Fair warning: I am feeling very exclamation-pointy today!! THERE IS A LOT OF EXCITEMENT GOING ON OVER HERE AND ALL-CAPS AND EXCLAMATION POINTS SURE DO CAPTURE THE FERVOR OF EMOTION, DON’T THEY?!! Except all-caps are too screamy for my conflict-avoidant sensibilities, so for now we’ll just stick with the exclamation points!! Okay even I am...

YOU: "What, what? WTF is a Life Review?" ME: "I love how inquisitive you are!" A life review exercise, which involves revisiting and evaluating your life experiences, can be a profoundly meaningful and therapeutic endeavor. (Look here for my article on this in Psychology Today, and a fabulous article in The New York Times about...

Brownies make our 4,000-ish Mondays on the planet better. There, I said it. I mention these brownies 12 times in my book, You Only Die Once: How to Make It to the End with No Regrets, so that's like every 29 pages. (Now that I think about it, that's just not frequent enough. It should...

Don’t you love it when you run into people (almost) as crazy as you? Crazy in the same crazy ways? I love it when I come across folks as interested in this mortality mentality as I am ... and the good news is that there are a lot of us out there. (Necrophiliac? You can...

You play the “Will We Ever” game with your significant other too, right? Or the single version—the “Will I Ever” game? After watching season two of White Lotus: “Will we ever visit Sicily?” Flipping through the pages of Bon Appétit magazine: “Will I ever go to the trouble of soaking lentils? Instead of just buying...

Here we are, 100 days into this calendar year of your life, and if you’re anything like me you look like you were just slapped in the face. “Already?” you ask with incredulity. It feels like it was just last week that you were falling asleep at 9:45 pm on New Year’s Eve. Where did...

I have been on emotional roller coaster for the last six weeks and it’s all because of bald eagles. Two of them: Jackie and Shadow, perched high above Big Bear Lake in their sturdy but rather uncomfortable looking nest. Thanks to a 24-hour a day live camera feed on YouTube, we get to see these...

Let’s talk today about two of our very favorite subjects: death and cleaning! (This conversation could only be made better if we added taxes to the agenda. Okay that and maybe also colonoscopies, but I’m losing you so let’s just stick with death and cleaning.) You’ve heard of Swedish Death Cleaning, right? The thoughtful process...

Picture a nine year old boy in his family garage—so curious!—toying around with a bit of gasoline and the enticement of fire. I can see your face; you know what happened next in this story, don't you? This kid was John O’Leary, who unwittingly created an explosion that burned 100% of his body. Odds were...

Admit it: you’d rather not be called a rookie. A convicted felon? Better than being called a rookie. A narcissistic psychopath? Still better. A “how to run a successful puppy mill” mentor? You get the point. Why is the rookie label so distasteful? Because in our know-it-all knowledge economy, nestled within our GO-GO-GO-GET-‘ER-DONE society, We...

Humans. We think we’re so damned smart, don’t we? Most of us are idiots—present company ruefully included—but there’s one rather problematic area where we actually are so damned smart: We’re acutely aware that we’re going to die. We know we’re ticking time bombs ... that we’re finite ... that we’re—brace yourself—FRAGILE. And that doesn’t tend...

Last week we spoke about the tangly questions of “when do you think you’ll live to” vs. “when do you think you’ll die by.” We had a blast! Regardless of how the questions are framed, all roads seem to lead to death. We can tinker with the wording, but the truth is out there waiting...