I do this thing at night where I lie next to my wife and rehearse my own funeral. Not in a suicidal way—I've danced with that devil enough to know the difference. This is something else. Reconnaissance, maybe. Morbid curiosity. The same impulse that made me memorize my patriarchal blessing at fourteen, the one that promised I'd join the ranks of apostles and prophets. I've always been planning for my own mythology.
Tonight I'm imagining she wakes up and finds me cold beside her. What would they say at the service? I catalog the acceptable platitudes, the ones I heard twice already—once for my brother, once for my best friend, both dead by their own hands before thirty.
They said my brother was witty, artistic, clever, infectiously charismatic. All true. All utterly insufficient for containing who he actually was.
They said my friend was tender-hearted, philosophical, goofy, loved nature. Also true. Also the barest sketch of a human being I loved for a decade before he decided he'd rather be dead than keep being himself.
What would they say about me? I'm running the highlight reel at 1 AM like I'm editing my own Wikipedia page, and I cannot for the fucking life of me figure out what matters.
This is what it looks like to rehearse your funeral at twenty-nine: lying perfectly still so you don't wake your wife, mentally drafting the tribute video, wondering if the people who show up will mean it or if they're just being polite, calculating whether your son will remember you or just remember the stories he's told about remembering you.
It's pathetic and I know it. But I can't stop.
Here's what triggered it this time: LinkedIn.
I was scrolling through my feed—because apparently self-torture is my brand—looking at stupid startup after stupid startup. Seed rounds for problems I had six months ago. Series As for ideas I sketched in notebooks I'll never open again. Some twenty-three-year-old with family money and no self-doubt announcing they're "disrupting" something that doesn't need disrupting, and somehow they're doing it, they're actually doing it, and I'm lying in bed at 1 AM rehearsing my funeral.
All these ideas I think I could probably do better. Maybe I could. Maybe I'm delusional. Doesn't matter—I'm not doing them. Is it money? Probably. Generational wealth I don't have? Definitely. Started a family too young? Sure. Trauma? Yeah, let's add that to the pile. Willingness? Who the fuck knows.
Point is: I'm not doing it. And here's the thing that should comfort me but somehow makes it worse—it's getting done anyway.
Every idea I ever had is being executed by someone else right now. Every essay I planned to write is being written. Every startup I dreamed of building is being built. Some of them will succeed. Most will fail. None of it requires me.
And even if they don't get done—if every single one of these founders flames out and takes their VC money down with them—it still wouldn't change a goddamn thing about whether my life mattered.
There's this Kurzgesagt video about optimistic nihilism. The basic premise: nothing matters on a cosmic scale, and that's actually liberating. The universe doesn't care about your startup or your essay or whether you self-actualized according to Maslow's hierarchy. You're a brief arrangement of atoms that will disperse back into the void, and your legacy will be forgotten, and the heat death of the universe will erase even the memory of there having been memory.
Cool. Yeah. Very comforting when you're lying next to your wife rehearsing your funeral at twenty-nine.
But here's the part they don't emphasize enough: if the universe is the body and we're all neurons firing in its brain, then the only things that won't happen without you are the things that couldn't happen without you.
Your kids. Your friendships. Your specific presence in someone else's story.
Everything else? The neurons reroute. The startups launch. The essays get written. The universe figures it out.
But your child won't have a father if you're not his father. Your wife won't have you if you're dead. Your friends won't have the specific shape of your attention, your humor, your particular way of showing up.
That's it. That's the whole list.
Not your Wikipedia page. Not your legacy. Not the thing you built that scales. Just: the people who would notice the specific hole your absence creates.
Murphy's Law says anything that can go wrong will go wrong. But, here's what nobody talks about: anything that can get done will get done. Your role is so much smaller than you think. And somehow, paradoxically, so much more important.
Anything that can happen will happen without you, except for people.
I've spent my twenties building monuments to anxiety. Not the productive kind that keeps you from bad decisions, but the cathedral-sized, ego-soaked, am-I-wasting-my-life variety. The kind that wakes you at 3 AM to inform you that you're twenty-nine and haven't written the definitive essay on grief yet, haven't built the startup that changes everything, haven't left your mark in any legible way.
Every cheesy devil gets a dance. And each one steps on your toes.
The legacy devil whispers that you need to be remembered widely. The impact devil insists you need to reach the masses. The ambition devil promises that if you just optimize hard enough, you'll finally feel like you weren't a waste of carbon.
They're all liars.
