Fear

This substack is about living the good life and indeed what exactly that means. This particular essay asserts that growth is requisite to living well. I don’t feel there is a need to defend this because it’s impossible to imagine life absent of growth from both physical and intellectual standpoints. Therefore, differences of opinion on this are a matter of degrees only. What do I mean by growth? At its core, growth is a reduction in the effort needed to achieve some goal. This reduction is achieved through broadening one’s horizon. Because I’m interested in how choices can improve one’s life, I am specifically focusing on intellectual growth, rather than physical. This is because physical growth is involuntary. ...

In the United States, there have been 658 thousand deaths attributed to Covid1. It’s a lot. For comparison, 38 thousand die each year in driving incidents. We lose from 20 to 60 thousand to the flu in a given year which makes Covid about 20x more deadly. In World War II 405 thousand died. In the Civil War - 655 thousand. One difference with war is the loss of primarily young men. About 1.8 percent of those lost to Covid are under 40 years old. Like many, Covid had me considering my own mortality. ...