Category: Living

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Living Music Writing

The Tonic Chord of a Life

We spend a good portion of our lives surrounded by noise. Not just the literal kind—the hum of traffic or the ping of notifications—but the internal noise of unresolved tensions.

I was reminded of this while listening to a recent conversation between David Perell and the legendary journalist Tom Junod (https://youtu.be/JnHTUyZjwiY). Towards the end of their sprawling, beautiful discussion, Junod introduced a metaphor about writing that made me pause the audio and just sit with it for a moment. He talked about the “tonic chord.”

“Musicians, you know, back in the day, they were always looking for the tonic chord. And writing, I’m always looking for the tonic chord… where all the discordant harmonies are resolved in a single ba-boom, you know, at the end of Beethoven or whatever… looking for some sort of resolution to the stuff that gnaws at me.” [00:39:42]

It’s a striking image. In music theory, the tonic is the home base, the center of gravity. It is the chord that finally brings rest after a long sequence of tension and suspense. Without the preceding dissonance, the tonic chord has no power. The chaos isn’t an obstacle to the resolution; it is the very environment that makes the resolution meaningful.

This applies far beyond the blank page. We are all, in our own ways, searching for our tonic chords.

We carry around the stuff that gnaws at us—the contradictions in our relationships, the career choices that look good on paper but feel hollow in the chest, the quiet hypocrisies we tolerate in ourselves. These are the discordant notes. We spend so much of our lives trying to ignore them, turning up the volume on our daily routines to drown out the clash. Or we try to fix them with brute force, stubbornly demanding harmony before we’ve even listened to the melody.

But maybe the point isn’t to erase the tension. Junod’s genius—both in his essays and in this metaphor—is his willingness to sit with the discomfort. He looks directly at the friction. He places two opposing truths right next to each other, letting them rub like tectonic plates, waiting patiently for that final chord to finally release the pressure.

I think about the architecture of a well-lived life in much the same way. The most resonant moments I’ve experienced haven’t come from a smooth, unbroken string of successes. They usually arrive right after a period of intense confusion or struggle—a sudden moment of clarity on a foggy morning walk, a tough but honest conversation with a friend, or finally letting go of an idea that had lost its spark.

That sudden ba-boom of clarity. The release.

We are taught from childhood that a good life should be harmonious. But true harmony is earned. It requires us to listen closely to the discordant parts of our lives, to bear witness to our own messes and mysteries, and to patiently search for the truth that finally brings them all together.

Often, it is the ultimate act of self-awareness.

Seek serendipity.

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Categories
Living Writing

The Origami Swan

Fold a piece of paper enough times, and it begins to take shape. It looks like a swan, but it isn’t one. It’s origami. Two-dimensional paper masquerading in a three-dimensional world.

There is a profound danger, both in writing and in how we move through life, of viewing people as origami. We see the folded edges—what they do, what they say, where they go—and we mistake the shape for the substance.

The sportswriter Wright Thompson borrows a concept from a college Tennessee Williams class to describe what is missing when we do this: interiority. It is the subterranean emotional reality happening beneath the visible actions of a character. Without it, scenes are flat. Without it, people are just paper swans.

Thompson builds on the philosophy of Gary Smith, who argues that every profile fundamentally asks the same question: What is the central complication of this person’s life, and how do they go about solving it every single day?

Almost all of that solving happens quietly, invisibly, on the inside. The exterior architecture of a person’s life is entirely meaningless until you understand the interior architecture holding it up.

But how do you communicate something so deeply internal? You can’t just tell the reader what someone is feeling. It feels cheap, unearned. Instead, Thompson uses a technique of “loading the object.” You find an exterior detail—a habit, a possession, an avoidance—and you charge it with interior meaning.

“The exterior action… is only meaningful if you’ve built the interior architecture first.”

Consider Michael Jordan. Thompson learned that Jordan falls asleep to old Westerns. As an isolated fact, it’s just a quirky celebrity habit. But Thompson also learned that Jordan misses his murdered father every single day, and that watching Westerns was something they used to do together.

By introducing the Westerns early and casually, Thompson loads the object. By the end of the piece, when he simply describes Jordan falling asleep to a Western, he doesn’t need to explain the grief. The reader already carries the emotional weight of the object. A completely mundane action becomes devastating.

