May 23, 2026 May 23, 2026 2026-05-23

In March 2009 I published 77 reasons to love your life. Almost 5,000 words. The list that started with the fact that you’re breathing and can read, and expanded from there into everything: from the people in your life to the food you haven’t tasted yet, or to the simple fact that tomorrow exists. It remains one of the most-visited posts on this blog. Some people find it when they’re having a bad day and have told me more than once it helped.

I want to revisit it now, not because the list was inherently wrong — most of it is valid — but because making the case for loving your life in 2026 requires something different than it did in 2009. As hard as it is to accept: the world has become harder to love. That changes the approach – even if it doesn’t change the conclusion.

The Original Angle

The 2009 post opened with a blunt claim: “too often we find more reasons to hate our life than to love it. And you know what? Life hates us back.” I was thirty-nine. I believed that fully. I still believe it — but I understand it differently now. In 2009 I framed it as attitude: if you orient toward gratitude, good things automatically follow. Seventeen years of living it told me it’s deeper than that. The relationship between how you feel about your life and what your life produces isn’t just about mindset. Mindset counts, of course, but mindset without action is just an empty shell. It’s more important what you actually do with your attention over long stretches of time.

Loving your life is less a feeling you cultivate and more a practice you either maintain or don’t.

The 2026 obstacle to that practice is very clear. It’s not pessimism, or laziness, or forgetting to count your blessings. It’s volume. The sheer amount of information, opinion, crisis, and noise available at every waking moment has made it inherently harder to be present to your own life. You can spend an entire day reacting to things that have nothing to do with you, and come out of it feeling like you’ve done something, when in fact you’ve only consumed the spectacle of other people’s problems at industrial scale. That’s the enemy of loving your life in 2026. It’s not about circumstances anymore, it’s the noise around them.

What Changed on the List

Some of those 77 reasons have become more important with age. Health is one of them. In 2009 I listed good health as a reason to love your life in a fairly abstract way. Since then I’ve run 220 kilometers in a single race and I’ve watched people my age stop being able to do things they used to do. The body working well — not perfectly, just well enough to move and carry and attempt things — is a reason that lands differently at fifty-five than it did at thirty-nine. It’s not abstract anymore, it’s as real as waking up with a sprained ankle in the morning.

The people you love: same as with the previous post in this series, this one has deepened infinitely. The 2009 version was about connection in the abstract. In 2026 I have a one-and-a-half-year-old who finds the existence of cats genuinely staggering. The reasons to love your life stop being items on a list and start being real people during real moments.

Some reasons have faded, or at least changed shape. The list included several items about future possibilities — things you haven’t experienced yet, places you haven’t been. I still think those are kinda nice to have. But the flavor of anticipation is different at fifty-five. It’s less about novelty and more about depth. I’m less interested in new things than in going further into the things I’ve already chosen.

What Wasn’t on the List

Building things. The 2009 list touched on creativity and work, but in 2026 I’ve built ten iOS apps in the last four months (with significant AI assistance). That process — deciding what to make, who it’s for, what problem it solves, and then actually shipping it — is one of the most satisfying things I’ve done in years. The apps are not perfect. But the act of making something that didn’t exist before and putting it into the world is a reason to love your life that I don’t think I fully understood at thirty-three.

The unexpected quality of old work. In March 2009 I wrote nearly 5,000 words on a single day. I don’t know exactly what was going on in my life that day. But seventeen years later, people are still finding that post when they need it. There’s something particular about writing that you can’t fully know the value of at the time you write it. The reason to love your life here isn’t just the work — it’s the discovery, years later, that it mattered to someone you never met.

How to Make the Case in 2026

The honest answer is that the list itself isn’t the point. In 2009, enumerating 77 reasons worked because the obstacle was forgetting — people simply weren’t in the habit of counting what they had. That’s still partly true. But the bigger obstacle now is access. You can know perfectly well that you have reasons to love your life and still be unable to reach them, because your attention has been claimed by something louder.

So the updated version of the original argument isn’t “here are 77 reasons.” It’s this: the reasons are still there, all of them.

The work in 2026 is getting quiet enough to feel them. That’s harder than it sounds, and it’s not a mindset shift. It’s a daily practice of choosing where your attention goes — which is, I think, what loving your life actually means.

Start with one. You’re breathing. You can read. That was reason number one in 2009 and it’s still reason number one now. Everything else is built on top of it.