I know people have been talking. That some of them look at the quieter life you've chosen and see retreat, or worse — defeat. That the word they use, if they're being unkind, is given up. I want you to let that go completely. Not with defensiveness, and not with contempt. Just let them run.
Prosperity is a turbulent thing. Watch long enough and you'll see it — the ones racing hardest are also the most tormented. Some get puffed up by it, some hollowed out, some simply pushed off the track by the very momentum they worked so hard to build. They're not wrong for wanting what they want. They're just in a different race. One you've already decided isn't yours.
If they call you serious, or difficult, or indifferent to your own advancement — good. There's an old observation that wine which tastes sharp when young becomes something worth drinking with age, while the wine that pleases everyone at the harvest rarely survives the years. I think you're the sharp wine. I'd rather that than the alternative.
Fortune has no jurisdiction over character. That's the only territory worth defending.
What I want for you now is depth over accumulation. Not to sprinkle yourself lightly with ideas and culture, but to steep in them. To let the things that matter actually change you. There's a season for storing up and a season for drawing on what you've stored. You're moving into the second. Use it.
There's something else I want to say, and I'll say it plainly. The fear of death — or more precisely, the unexamined fear of death — is behind more bad decisions than almost anything else I can name. The frantic accumulation, the need for applause, the inability to stop. Much of it is just a refusal to sit with the fact that this ends. That you end.
I'm not asking you to be unafraid. I'm asking you to look at it long enough that it stops making your decisions for you. Because here's what I've come to believe: nothing is really annihilated. Things end their course. They don't perish. The stars don't burn out — they set, and rise again. Summer goes and returns. Death interrupts life. It doesn't steal it.
You are destined to return. So you can afford to depart with a quiet mind.
Children aren't afraid of death. Neither are people who've lost their minds. It would be a strange thing if reason, which we've worked so hard to cultivate, couldn't bring us at least as much peace as ignorance does. That's the work now. Not the race. The peace.
Steadily yours,