All Good Things, and Good Fortune, Live Here

Life, Philosophy / /

Seneca said a good way to know whether something is worth pursuing is whether it has an endpoint.

Unnatural pursuits have no endpoint. Fame, excessive wealth, power, praise—it’s hard to know what’s enough.

With natural pursuits, the goal is to finish what is in front of you right now. This newsletter. This mile. This meal. This phone call. These dishes. This conversation.

When I go for a run, if I don’t force my mind to stay present, it naturally goes to the future, to all the things I still have to do that day. It zaps my energy. Same with writing. If I start thinking about the next paragraph, the sentence I’m writing goes slack. It always does when my attention is not fully in it.

Because the problem with thinking into the future is that the future does not exist.

C.S. Lewis said that we’re biologically inclined to point our passions and pursuits toward the future. Because of this, “nearly all vices are rooted in the future.” Fear, greed, lust, worry—they all exist in the future, built on the anticipation of some outcome.

The present is the only place where goodness is found. And…

The Present Is Full of Good Fortune

In 1994, Anthony Russo, a captain in the Colombo crime family, was convicted of racketeering and violent crimes connected to the murders of two members of a rival faction. In 1999, a federal judge gave Russo a life sentence. Because it was federal, he’d have no chance for parole. He would die in prison.

In 2018, a bipartisan criminal justice reform bill called the First Step Act was signed into law. This act changed federal compassionate release procedures and allowed incarcerated people to ask courts directly for sentence reductions. After serving 29 years in prison, Russo applied for compassionate release. It would be up to Judge Frederic Block to decide his fate. Should he free him? (“What would you do?” he asks the reader in his fascinating book A Second Chance: A Federal Judge Decides Who Deserves It.)

For most of the decades Russo spent behind bars, there was no First Step Act. There was no realistic reason good behavior might someday help free him. And yet, Russo kept working on what was in front of him. He earned his GED, completed more than 40 educational courses, maintained a steady work assignment, and went 21 years without a single disciplinary infraction—a hard thing to do in a place with so many arbitrary rules. Prison staff described him as a ‘model inmate,’ ‘considerate, respectful, hard-working,’ and deserving of ‘a second chance.’ One supervisor wrote, ‘Mr. Russo has consistently shown a desire to not only better himself and the people around him but to improve his environment and community to the best of his abilities.’

Judge Block would eventually call his rehabilitation “extraordinary,” and though he denied most bids for early release, he granted Russo’s. In 2022, at the age of 70, Russo walked free.

Block cited numerous reasons for his decision, but the one that tipped the scales in Russo’s favor was how hard he had worked to become a better person despite having no hope for freedom.

Whatever Russo imagined about the future, the record he built was made out of things immediately in front of him. This class. This job. This day. This choice. His future had been closed off, but his present remained wide open.

After nearly 30 years of creating his own good fortune, he had stacked up a debt that luck would eventually have to pay.

Cultivate Your Own Garden

In Voltaire’s Candide, Candide and Cacambo, weary from their travels, stumbled upon the village of Eldorado, a literal utopia. Its people lived in harmony. There were no courts, no prisons, no religious disputes—only peace. Jewels of extraordinary worth—what the locals called “pebbles”—scattered the roads. Yet to the people who lived in Eldorado, the jewels were as unremarkable as dirt; wealth was shared, not hoarded.

At first, Candide enjoyed the serenity of Eldorado and the pleasant yet unfamiliar feeling of contentment.

But soon restlessness crept in.

A force began to work on Candide, not unlike the devil on your shoulder C.S. Lewis wrote about—the voice that creeps in when you’re absorbed in the present. Why don’t you get a bite to eat? It suggests. You protest: not now, I’m in the middle of something important. Yes, the voice agrees. Much too important to do on an empty stomach.

Thomas Merton called it by its oldest name: hurry.

“Hurry,” he wrote, “ruins saints as well as artists.”

Hurry is always trying to get us to be something else, to go somewhere else, to do something else. Hurry wants the payoff. Hurry is concerned with the future.

Hurry began to rattle Candide out of his stillness.

He thought of Cunégonde. Had he not set out on this journey to find her? Was she not suffering somewhere, waiting for him? His love for her, undimmed by time or reason, now burned all the brighter against the stillness of Eldorado. He convinced himself that this, above all, was why he must leave.

But there was more to it than that.

The wealth that meant nothing to the Eldoradians filled Candide with a new hunger. The “pebbles” he had accumulated might not be worth much here, but in the outside world, he would be a rich man. He envisioned himself returning to Europe, pockets brimming with gold, dazzling the world with tales of his journey. How pleasant it was to be on the move, Candide said to his friend, Cacambo. To be noticed back home, to brag about one’s travels. Why stay put when there is so much power and glory to seize?

With that, Candide and Cacambo sought Eldorado’s king to ask permission to leave.

The wise ruler, having seen too many men before mistake gold for happiness, counseled, “When one is tolerably well off somewhere, one ought to remain there.”