Because here's what I'm learning, lying in my funeral bed and scrolling through LinkedIn at 1 AM: the only bespoke thing you will ever do in this world is how you impact other humans directly. Face to face. Name to name. In the small, tedious, non-scalable ways that build relationships instead of audiences.
Everything else happens without you.
AI will write your novel, probably better than you would have. Someone else will launch your startup. That essay you're drafting about suicide or poetry or the intersection of both—there are already thousands of versions published this year, some brilliant, most fine, none mattering as much as you think yours will.
We tell ourselves we're building for the masses—that we'll say that thing only we could say, in that way only we could say it. We fantasize about virality the way I used to fantasize about heaven: some future state where we're finally recognized, validated, proven right.
But virality is either serendipity or capitalism, and either way it happens without you. The thing goes viral. The you who made it stays exactly as mortal and forgotten as before.
The eulogies for my loved ones were true but useless... for me. They described who these people were to them. Not who they were to me.
And I realized, lying in my funeral bed scrolling through LinkedIn looking at startups I'll never build: I don't want the crowd at my funeral. I want twelve people who would cry and mean it. I want my oldest son to remember me as present, not ambitious. I want my daughter to remember my hugs not my absence. I want my youngest son to remember my love not my aches. I want my wife to feel lucky she married me even when I'm difficult. I want my friends to think of me when they need someone to call.
I want to be remembered fondly.
Not widely. Not impressively. Fondly.
With specificity. With warmth. With the kind of detail that only comes from proximity over time.
Fondness is the residue of direct human contact. It can't scale. It can't be automated. It can't be achieved through viral essays or successful startups or impact metrics that look good on your annual review.
You have to be there for it. Repeatedly. In the small, tedious, non-optimizable ways that actually matter.
The people building cathedrals to their own legacy are usually terrible at direct human contact. Too busy optimizing their Wikipedia entry to notice their kid needed help with homework. Too busy crafting the perfect essay about vulnerability to actually be vulnerable with someone who might not understand it perfectly. Too busy building for scale to build for this person, right here, right now, who needs something only proximity can provide.
I've been that person. I am that person. I'm lying in bed at 1 AM cataloging startup ideas I'm not executing while my wife sleeps beside me and my kids are down the hall and I'm mentally drafting my own eulogy like I'm applying for a job as a dead person.
The monuments will crumble. The startups will get acquired or die. The essays will get buried in archives no one reads. The AI will write better versions of everything I thought was mine. The algorithm will move on. The masses will forget me, if they ever knew me at all.
But my children will remember whether I was present or distracted. My wife will remember whether I chose her or my anxiety about legacy. My friends will remember if I showed up or if I was always too busy building something more important than them.
That's the game. That's the whole game.
I want more friends. Not followers. Friends who know my coffee order and which specific thing I'm sensitive about that I pretend not to be.
I want more family. Not the one I was born into necessarily. The one I choose. The people who show up when my life is imploding and I need someone to confirm I'm not insane.
I want more community. Not audience. Not platform. People who know my name when you walk into a room. Who save you a seat. Who make you feel accountable to something larger than your own ambition.
I want to be remembered fondly.
Not widely. Not impressively. Fondly.
As in: with warmth. With specific memory. With the kind of detail that only comes from actually being there.
It's 1:21 AM now. My wife is asleep. My tired sons are asleep. My sweet daughter is asleep. I'm still awake, but I'm thinking differently.
Tomorrow I'm going to wake up and care just a little bit less about the startups I'm not building. A little bit less about the essays that aren't going viral. A little bit less about whether I'm leaving a mark that strangers will remember.
I'm going to make more room for what actually matters. My kids' questions. My wife's laugh. My friends' texts. The specific humans who would notice the hole my absence creates.
Right now I'm building investment accounts. Not just financially—though yeah, we need those too. Emotionally. I'm building a portfolio of fondness. Investing in relationships that will compound not into legacy but into presence. Into the kind of retirement where I'm not a provider anymore, just a person. Where I've built enough community that being alive is worth it even when I'm no longer useful.
Where I can be fond, and be remembered fondly, until the very end.
Just: wake up tomorrow and be a little more present. Call the friend. Play with the kid. Notice the wife. Show up for the people who would show up for you.
And hope that when I'm lying in this bed for real—actually dying, not just rehearsing—the thing they say is simple:
He was good to the people close to him. We're glad we knew him. We'll miss him specifically.
Fondly.
Everything else happens without you anyway.
