May 22, 2026 May 22, 2026 2026-05-22

In 2009 I wrote seven reasons to enjoy life more, grounded in the idea that most people simply forget they’re allowed to. The main obstacle back then was the race — that endless, empty sprint toward something vague that keeps you from noticing what’s already there. I still think that’s true. But the specific obstacles to remembering have changed enough that the reasons deserve another look.

Some of these have held up exactly as written. A couple have deepened in ways I didn’t expect. And one needs an honest revision, because what I said in 2009 was incomplete.

1. Beginnings

The original framing: every new thing you start is a small creation, a thing that didn’t exist before you decided to make it happen. I called it a miracle, which is a word I’d probably handle more carefully now — but the core observation holds. Starting something activates something in you that nothing else quite does.

What sixteen years added: the friction around beginnings has changed. In 2009, starting something new was mostly an internal obstacle — summoning the courage, deciding it was worth the attempt. In 2026, the external noise around any beginning is enormous. There are tools to help you start, communities to join, courses to take, frameworks to follow. All of that can be useful. It can also become a very convincing substitute for actually beginning. I’ve learned to be suspicious of the feeling of productive preparation. Sometimes it’s legitimate groundwork. More often it’s the race wearing a different costume.

2. People You Love

This one hasn’t changed in principle and has changed completely in practice. The original post said that loving people transcends logic and provides connection during dark periods. That’s still true, as far as it goes.

What it didn’t account for is how much the texture of this reason shifts depending on which chapter of life you’re in. When I wrote the 2009 post I was thinking about friendships, partnerships, the people you choose. In 2026 I have a one-and-a-half-year-old who has strong opinions about breakfast and no interest in my schedule. The people you love stop being an abstract reason to enjoy life and become the most concrete possible one — present, loud, demanding, and somehow the whole point. The reason didn’t change. The experience of it became a completely different thing.

3. Creating Value

The 2009 version: using your unique talents to help others generates a kind of fulfillment that the market undervalues and that most people don’t make enough room for. I believed that then and I believe it now.

The 2026 complication: the question of what counts as “your unique talent” has gotten genuinely harder. AI can produce plausible writing, competent code, compelling design. The things that used to feel distinctly yours are now, at minimum, assisted — and at maximum, delegated. I’ve built eight apps in the App Store in the last four months, most of them with significant AI help. I’m not a better programmer than I was in 2009 – if anything, I am more experienced, though. But still, with AI I can do more, much faster. The value is still created. But the feeling of it — the sense that it came specifically from me — is something I’ve had to think about more carefully. The answer I’ve arrived at is that the source of the enjoyment isn’t the output. It’s the choice – or, if you want, the applied taste. Deciding what to build, why, for whom, shaped by what you’ve learned and what you care about. That part hasn’t been automated, cannot be automated, and I think it’s the part that matters most.

4. Enjoying Value Created by Others

This was always one of the quieter reasons on the list and it’s the one I’ve come to rely on most. Appreciating what other people make — music, food, writing, a well-built piece of software, a conversation that goes somewhere — is free, inexhaustible, and almost impossible to exhaust once you develop the habit of actually paying attention.

The 2026 version of this reason comes with a genuine threat: the volume of content has become so large that the default mode is consumption without attention. You can spend an entire evening surrounded by other people’s creations and come out of it feeling empty, because none of it actually clicked deep inside. The reason is still valid. But it requires more active choice than it did in 2009. You have to decide to actually receive what you’re looking at, which is a different act from just looking at it.

5. Your Current Moment

The original post said the present moment is the only moment you actually have, and that dwelling in the past or future is a guaranteed way to miss it. This is the oldest idea on the list — it’s in the Stoics, in Buddhist philosophy, in every contemplative tradition that has lasted long enough to be worth reading. I cited it in 2009 because I believed it. I cite it now because I’ve had sixteen years of evidence.

The specific obstacle has intensified. In 2009, staying present required resisting your own tendencies toward worry and distraction. In 2026, it requires resisting an entire industry built specifically to prevent you from being present. The phones, the feeds, the notifications — none of this is accidental. The attention economy is, at its core, a machine for relocating you from your current moment to a managed simulation of someone else’s world. The reason to enjoy your current moment is identical to what it was in 2009. The effort required to actually do it has gone up considerably.

6. The Unexpected

This is the one that needs the most revision. In 2009 I framed the unexpected as a source of growth and aliveness — surprises prevent boredom, unpredictability enables change, trying to eliminate all uncertainty guarantees a dull existence. All of that is still true for personal-scale surprises: the chance encounter, the project that goes sideways and teaches you something, the door that opens where you weren’t looking.

What I didn’t account for is collective-scale unexpected events. 2020 happened. The kind of unexpected that arrives as a global pandemic, or as large political and economic disruptions, is a different category from the kind I was describing in 2009. It doesn’t automatically produce growth. It doesn’t feel like aliveness. It feels like being picked up by something much larger than you and put down somewhere different without being asked. The reason to enjoy life that I’d offer now isn’t “embrace the unexpected” as a general principle. It’s more specific: learn to distinguish between the unexpected that is yours to engage with and the unexpected that is simply happening around you, and respond accordingly. The first is still a source of life. The second requires a different set of tools — the ones in the next reason.

7. Endings

The original framing: healthy endings represent purpose fulfilled. A chapter that closes cleanly makes room for what comes next. Resisting endings, clinging to what’s already done, prevents both the grief that’s due and the beginning that’s waiting.

This one has held up completely and become more personal. At thirty nine you’ve accumulated enough endings to have opinions about them. Projects that finished. Relationships that ran their course. A version of yourself that you were for a decade and then weren’t. The 2009 post was right that endings are reasons to enjoy life — not despite the loss they involve, but because of what they clarify. A life without endings would be a endless complication.

What I’d add: the practice of ending things well is underrated and difficult. Most endings are messy — they trail off, they linger, they arrive before you’re ready or long after you should have let go. The reason to enjoy life here isn’t that endings are easy. It’s that when you can meet one clearly — acknowledge what it was, release it without excessive drama, and turn toward what’s next — there’s a particular kind of satisfaction available that nothing else quite replicates. It’s the feeling of a life being lived deliberately rather than happening to you.

The Reason That Wasn’t on the List

Having a small person in your life who is encountering everything for the first time — language, gravity, the existence of dogs, the inexplicable injustice of bedtime — is influencing your capacity for enjoyment in a way that I couldn’t have predicted. And I’m talking about having kids again at 50+. It’s not that it makes life simpler. It doesn’t. On the contrary, it makes it louder and more demanding and way less efficient. But it recalibrates what you’re paying attention to in a way that turns out to be beautiful. You notice things you’d stopped seeing.

And you’re just grateful you get to enjoy being a parent again.