Gongol.com Archives: May 2025
May 11, 2025
Two approaches to the world are at sky-high popularity right now: One is the blissful belief that if we just make enough changes happen fast enough (and especially if we make them faster than our rivals), then we will achieve something utopian as the product of all that change. This is the language of those predicting outcomes like a two-day workweek in ten years, thanks to computers. ■ The other ascendant worldview is one that resents often unknown or shadowy forces thought to be agents of oppression, seeking a system in which everyone is free to "do their own research" and make all choices accordingly. It tends to result in a fashionably anarcho-libertarian potluck of consequences, like a measles outbreak in Texas, off-grid doomsday bunkers, and memecoin boomlets. ■ In contrast, consider some advice from Warren Buffett: "Your children are learning from you from the day they're born. Don't think that a cleverly-drawn will is going to teach them their values. If you want to know how to live your life, write your obituary and then reverse-engineer it." ■ To prepare a will is to acknowledge one's mortality, yes, but it is also to make choices about the future. Hopefully, those are pro-social choices. And because choices are informed by values, a choice affecting one's heirs is also an investment in values. ■ The decent person looks to the future, hopes it will be better, and intentionally constructs choices to lead in that direction. That intentionality is what "reverse-engineering" an obituary is all about: In the words attributed to Yogi Berra, "If you don't know where you are going, you might wind up someplace else."