The same is true of Tiger Woods naming his boats Privacy and Solitude. To the casual observer, they are just wealthy indulgences. But once you understand the interiority of an extreme introvert who has been force-fitted into a global, extroverted marketing machine since childhood, those names are no longer just names. They are a diagnosis.

Executing this requires two distinct disciplines. The first is deep observation—what journalists call reporting. You cannot manufacture interiority at the keyboard. As Thompson notes, whenever a scene feels flat, it is because he hasn’t dug deep enough into the reality of the person to earn the meaning. Overwriting is simply underreporting with a better vocabulary.

The second discipline is restraint. Once you have built the interior context, you must stop talking. You have to let the exterior action land in silence. The human instinct is to over-explain, to ensure everyone gets it. But the magic happens when you step back and trust the connection you’ve built.

There is a philosophical lesson here that extends far beyond writing. How often do we settle for the origami versions of the people around us? How often do we try to talk our way into understanding them, rather than doing the deep, quiet work of observing their “loaded objects”?

To truly understand another human being requires the discipline to look past the surface, the patience to uncover their central complication, and the grace to let their quietest moments speak for themselves.

Note: Be sure to watch this conversation between Wright Thompson and David Perell.

Categories
Living Productivity Serendipity

In Praise of the Interruption

We live in an era of the hyper-optimized schedule. Every waking minute is categorized, color-coded, and squeezed for its maximum potential output. We download applications to track our sleep cycles, our hydration, our daily habits, and our deep work intervals. We have collectively adopted the mindset of the factory floor, treating our own lives like well-oiled machines, and viewing any deviation from the master plan as a glitch that requires immediate patching.

But in our relentless pursuit of efficiency, we risk engineering the magic out of our own existence. We try to pave over the wilderness of our days with the concrete of predictable routines. In doing so, we forget a fundamental truth about human nature, a truth that author Jenny Odell captures perfectly:

“We still recognize that much of what gives one’s life meaning stems from accidents, interruptions, and serendipitous encounters: the ‘off time’ that a mechanistic view of experience seeks to eliminate.”

When we adopt this mechanistic view of our experience, an interruption is viewed as a systemic failure. A delayed train is a disaster. A wandering, off-topic conversation with a stranger is a sunk cost of our valuable time. Yet, when we look back on the broader timeline of our lives, the moments that stand out in the sharpest relief are almost never the ones we scheduled in thirty-minute increments on our digital calendars.

Think about the architecture of your own life. I often reflect on the most vital relationships I’ve formed, the sudden and necessary shifts in my career, or the quietest, most profound moments of personal clarity I’ve experienced. Practically none of them were planned. They were born from a wrong turn taken on a road trip that led to a breathtaking view. They emerged from a sudden downpour that forced me into a crowded, unfamiliar coffee shop. They sparked when a friend called out of the blue on a Tuesday afternoon when I was “supposed” to be doing highly focused work.

These accidents, these beautiful and unscripted interruptions, are the connective tissue of a life well-lived. They are the gentle reminders that we are not algorithms processing daily tasks, but fragile, curious humans experiencing a deeply unpredictable world. When we try to eliminate the “off time,” we are unknowingly trying to eliminate the very environments where serendipity is allowed to breathe.

We need to leave room for the friction. We need to stop seeing the blank spaces on our maps—and our schedules—as terrifying voids that must be filled with productive noise. Instead, we must begin to see them as the fertile soil from which the unexpected grows. Efficiency, routines, and optimization can certainly help build a very productive life. But only the accidents, the interruptions, and the quiet serendipity of “off time” can build a meaningful one.

Categories
Living

The Compound Interest of Ignorance

There’s an emotional navigation system within all of us, an internal map of behavior and consequence. We navigate by way of kindness, curiosity, and empathy.

Most days, we manage to keep the car on the road. But there is a particular intersection on this map, one that rarely ends well for anyone who finds themselves there, either driving or just walking by.

It’s the intersection where Annabel Monaghan located a particularly difficult archetype in Nora Goes Off Script. She describes it, with a precision that feels like the pop of a bubble, as “the corner of arrogance and cluelessness.”

“At the corner of arrogance and cluelessness, you find the worst kind of person.” (Annabel Monaghan, Nora Goes Off Script)

Indeed.

