My son said it to me in the middle of the night, while I was holding him. “I don’t want to die.”
He’s four. He was safe in my arms, in his own house, with the whole family a wall away. Nothing was wrong. But something had arrived anyway — the thing that arrives for all of us — and he had run straight into it in the dark. He wasn’t asking a question. He was refusing. He simply could not accept that this was part of the deal, that it was coming for him someday too.
It’s the Santa Claus discovery, but upside down. Instead of finding out something wonderful isn’t real, you find out something unbearable is. I held him and told him he was safe, which was true, and didn’t tell him the other thing, which was also true. And I remembered being that age myself — waking up to it, the floor of the world dropping an inch.
I turned 41 last week. So maybe it’s fitting that I’ve been carrying my son’s sentence around like a stone in my pocket. Every day I’m older. Every year the light gets a little more expensive. And the strange thing — the thing I didn’t expect — is that it hasn’t made me morbid. It’s made me greedy. I have never felt more creative, more driven to make each ordinary moment actually count. It lands on me the way a Dylan Thomas line does. Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Not despair. Appetite.
I honestly can’t tell if I’m getting better at living or worse. It feels like better. I’ve never been more connected — business and family, the newsletter and the group texts, all of it lit up at once — and I’ve never guarded a plain walk more fiercely. I play music. I write. I do more of both than at any point in my life, because the machine follows me now instead of the other way around.
So I’m not even sure “being in the moment” means what it used to. I can be on a walk, in the sun, with my kid — and also mid-thought, mid-draft, mid-conversation with a machine that’s helping me think. Is that presence, or its opposite? The closest thing I’ve found to an answer is old: there’s a stillness in the Tao that feels weirdly identical to working well with AI. You stop forcing. You find the way the thing wants to go, and you go with it — and somehow end up more in the moment, not less.
Which brings me back to a small boy in the dark, refusing to accept his one non-negotiable fact.
I can’t spare him that. No one could spare me. But the rage, the appetite, the greedy attention to ordinary Tuesdays — it’s the only honest answer I have for him. You don’t get to not die. You get this. The walk, the light through the oaks, the machine humming along beside you, the four-year-old heavy and warm and alive against your chest at 3 a.m.
You don’t want to die, buddy. Good. Neither do I. So let’s not waste a second of the part where we’re not.
— Joe
