"Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose."
— Steve Jobs, Stanford Commencement Address, 2005
I was 2am deep into another night shift.
Standing at a computer that analyzed chipped and split almonds from the fields. Same screen. Same data. Same fluorescent hum overhead. Vaping heavily. Running on no sleep, nicotine, and the particular kind of mental exhaustion that comes not from working too hard, but from feeling too much while pretending you aren't.
Three people were gone.
Two from fentanyl. One from cancer. People I considered friends. People I thought would be around.
And somewhere between one order and the next, that voice echoed in my ear from earlier this evening — casual, almost bored —
"What does it matter? People die from stupid shit all the time."
I remember what moved through me.
You don't think I fucking know that? You don't think I have thought about how it can all end tomorrow without any warning, without any control?
I didn't say it out loud.
I just stood there. Vape in hand, a stream of numbers on the screen I began to care less and less for.
And then, the thought arrived — quiet, devastating, and completely clarifying:
What if I died today. and no one knew.... or more disturbing, no one cared.
Not a dramatic thought or cry for help.
Just a question that refused to leave.
I had been reading on my breaks, since I had to drop out of classes online because it became too taxing on me mentally to do it all.
Marcus Aurelius. Miyamoto Musashi. Sun Tzu. Steve Jobs. I was desperately reaching for something true in a world that had started to feel completely hollow.
The Stoics believed that meditating on death wasn't morbid — it was clarifying. MEMENTO MORI "Remember that you will die". A way of burning away everything that doesn't matter, so you can finally see what does.
Musashi understood that a warrior who has truly accepted death becomes impossible to defeat — not because he doesn't fear it, but because he has already moved through it.
Sun Tzu knew that the general who understands the terrain — including its most dangerous ground — is the one who survives it.
And Jobs said it plainly at Stanford in 2005: remembering you are going to die is the best way to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.
I was reading all of this at 2am in an almond processing facility.
And every word of it was landing.
Based on how I was raised, I wasn't so sure anyone would notice if I was gone.
The words were always there... the love, the support, the family... but the words never matched the attitude.
I was made to feel like I was always behind. Developmentally. Emotionally. Like something was slightly wrong with me that needed managing.
"You're too smart for your own good," my stepmother would say.
What she meant was: you see too much. You know too much. Stop noticing things.
My father made sure I knew the horrors of the world before I ever stepped outside the door. Not to prepare me. To control me. Fear was currency in that house. He would smile when he frightened me. He would laugh. He would construct scenarios — fabricated ones — and watch me take the blame for things I never did.
And when I lost three people in the same year and looked to him for something — anything — he shrugged.
People die from stupid shit all the time.
Two emotions hit me at exactly the same moment.
Panic. And rage.
One said: you need to start living your life. Now.
The other answered: because fuck that guy and his entire attitude toward life.
Both of them were right.
Two weeks later, while he was gone for the weekend, I moved out.
I heard every fear on the way out the door.
It's a tough economy.
It's difficult to live alone.
You need family behind you before you make a move like this.
I had heard every version of every excuse there is for staying small, and I had watched other people in my exact position pull off greater things with less. So I moved out anyway. Got sick — a respiratory illness that required antibiotics — and survived that too. And then I met my wife.
The words people use to keep you afraid are rarely about you.
They are about them.
There is a concept in action sports that I keep coming back to.
Once you commit to your line — once you drop in, once you launch, once you point the car into the stage — turning back can mean consequences more dangerous than going forward.
Commitment isn't recklessness.
It's the only rational response to the terrain.
The Philosopher doesn't think instead of act. The Philosopher thinks until the action becomes inevitable. Until the fear of staying still outweighs the fear of moving. Until remembering that death stops being a concept and becomes a compass.
"Remember that you will die"
Now what are you going to do about it?
I will not look back on my life and regret choosing a dream that was never mine to begin with.
In that old life, standing at that screen at 2am, I was seeking death — not physically, but in every other way that counts. Numbing it. Scheduling it. Letting the routine replace the pulse.
I sought the death of my old self.
Now I am seeking something else entirely.
There is a larger story forming at the edges of all of this. I can't name it fully yet. But I can feel its shape. And when it's ready — it will be the other side of everything written here.
The excavation ends somewhere.
What gets built on top of it is just beginning.
— MR. BONEZ