It’s easy, and frankly quite satisfying, to point fingers. We can all summon the mental image of someone parked right at that corner.

Perhaps it was a micromanaging boss who had never performed the basic function of the department. Perhaps it was a self-styled intellectual whose confidence was inversely proportional to their subject-matter expertise. We’ve all felt that specific, teeth-gritting frustration when faced with the wall of certainty erected by the fundamentally uninformed.

Arrogance on its own is, of course, rarely endearing. But there’s a difference between earned arrogance—the abrasive confidence of someone who actually knows what they are doing—and this unholy alliance. Pure arrogance is often about results; it says, “I am the best, and here is my proof.” It’s difficult to live with, but it is at least based on a form of reality.

Cluelessness, too, has its own nuances. We are all clueless about something (a truth that keeps life interesting). There is an innocence to genuine ignorance, an implicit opening for growth. To be clueless and know it is a temporary state. It’s the raw material for humility and learning.

But Monaghan’s observation zeros in on the specific danger when these two states merge.

Arrogance and cluelessness don’t just coexist; they compound.

This isn’t just a simple mistake (cluelessness) or just a big ego (arrogance). This is a system where the arrogance actively prevents the realization of the cluelessness.

The arrogance acts as a sturdy shield, deflecting any data, any feedback, any reality-check that might reveal the cluelessness underneath. The clues are everywhere, screaming from the spreadsheets or the strained smiles of everyone around them, but the arrogance filters them all out. This person cannot learn because the primary tool for learning—admitting you don’t know—is precisely what the arrogance forbids.

When you find yourself arguing with a person at this intersection, you aren’t arguing about facts. You aren’t arguing about solutions. You are trying to breach a fortress that has decided that the external world must adapt to its inner perception.

The “worst” part of it, the thing that makes it so toxic, is the casual destruction it wreaks. The person at this corner is navigating with a map they have drawn themselves, one that ignores all existing roads, all traffic lights, and every standard convention of behavior. They crash through the lives and efforts of others, convinced all the while of their own perfect navigation.

The hardest truth to swallow, though, isn’t about them. It’s about us. Because if we find this so true of others, the final realization is that none of us are immune to the lure of that corner. It’s an easy intersection to drift into. Whenever our confidence outpaces our real-world competence, whenever we get a tiny bit of power and a tiny bit of success and we think we know, we are in danger.

We are all just a bad day, a stressful project, or a momentary inflation of ego away from parking right at that corner ourselves. The antidote to that specific, devastating brand of arrogance isn’t trying to become more right; it’s remembering how deeply, often, and completely we are wrong.

Stay humble, stay foolish.

Categories
Japan Living

The Sweetness of the End

The tragedy isn’t that the bloom falls; the tragedy would be if it stayed forever, plastic and unchanging, immune to the wind. We spend so much of our lives trying to build fortresses against decay, seeking “permanent solutions” and “everlasting” bonds, yet we find our deepest emotional resonance in the things that are actively slipping through our fingers.

In Autumn Light, Pico Iyer captures a truth that Japan has long held as a cultural pulse:

“We cherish things, Japan has always known, precisely because they cannot last; it’s their frailty that adds sweetness to their beauty.”

This is the essence of mono no aware—the bittersweet pathos of things. It is the realization that the glow of the sunset is sharpened by the encroaching dark. If the sun hung at the horizon indefinitely, we would eventually stop looking. It is the ticking clock that forces our attention into the present.

When we look at a ceramic bowl mended with gold—kintsugi—we aren’t just seeing a repair. We are seeing a celebration of the break. The frailty of the clay is part of its history, and the gold doesn’t hide the fracture; it illuminates it. It suggests that the object is more beautiful now because it was vulnerable enough to break and survived to tell the tale.

In our own lives, we often mistake fragility for weakness. We hide our grief, our aging, and our transitions, fearing that they diminish our value. But beauty isn’t found in the absence of a shelf life. The most profound moments of connection—the way a child’s hand feels before they grow too big to hold yours, the specific light of a Tuesday afternoon in October, the final conversation with a mentor—derive their power from their expiration date.

To love something that cannot last is the ultimate act of human courage. It requires us to lean into the “sweetness” Iyer describes, knowing full well that the ending is baked into the beginning. We don’t love the cherry blossoms despite the fact that they will be gone in a week; we love them because of it.