The advice fell on deaf ears. The ruler granted their request and the pair set out. As Voltaire writes, “our two happy wanderers resolved to be happy no longer.”

It takes Candide the rest of the book to understand the king’s warning. The pursuit of “the best of all possible worlds” brings misery, disappointment, and no shortage of scammers. The pursuit of absolute perfection is futile. The pursuit of practical goodness and happiness is not.

Eventually, Candide stops pursuing the impossible and buys a small farm. After all his wandering, he finally takes root and decides to cultivate his own garden.

That is the endpoint.

Happiness and goodness were always right in front of him, just as they are always right in front of us.

This mile. This conversation. This meal. This person. This patch of earth.

This moment.

It’s where all good things, and good fortune, live.

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Books Read This Month

Reading / /

The Echo Machine: How Right-Wing Extremism Created a Post-Truth America by David Pakman
I read this mostly before bed, which was not a good idea, as it gave me heart palpitations. It details the rise of the anti-intellectual movement that is the far right. This anti-intellectualism has culminated in one man—someone who highlights people’s fears only to frame himself as the sole solution—with fanatical followers determined to avoid reason and facts at all costs, convinced they’re privy to information that apparently no one else has. (Which reminds me of another book I recently read and LOVED, Helter Skelter.) One of the far right’s most corrosive tactics is dressing up opinion as fact. Take COVID. You can dislike the vaccine and think the mandates were wrong. Those are opinions. But whether the vaccines reduced the risk of hospitalization, critical illness, and death is something we can actually measure—and they did. Pakman argues that attacks on higher education are part of the same anti-intellectual pattern. Much of his argument comes back to critical thinking and media literacy: the ability to stop and ask, Is this actually true? How do we know? What is the evidence? A populace equipped with those skills is much harder to persuade with fear and misinformation. (The right claims they’re against a person’s education because they want to shield them from the supposed liberal ideology of academia. You would think their followers would be offended by the inherent message: you’re not smart enough to think for yourself.) And once facts give way to slogans, strange contradictions become possible—like railing against “socialism” while happily relying on government programs yourself. “One Trump supporter,” Pakman writes, “interviewed by Right Side Broadcasting Network, complained about the ‘socialist’ policies of President Biden and Democrats, while simultaneously explaining that ‘fortunately’ he is on Medicare, and also has VA benefits as a veteran—a stunning cognitive dissonance.” The broader point I kept seeing is that politics shouldn’t work like fandom. You can like a politician and not vote for him/her. Personality is not policy, and slogans are not arguments. A “beautiful plan” is not a health care plan, and shouting commie! at every dissenting voice is just exasperating for everyone. Pakman’s prescription is essentially more thinking, not less of it: better education, greater media literacy, more willingness to interrogate our own side, and a return to some shared standard for determining what is true. After so many pages explaining how we got so far away from that, I appreciated that he ended with some ideas for getting back. Great read.

Catch the Devil by Pamela Colloff
When I finished this book I felt sick to my stomach. James Dailey was sent to Florida’s death row for the 1985 murder of 14-year-old Shelly Boggio, despite there being no evidence tying him to the murder (unless you count as evidence a career conman’s incentivized testimony). In 2019, Governor Ron DeSantis signed Dailey’s death warrant. Soon after, the American Bar Association submitted a formal letter requesting clemency for Dailey. Florida’s Catholic bishops pleaded for his execution to be stopped. Organizations like Witness to Innocence and The Innocence Project have advocated on Dailey’s behalf. Even Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty filed an amicus brief in support of his petition to the U.S. Supreme Court. No matter. Florida has a tough-on-crime image to protect—inmates languishing on death row due to jailhouse testimony be damned. Quite literally. Florida has executed 15 people so far in 2026, with additional executions scheduled. Colloff’s book is about Jim Dailey’s case, but it is also about what happens when a legal system capable of killing someone relies on testimony from people who have powerful incentives to lie. Anyway, you will not be able to put this book down.

Misc:
Another book I could not put down was Bill Browder’s Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice—a memoir about Browder’s experience doing business in Russia, the torture and murder of his lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, the brutality of Putin’s regime, and his subsequent campaign for sanctions against Russian officials. I also read The Four Cardinal Virtues by Josef Pieper and A Second Chance: A Federal Judge Decides Who Deserves It by Judge Frederic Block, which were both excellent.

This Might Be the Most Important Work You’ll Ever Do

Journal, Life, Philosophy / /

When John Elway retired in May 1999, he had just finished one of the greatest careers in NFL history.

Two consecutive Super Bowl titles.

Super Bowl MVP.

Nine Pro Bowls.

Forty-seven fourth-quarter comebacks, the most in league history.

148 wins as a starting quarterback—the most anyone had ever won.

He was thirty-eight years old, the reigning champion, walking away at the very top.

