life to align with my purpose, vision, and values. I don’t need “little treats” to get through the day now, because I love my day-to-day as it is … and part of why I love it is because I changed my work-life balance. Put it another way: before, I was working more hours to have more money to spend on things to make up for the fact that there wasn’t enough time in my life for meaning because I was spending so much time working – to have money for things that didn’t add true meaning to my life. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Ok, one last last thing (I promise!): What I am describing here is the very definition of first-world problems so if that doesn’t apply to your life, you can go ahead and ignore everything I’ve just said. Not everyone is running the same kind of race, so I will never generalize my experiences and opinions. I would love to hear yours, so please feel free to share in the comments. We all learn more that way 🙂