Interlude: small deaths

Every day, something in us dies. Small abdications we barely register. The enthusiasm for a project that fades after the third inconclusive meeting. The conversation we don't start with a stranger. The book we keep meaning to read until we forget why it mattered. The question we swallow—in meetings, at dinner tables, in bed—because the timing seems wrong.

These micro-deaths happen everywhere. We trade them for security, approval, peace. For that promotion, yes, but also for avoiding conflict, for fitting in, for not being the difficult one, the contrarian, at gatherings. Bad exchange rate. We take it anyway—everyone does.

There are resurrections too. Someone laughs genuinely in a tense meeting. A stranger offers a fortuitous and generous smile. Your teenager tells you something real, meaningful, with intimate affection. The formal email with an unexpected emoji. Your partner touches your hand during an argument, breaking the script just enough to remind you that “this” can be fun.

They're evidence that the structures we inhabit—offices, families, relationships, cities—have cracks where life gets through. Like plants growing through concrete—improbable, insistent, necessary.

There should be no desire to avoid these deaths. That's impossible without becoming a hermit or aiming for immortality (and I suspect you, dear reader, know which people are pursuing that). An alternative could appear by developing a kind of internal composting system. Let what dies decompose. Feed what can still grow. Turn resignation into something else.

Some people refuse this process, keeping every enthusiasm intact, every idealism preserved. They break, inevitably. And others have died so incrementally they became functional ghosts—present but not there, efficient partners, dutiful children, hollow friends.

There's wisdom in dying selectively. Choosing what to release and what to defend. It's an economy where the capital is vitality, where profit comes in moments of authenticity stolen from all the systems we navigate, where wealth means knowing that for each death consciously accepted, we keep something essential that won't die.

I'm still learning which deaths to choose.