If you’re not a little paranoid you won’t see tomorrow, make bolder choices

September 18 2026 – 08:15am

I was incredibly careful crossing Dodge Street in August of 2005, ducking into the smokey bar where my friends and family had gathered. I had gotten a job in California, and was finally getting out of Nebraska. Life had suddenly gone from feeling stagnant, monotonous, and dreadful to exciting, anticipatory, and auspicious.

This newfound optimism brought with it newfound caution. I turned down an invitation for a sand volleyball game, not wanting to risk injury. I was extra careful to wash my hands and order burgers well-done, not wanting to risk illness. While I normally scurried across five lanes of traffic directly to the door of The Old Dundee, this time I walked the extra fifty yards to the nearest intersection and waited for a walk signal.

I hadn’t considered myself particularly against being alive, but for the first time I felt in high-relief an urgent desire to stay alive. I was more eager than ever to experience the following weeks and months. When I recall that time and feeling, I wonder if it should be some kind of yardstick.

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Logically, it seems we shouldn’t cling so desperately to experiencing the future. Each of us is insignificant, the very Earth on which we stand the only known spec of dust supporting complex life in an unfathomably vast universe. As Oliver Burkeman points out, “In the long run, we’re all dead”: If we’re lucky we get four thousand weeks, but because we can’t experience the past and aren’t guaranteed the future we never get more than the current moment.

If we’re going to die anyway, and nothing we do will matter for long after we’re gone, it’s easy to conclude that we shouldn’t care about anything. Why build a relationship or a family if you and everyone you love are going to die anyway? Why make any long-term plan, such as planting an avocado tree, if you can’t be sure you’ll enjoy the fruits?

Extending that logic, aside from the potential pain involved in getting there, why fear death at all?

One day I got an email from a former coworker, who I’ll call Margaret. Margaret suddenly seemed very eager to publish a book she had been working on sporadically, for decades. I was surprised and optimistic at this sudden change in behavior because she had always seemed to suffer from the classic symptoms of perfectionism. Early versions of her book had been amalgamations of poems, short stories, recipes, and home remedies. She had adapted some of them to a website with one of the most unconventional layouts I had ever seen. It had reminded me of all the times I had gotten paralyzed by my own creative visions, feeling unwilling to compromise to fit the rigid standards that would turn that vision into a coherent attempt to appeal to others, with a commensurate potential to fail.

Margaret was finally interested in what she might have to do to adapt her vision to give it a chance to be seen by the global audience that looks for things to read on Amazon. As someone who had published several books, I gave her my simple advice.

A couple years later I learned that Margaret had died of cancer. I wondered if a diagnosis had been behind her email’s peculiar sense of urgency.

Recently, a friend told me over dinner that if he got in an accident on the way home that night, as he was dying in the ambulance, he would be very distraught over not finishing his book. This would probably seem shocking to some, because he has a wife and kids he should presumably be thinking about in his final moments. But I understood perfectly.

After I finish writing a book, I feel a sense of lightness and relief, as if it would be okay to die. Stephen King once wrote under a pen name, in part because his publisher would only let him publish one book a year. He compared it to a man needing to visit a prostitute once in a while to make up for a large gap between his and his wife’s sexual appetites. I believe that as we live our lives, the potential to create things builds up inside us. When we create something, that pressure releases.

But once we put something into the world, that relief doesn’t last long. The pressure builds up once again. So as we get closer to finishing a project or otherwise achieving some long-term goal, we experience a heightened fear of death. The moment before reaching our objective is like looking at a text-message progress bar stuck at 99% – it’s when we have invested the most, while gaining the least. We can no longer fool ourselves that our anxiety is due to what behavioral economists call the “sunk cost fallacy.” We fear the unlocked gains reality.

This is why I also felt a sense of relief – as I was doing final edits on my new book, Finish What Matters – after I scheduled what I call a “dead man’s draft.” In various situations, there are things called “dead man’s switches,” such as a pedal on a big truck that, once released, causes the truck to brake. If the driver isn’t conscious and capable of holding it down, it saves the rest of the world from a calamity. My dead man’s draft merely helped alleviate my own fear of the calamity of the unlocked gains reality. I scheduled a blog post that would go live by a certain date, unless I was alive to un-schedule it. It linked to the in-progress draft of my book, with a statement declaring that if I was indeed dead, my book would be free for all.

The relief that I felt upon scheduling my dead man’s draft suggests that what I want most is not so much to experience the launch of my book, but to know that the project I dedicated the last years of my life to wouldn’t go to waste. That’s of course still illogical in the long run. As Marcus Aurelius reminds us in his Meditations, we shouldn’t be concerned with posthumous fame because, “see how soon everything is forgotten.”

I definitely would have felt differently about missing out on the launch of my first book, but this is a positive development, because there’s no doubt that if you dedicate your life to creating things, the disappointing event you fear will come to pass. As you are witnessing the outcome of your latest project, pressure will once again build up, driving you to pursue the next. At some point you will leave something unfinished. I’m reminded of the German sociologist, Niklas Luhmann, who – though he published 500 works – lamented that “the only thing that really is a nuisance is the lack of time.” (He left unfinished 150 works.)

As my dead man’s draft sits scheduled, and my manuscript is finished, it’s nice for the meantime to have considerably less fear of death. But maybe that’s not a state we should strive to be in for long. Even if we aren’t Marcus Aurelius and people won’t be quoting what we’ve left behind in a couple thousand years, fearing death is a sign that we’ve dared to make long-term plans, anticipate tomorrow, and build something – doing the brave act of looking forward to a future so exciting we fear we may not live to see.