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If you can get past the accusatory title, this essay provides an entirely new (to me) way of looking at purchases. Every object is your time.

They state it perfectly: “Stuff I didn’t particularly love. Stuff with no serious meaning to it. Stuff I didn’t care about. Stuff that, if you had secretly tossed, I wouldn’t even realize went missing … Standing in front of all my stuff, it hit me that all of it used to be money, and all of that used to be time.”

Whoa.

I mean, it’s absolutely true. Every object you hold represents the money spent on the object. The book is $22.99. That $22.99 can take the form of paper bills or it can take the form of the book, but in either case, it is $22.99. But what is money except a tangible version of your time and effort? 8 hours of work = x amount. So when you spend money on an object, you are also spending a representation of your time.

I don’t buy a lot of things that I don’t use up pretty much immediately (food, toiletries, etc). The exception would be books, and I feel okay about the books I buy. Or the fact that I buy books. If I buy clothing, I try to make it as timeless as possible. Zero articles of clothing that mark a moment. We wear out things before we replace them. But sure, there are things that we’ve collected through the years that feel like clutter, but I don’t really have an “appetite for novelty” or a “fear of missing out,” though I assume many people do.

I also wouldn’t say that my lack of purchases comes from values. As I said, the thought above blew my mind. I just have a lack of desire for new things. Unless they’re books. I like familiar things, not new things. So that is not a value system; that is just a fact of my personality. And it’s not better or worse. Though it probably does inadvertently save me money.

I don’t read a lot of nonfiction, but there was a book that kept popping up on “best of” lists, and when it came in at the library, I decided to check out the short audiobook. It’s called A Beginner’s Guide to Dying by Simon Boas, and I liked that it started by pointing out that every single person on earth is a beginner in their own death. We never get to become an expert on our own dying because we only do it once.

He says, “I am obviously as much of a novice as you are at this dying business and may well be talking bollocks.”

But to that end, these are the profound takeaways I captured. And while he points out that they are nothing new, they appear in every book about dying. We know that our relationships matter more than our jobs, that the things we worry about rarely come true (and if they do, we deal with them), that we should take more time to enjoy life, but even though we know all of these things, we don’t behave as if we know them.

And for what it is worth, he mentions midway through the book that they went through “10 fruitless years of IVF,” and I think that experience plays into this advice, too.

“All of our tombs will be unvisited in a few short spins of the rock around the star, but the smile you gave the check out lady might still be rippling forward.”

It’s profound to think about: With the exception of the genealogy fans in our families, most people will be forgotten to have ever existed in a few short generations. But the tiny ways we impact other people while we’re here may still be rolling forward, impacting the world in the future. He’s not talking about the major discoveries or inventions. He’s just talking about the small kindnesses or moments of connection we extend to other people.

“We fret about what other people think of us, even though actually other people devote much less time doing so than we imagine. A huge mistake we all make — I think it must be hardwired into us — is to compare ourselves only upwards. Social media probably makes this worse.”

It’s so true — we always compare ourselves up (“I’m not doing as well as she is”) vs. down (“I am so grateful that I have this job”). It would make more sense when you feel yourself comparing yourself in one direction to also look behind and realize where you’re not and happy that you’re not.

“I don’t advise consuming too much news as it’s too skewed toward the awful, and can leave one just hopeless and wrongly depressed about the state of the world.”

Such a good reminder to close down the news app. It doesn’t make you ill-informed. The important news has a way of getting to us even when we try to shut it out. But understanding that we’re being manipulated by the media and what is reported and how. So dip into coverage, get what you need, and then go and process it yourself (or do something about it).

“Thoughts and emotions arrive, and they fall away. The past exists only in our memory, and the future, only in our imagination. By recognizing that, we can focus on the present, let go of worry, and even pain, though I’m not quite there yet, and understand that so much of our suffering is actually made by ourselves, both through our expectations and our inability to see how beautiful we all are at our core.”