Categories
Living

When Patience is Just Stubbornness in Disguise

We are taught from childhood that patience is the ultimate virtue. Good things come to those who wait. Rome wasn’t built in a day.

We elevate patience to a saintly status, conditioned to believe that if we simply hold on long enough, the universe will inevitably reward our suffering with success.

In his book Same as Ever, Morgan Housel offers a piercing observation that shatters our romanticized view of waiting:

“Patience is often stubbornness in disguise.”

That single sentence is a quiet earthquake. It forces us to examine the things we are holding onto and the real reasons why we refuse to let them go.

We like to tell ourselves we are being patient—with a stagnant career, a fractured relationship, or a creative project that refuses to take flight. The label of “patience” feels noble. It feels righteous. It protects our ego from the sharp, uncomfortable sting of failure.

But if we strip away the noble veneer, what remains is often simple, unyielding stubbornness. It is the refusal to adapt, the refusal to admit defeat, and the refusal to accept that the world has changed while we were standing still. “I’m staying the course” is much easier to say than “I’m terrified to admit I made a mistake.”

I think about the seasons in my own life where I mistook one for the other.

I held onto projects that had lost their spark, telling myself that the breakthrough was just around the corner, just one more iteration away. I’ve held on to failing investments for far too long.

In hindsight, I wasn’t practicing patience. I was practicing avoidance. I was avoiding the grief of letting go and the daunting reality of starting over from scratch.

So, how do we distinguish between the two? How do we know when we are nurturing a slow-growing seed, and when we are merely digging our heels into the dirt and being stubborn?

The difference lies in our relationship with reality. True patience involves a quiet confidence and an active engagement with the present. It requires us to make incremental progress, to observe the feedback the world gives us, and to adjust accordingly. Patience is flexible yet realistic.

Stubbornness, on the other hand, is rigid. It ignores feedback. It closes its eyes to the changing environment and insists that reality bend to its will.

It takes vulnerability to look at something you’ve poured your heart and time into and say, “This isn’t working, and I am choosing to walk away.” It is not a weakness to change your mind when the evidence suggests you should. Often, it is the ultimate act of self-awareness. Annie Duke wrote a whole book about quitting being an underutilized choice.

Sometimes, the most productive thing we can do with our time is to stop waiting, let go, and walk in an entirely new direction.

Categories
Living Planning Serendipity

The Architecture of Surprise

We humans are endlessly obsessed with the horizon. We stand on the shores of the present, squinting into the distance, trying to discern the exact shape of tomorrow. We build elaborate models, draw flawless trendlines, and construct five-year plans with the meticulous care of a master architect drafting a blueprint. And, to our credit, most of the time we are remarkably accurate about the mundane trajectory of it all. We know when the seasons will change, how our compound interest should accumulate, and roughly where our careers might lead if we just keep putting one foot in front of the other.

“We are very good at predicting the future, except for the surprises—which tend to be all that matter.”
— Morgan Housel, Same as Ever

It is a profound truth wrapped in a deceptively simple observation.

When we look back at the grand sweep of history—or simply the quiet narrative of our own individual lives—the defining moments are almost never the ones we carefully penciled into our calendars.

The things that irrevocably alter our trajectories are the sudden shocks, the absolute anomalies, the unexpected phone calls on a random Tuesday afternoon.

Think about the turning points of the last decade. The events that completely rewired our global society, our economies, and our daily habits were not predicted by think tanks, algorithms, or pundits. They were the blank spaces on the map. They were the surprises.

On a personal level, I find this resonates with almost uncomfortable accuracy. If I examine the hinges upon which my own life has swung, they were completely invisible to me until the exact moment I arrived at them. The chance encounter in a crowded room that led to a lifelong bond; the sudden, jarring loss that forced a complete re-evaluation of my priorities; the seemingly disastrous failure that ended up opening a door I hadn’t even known existed. I have spent so much of my life optimizing the straight lines, unaware that life itself is actually lived in the zig-zags.

We suffer from a collective illusion of control. We desperately want to believe that by accumulating enough data, we can permanently banish uncertainty.

But data is simply a record of what has already happened; it cannot account for the unprecedented. It cannot measure a sudden shift in human psychology, a freak accident, or the spontaneous spark of a revolutionary idea.

