Arthur Brooks: evaluation

Transcript context

…Why not cram all that contemplation of death into your last three months rather than your last 18 months? Do intertemporal substitution, right? Accelerate it. Ben Sasse probably is facing a pretty short timeline, but he’s done a remarkable job, even publicly, of coming to terms with what’s happening. Isn’t that better than two years of the same? That’s an empirical question, actually, at the end of the day. That’s the kind of thing that you and I could gather data on, and some people, in point of fact, have. We all remember Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s stages of death and dying, the stages of grief. She had a comprehensive study in the 1960s and 1970s and wrote a fabulously bestselling book that has not stood up extremely well to the subsequent research, but it’s a great book nonetheless and is worth reading. She was a Swiss physician, psychiatrist. She talked about the stages of grief that people go through. There’s a lot of misery that when people find out they’re going to die. They’re bargaining and they’re angry and they’re in denial. Then they get to the last stage, which is acceptance. Now, a lot of research since then has said, okay, how long is each stage and what do people actually experience in each stage? To cut to the chase, here’s what the research basically says. People get to acceptance pretty fast, and they’re happier during the acceptance phase than they were before they were told they were going to die. Now, this is important, right? This is an important thing because what that says is—if you’re taking it at its face, and again, the research is the research, and it could be updated, and everything’s contested—what this suggests is that if you’re doing it right, the more time you have, the more meaningful your life is going to be, and the more you’ll actually savor it. The truth is, Tyler, I would prefer to have 18 months of advance notice as opposed to three, and here’s what I really want, somewhere between five and 20 years, which is what I actually have. Speaking of Buddhism, why is the footprint of Buddhism shrinking around the world? There’s fewer Buddhists every year.…

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