“In proportion as our inward life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the post-office. You may depend on it, that the poor fellow who walks away with the greatest number of letters, proud of his extensive correspondence, has not heard from himself this long while.”

- HD Thoreau, Life Without Principle

We are living in a world of accelerating addictiveness and increasingly I think the only way (likely lonely, squirming, and eccentric as Paul alludes) we’ll get things done is the continuous directed practice and improvement of willpower, productivity, flow, and exercising thereof.

- Tantek Çelik, The Acceleration of Addictiveness vs Willpower, Productivity, and Flow

It’s an excellent essay, but it could stand to be five times as long and draw out its points with more information and analysis. I plan to spend time diving into the various wiki pages he links to later this weekend.

For many years I worked in palliative care. My patients were those who had gone home to die. Some incredibly special times were shared. I was with them for the last three to twelve weeks of their lives.

The post lists the top five regrets that people have as they reconcile themselves to their approaching death:

• I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
  
• I wish I [hadn't] work[ed] so hard.
  
• I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
  
• I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
  
• I wish that I had let myself be happier.

It’s a great gift to know what people think as they learn to live with their own oncoming mortality. Most of us (the lucky ones) will have to learn to die. Getting to know the territory ahead of time can only be a help to us.

First, I actually read more now. The Kindle is really fun to read, compared to the average book. The text is clear (and can be adjusted to be larger or smaller), the book selection is ok, and I can let it sit on my lap without having to hold it open.

Second, it obviously saves an awful lot of space. I must have bought at least a shelf’s worth of books for the device, but it remains tiny. I haven’t had to think about where to put a single one of the books I bought, because they are all stored either on my Kindle or in the cloud by Amazon.

Those two things combined actually made a difference in how we approached buying our next house. We didn’t need to be overly concerned with having tons of room for bookshelves, as we default to buying books on the Kindles when they’re available. An unexpected change was that we’re considering going without a TV altogether, as we spend so much more time reading that the cost of a TV, and the space it would require, are on the edge of not being worth it. As a result, we could shop for a smaller house, relative to what we would have wanted if we were going to fill the house with books and a TV.

The Kindle is fairly expensive, but it may have saved my wife and I hundreds of thousands of dollars in a house.

I do have one criticism of the Kindle, which they are already addressing. The book selection is still nowhere near what I would need for a complete replacement for paper books. Lots of old books are missing, and even some recently released books don’t go on the Kindle (such as Nixonland, which I bought in hardcover recently). When I got my Kindle I think Amazon was advertising that they had over 90K books on the Kindle and it is now over 120K, which is great progress. But I don’t think I’ll be really happy with it until it hits several multiples of where it is now.

It turns out, if you own enough books, you have to figure them into your future housing plans. As in, if you buy enough books, you’re buying a bigger house than you otherwise would. Luckily, we were able to notice that TVs, excess electronics, and even excess books were warping our plans before we bought a house. As a result, we were able to decide to get rid of an awful lot of our stuff, and now we’re moving into a much better neighborhood and smaller house than we expected to at the beginning.

Also, we will now have a few additional benefits. For one, we will live in an urban enough area that we can walk to the grocery, several restaurants, and possibly even downtown if we were ambitious. If we continued our devotion to our stuff, we would be looking at lots and lots of driving.

For another, when we move to our next house we won’t start life there already buried under our possessions. We can take our time and get new stuff and that stuff will be much better suited to the people we are now. In this case, it seems like there’s not enough room for yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Our stuff was yesterday and now we have room for today and tomorrow. That sounds like a nice start.

Laying in their deathbed, no one wishes they spent more time at the office, and no one wishes MS Word 2007 shipped a little sooner (and a little buggier).