The surprises are all that matter because they force adaptation. They break the fragile mold of our expectations. They are the crucibles in which our real, unvarnished growth occurs.

When the predictable happens, we just keep sleepwalking down the path. It is only when the unexpected strikes that we are forced to wake up, look around, and decide who we actually need to become.

This shouldn’t be a cause for despair, nor is it a valid excuse to abandon planning altogether. Dwight D. Eisenhower captured this paradox perfectly when he noted:

“In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”

The written plan itself—the rigid timeline, the expected outcomes—might shatter upon impact with reality. But the act of planning? That is essential. It forces us to take inventory of our resources, establishes a baseline direction, and builds mental agility. The danger doesn’t lie in the act of preparing, but in attaching our ultimate peace of mind to the exact realization of a fragile script.

Perhaps the most rational way to face the future is with a sense of prepared humility. We can plot our course, pack our provisions, and meticulously check the compass.

But we must also accept that a sudden, unforecasted storm might blow us onto an entirely different continent. And when we finally wash ashore on that strange new land, exhausted and disoriented, we might just find that it is exactly where we were meant to be all along. Seek serendipity.

Categories
Aging Living Paris Serendipity Street Photography

The Geometry of Choices: Life Beyond the Viewfinder

Every day, I walk past Henri Cartier-Bresson’s The Decisive Moment resting quietly on my bookshelf. Its spine is a familiar friend, a silent anchor in the room.

For Cartier-Bresson, the decisive moment was a photographic philosophy: the simultaneous recognition of the significance of an event, paired with the precise organization of forms that gives that event its proper expression. It is the fraction of a second where the head, the eye, and the heart perfectly align.

“To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression.” — Henri Cartier-Bresson

But as I caught sight of the book this morning, I realized how deeply this concept bleeds beyond the edges of a viewfinder. We tend to measure our lives in chapters and milestones—graduations, marriages, career shifts, relocations. We look at these grand events as the towering pillars of our personal history. Yet, if we look closer, the actual architecture of our lives is built on a series of fleeting, decisive moments.

Think about it. The true turning points rarely announce themselves with a booming voice or a dramatic swell of music. They are profoundly quiet.

It’s the split-second decision to take a different route home where you stumble upon a neighborhood you’ll eventually live in. It’s the pause before answering a question that completely changes the dynamic of a relationship. It’s the instant you decide to say “yes” to an unexpected invitation, opening a door to a career you hadn’t even imagined.

In these moments, just as in photography, there is a sudden geometry to our choices. The elements of our past experiences, our current desires, and our future trajectories suddenly arrange themselves into a perfect composition. We may not hear the click of a shutter, but the picture of our life is forever altered.

I run my finger over the dust jacket sometimes and think about the paths I didn’t take. The moments I hesitated just a second too long, and the composition dissolved into chaos. There is grace in those missed moments too, of course—they teach us how to hold our gaze steady for the next time.

The tragedy is that we often miss these fractions of a second entirely. We move too fast. We are too distracted by the noise of the future or the echoes of the past to recognize the composition forming right in front of us. We forget to keep our eyes open.

Cartier-Bresson roamed the streets of Paris with his Leica, intensely present, waiting for life to unfold. How often do we roam the streets of our own lives with that same level of presence?

To capture the decisive moments of our lives, we don’t need a camera. We need awareness. We need to cultivate a stillness that allows us to recognize when the head, the eye, and the heart are asking us to act.

It’s about trusting our intuition when the geometry feels right, even if we don’t fully understand the picture yet.

The next time you find yourself hesitating—caught in a quiet fraction of a second—pay attention. It might not be a milestone. It might just be an ordinary Tuesday. But it might also be the exact moment the elements of your life perfectly align.

Click.

Categories
Aging Living

The Architecture of Autumn

We have long been told that time is a thief, a silent prowler that robs us of our vitality and leaves us with the husks of our former selves. We track its progress in the mirror, in the softening of a jawline or the deepening of a crease.

But recent insights into the relationship between the mind and our biological “clocks” suggest a more haunting possibility: time isn’t just stealing from us; we are handing it over.

New research into epigenetic aging—the cellular measurement of how “old” our bodies truly are—reveals that those who harbor deep anxiety about aging actually age faster.