Very true.

“Grief is the price we pay for love.”

He quotes Queen Elizabeth’s words, but I wanted to set them here, too. Big love = big grief. There’s no way around the cost.

“We humans are programmed to focus on the negative. To remember losses more than gains and hardships more than softships. That kept our ancestors alert and alive on the savanna. However, many developed countries today seem to be experiencing an epidemic of depression, pessimism, and anger. This simply isn’t justified by the conditions we live in.”

He admits that there are problems in the world, big issues that need addressing. But the book is also scattered with reminders that the negative lens doesn’t always serve us. And the solution is to stop the comparisons, stop the things you know are making you unhappy, and connect with the people you love.

Speaking of Susie Dent’s Guilty by Definition (we were speaking about this many days ago), the book introduced me to a new term: a commonplace book. This was a notebook where people collected thoughts, bits of poetry, recipes, ideas they liked, lists, etc.

Essentially a bullet journal. Or, at least, how I keep a bullet journal. I collect up tasks I don’t want to forget to do, dump out feelings, write down quotes from books or television shows, copy recipes, and record everything I am scared I will one day forget.

I also do the bullet journally thing of writing down a single sentence for every day of the year. I’ve been keeping a bullet journal since May 2014, so I have over 10 years of these one-sentence entries, and it makes me happy to flip through them and see what I thought on this day in a random year.

Oh! The point with Susie Dent’s book. There is a commonplace book in the book, and it made me think about how I shouldn’t destroy these journals at some point in the future. I mean, most of the scribbling will be meaningless to anyone but me, but then there are the pages that give a snapshot of the time vs. not just my mind.

The writings we leave behind keep popping up in books I’m reading. Maybe the universe is trying to send me a message.

I liked this list of 25 things the writer still doesn’t know at 50. There are many many many more things we don’t know, but we’re also not expected to know them.

So this list would be all of the things you should know by 50, but maybe you don’t. I felt pretty solid on 14 of her 25 things (#s 1, 2, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, and 18).

I also didn’t know 11 of her 25 things (#s 3, 4, 5 — though I would argue that these three things are not things most adults know how to do — 13, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, and 25).

I would add to the list tying my shoes. Justine asked me recently if I had ever admitted this on my blog because she didn’t know this about me, and I found it in a post from 2016.

Checking the air pressure in my tires and adding air.

Doing any type of maintenance or checking on my car. I cannot do simple car tasks.

Buy or sell stocks.

Fly without drugs.

Kill a cricket. (As in, I need someone to do the dirty deed for me.)

Turn off the water or electricity in the house.

That takes us up to 18 things I don’t know at 50. Again, many many many things I don’t know, but these seem like common ones I should know.

What is on your list?

Erin McKweon always makes me think. I mean, her music makes me dance, but her newsletter makes me think. She recently wrote about the cost of creating art. Yes, there are the very visible outliers — the Taylor Swifts and the George Clooneys of the world. But the vast majority of people who create the art we consume do not live a life of private planes and lake houses.

She quickly gets to the heart of the matter: “So many people enjoy art so blithely without realizing what it costs, financially and emotionally, to provide it.”

I think about this every time I see a two-star or one-star review on Goodreads. I saw one yesterday — “not well-written.” That was the whole review accompanying a one-star rating. Maybe it was. It wasn’t a book I read. But I think about that author reading that review and thinking about all of the things she didn’t do while she was writing the book for other people’s entertainment or elucidation. Maybe she made a couple thousand on the experience. Or maybe not even that much. Many publishers have stopped giving advances, so you only get a fraction of what you sell.

When I look at my bookshelves, peruse my ongoing music playlist, attend the theater or the symphony, or even watch a television show, I notice that the vast majority of what I consume is created by people who do not own second homes, and as Erin would point out, may not own first homes. The point of creating art is not to get rich. But we should pay the entertainment providers a living wage. Just food for thought.