How proud he must have felt. How fulfilled. He had spent sixteen years proving himself; surely the proving was over. Now he could enjoy what he had earned.

If he did feel that way, it didn’t last.

Because do you know how he admitted to actually feeling when he retired?

Behind.

His peers had spent those same sixteen years building careers in business. Elway worried that outside football, he had no transferable skills beyond his name.

Jackass star Steve-O reached a similar summit and found something equally unsettling.

In 2006, Jackass Number Two had catapulted him into mega-stardom. At the red-carpeted movie premiere, he was on top of the world. Or so one would have thought.

Instead, he felt like he was at his own funeral.

He worried he and his team would never again produce something as good, that it would be downhill from there.

His fears spiraled into addictions, arrests, an intervention, and eventually a 72-hour involuntary psychiatric hold after he emailed friends that he was “ready to die.” It would take him eight years to climb out.

One man got almost everything he had worked for and felt behind. Another reached the height of his fame and felt as though he were at his own funeral.

For both, success had delivered what it promised but failed to deliver what mattered.

Which is why we all need to spend more time cultivating something less visible and far more durable: a rich inner life.

Life is too uncertain, and our interpretation of it too consequential, to leave our well-being entirely in the hands of circumstance or our ever-changing feelings.

Without a rich inner life, we become the person Seneca described as needing “another happiness to safeguard the happiness one has,” forever saying prayers “on behalf of prayers already fulfilled.”

A rich inner life is what keeps the outside world from having the final say.

Few people demonstrate this more powerfully than Etty Hillesum.

As the Nazi occupation tightened around Amsterdam in 1942, Etty’s physical world shrank almost to nothing. The young Dutch Jewish woman was banned from public transportation and parks and forced to wear the yellow star.

Yet, in the midst of this, she wrote in her diary:

“Is this really my life? So full, so rich, so intense and so beautiful?”

Those words seem almost impossible for someone in her situation.

But Etty had learned how to meet life inwardly. Through relentless reflection, she developed what she called an “uninterrupted dialogue” with beauty—even inside a room she was legally forbidden to leave.

“Within these four walls or within four other ones,” she wrote of her impending internment, “what does it matter? If you have a rich inner life [. . . .] there probably isn’t all that much difference between the inside and outside of camp.”

It reminds me of Epictetus’s challenge: show me someone who can be equally happy on the podium or in prison, and I’ll show you a wise person.

What makes Etty’s example especially inspiring is that she wasn’t born that way. She had to work really, really hard.

In one entry she writes: “In the past I would live chaotically in the future, because I refused to live in the here and now… I had the feeling that nothing I did was the ‘real’ thing, that it was all a preparation for something else, something ‘greater’… But that feeling has dropped away from me completely.”

Etty learned to bring herself back.

To the dishes. To a lesson. To a conversation. To one minute lived all the way through instead of mentally abandoning it for the next.

One of her most profound realizations came when she noticed how much of her anxiety came from trying to possess what could never really belong to her.

She would look at a beautiful landscape and feel a pang of sadness because she wanted to own it—to write it down, capture it, make it hers before it disappeared.

She did something similar with people. Her attachment to her mentor Julius Spier could become jealous and possessive: she loved him, so she wanted to make him hers.

And here’s the paradox: loosening that grip didn’t make her feel less connected to him. It made her feel more connected.

“Now that I don’t want to own anything anymore and am free, now I suddenly own everything, now my inner riches are immeasurable.”

The less she tried to force life into the shape she wanted, the more connected she became to other people, to the world, and to herself.

Again, none of this happened automatically. She practiced.

Instead of praying for circumstances to change, she prayed that she could change. She prayed not to become preoccupied with food or clothing or the cold. She reminded herself that sleeping on a hard floor or being forbidden from certain streets didn’t need to consume her.

“These are minor vexations,” she wrote. “So insignificant compared with the infinite riches and possibilities we carry within us. […] Let every day be something more than a thousand everyday cares.”

She sat quietly in the mornings and listened. She picked up a pen and set her thoughts down on paper.

Because to journal is to reason and to reason is to free ourselves.

The act of setting down words is the act of setting down weight. She could see what had been burdening her, and she could question it, reframe it, release it.

Where a less reflective person can become a consumer of circumstance—waiting for the outside world to provide reassurance, meaning, excitement, adequacy—Etty became a generator of meaning.

When the Nazis stripped away more and more of her external world, she kept producing meaning from within.

But that inner work did not end with her. By rooting out personal desires and trivial preoccupations, she made more room in herself for others. She became a haven—a person able to absorb sorrow, offer comfort, and remain present to those around her.

She famously wrote that she wanted to become “the thinking heart of the barracks.”

“I so wish I could put it all into words. Those two months behind barbed wire have been the two richest and most intense months of my life, in which my highest values were so deeply confirmed. I have learned to love Westerbork.”

She didn’t wait for Westerbork to give her peace. She brought peace to Westerbork.

She did the inner work. And it was the most important work she ever did.

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