Specifically, the fear of declining health acts as a catalyst, accelerating the very decay we dread.

“Fears about declining health had the strongest link [to faster biological aging], while concerns about beauty or fertility didn’t appear to have the same biological impact.”

It seems the body is a faithful servant to the mind’s expectations.

If we view the later chapters of life as a slow-motion catastrophe, our cells begin to prepare for the wreckage. This creates a tragic feedback loop: we worry because we see signs of age, and our worry ensures those signs arrive with greater velocity.

In my own reflections, I’ve begun to think of aging not as a process of depletion, but as one of distillation. In our youth, we are a broad, shallow lake—vast, shimmering, and scattered. As we age, the borders close in, but the depth increases. The water becomes clearer, the essence more potent.

If we can shift our internal gaze away from what is being lost and toward what is being concentrated, perhaps we can quiet the ticking.

To age well is not to fight the clock, but to stop treating the passage of time as an indictment.

We are not just growing old; we are becoming more of who we were meant to be.

The architecture of autumn is not one of collapse, but of a different, more golden kind of light.

Categories
Aging Financial Planning Living Taxes

Borrowing from Tomorrow: The Paradox of the Modern 401(k)

A retirement account is, at its core, a financial time machine. It is a profound act of optimism and delayed gratification, a quiet promise made by our present selves to ensure the security of our future selves.

We lock away a portion of our labor today, trusting that time and compounding interest will nurture it into a safety net for tomorrow.

But what happens when tomorrow’s safety net becomes today’s desperate lifeline?

According to a recent piece by Anne Tergesen in the Wall Street Journal, reviewing Vanguard’s “How America Saves 2026” report, we are currently living through a profound financial paradox. On one hand, the machinery of wealth building is working better than ever. The average 401(k) balance rose 13% in 2025 to a record $167,970. Thanks to automatic enrollment—which now encompasses 61% of plans—more people are participating and escalating their contributions than at any point in history.

Yet, hidden beneath these soaring averages is a quiet, parallel crisis.

In 2025, a record 6% of workers in Vanguard-administered plans took a hardship withdrawal. This is roughly double the pre-pandemic average. We are witnessing the stark reality of a “K-shaped” economy in real-time: a broad swath of the population is riding the upward arm of the “K” into financial security, while a growing minority is sliding down the bottom arm, facing acute financial stress.

The most telling, and perhaps the most heartbreaking, statistic in the report is the median withdrawal amount: just $1,900.

These are not individuals cashing out their life savings to fund frivolous luxuries. A $1,900 hardship withdrawal—subject to income taxes and a brutal 10% early-withdrawal penalty for those under 59½—is an act of absolute necessity. It is the exact cost of avoiding an eviction notice. It is the price of keeping the lights on, of covering a sudden medical expense, or of preventing a cascade of debt from pulling a family under. It is the cost of survival.

Recent policy changes have fundamentally altered the psychology and accessibility of the 401(k). The removal of the requirement to take a loan first, combined with new exemptions for domestic abuse victims, disaster relief, and penalty-free emergency withdrawals, has transformed the traditional retirement lockbox into a de facto checking account for emergencies.

From a purely mathematical standpoint, raiding a retirement account is a tragedy of lost potential. It interrupts the magic of compound growth and cannibalizes the future to feed the present. But from a human standpoint, it is difficult to judge. How can we ask someone to prioritize their 65-year-old self when their 35-year-old self is facing foreclosure?

David Stinnett of Vanguard offers a vital, empathetic reframe of this data. Because of automatic enrollment, he notes, “People are saving more, remaining invested, and being automatically rebalanced in a professional way.” This systemic forced-savings mechanism has created a financial cushion for millions of people who previously had none. Yes, it is heartbreaking that they are forced to use it. But the silver lining is that the money is actually there to be used.

This trend forces us to ask deep, philosophical questions about the modern American economy. If our total savings look so strong on paper, yet so many must still routinely puncture their life rafts just to stay afloat, what does that say about the cost of living, housing, and healthcare?

A 401(k) was designed to be a bridge to a peaceful retirement. Today, for an increasing number of Americans, it is the only bridge across the turbulent waters of the present. As we celebrate record-high balances, we must not look away from the $1,900 lifelines being thrown out every day.

The future is only guaranteed for those who can afford to survive the present.