Saturday morning reading
It was a dark and rainy morning. Not inviting to go for a walk and still too early to feed the cows and chickens. So, instead, after Bible reading and prayer, plotting out the day in my Just Scribble planner, and cradling many mugs of instant espresso, I opened my laptop and logged into email.
First, a roundup of news from The Wall Street Journal. Disturbingly the email headlined a reflection by Jason Zweig on Why did a Nobel Prize-winning psychologist who studied decision-making decide to end his own life?.
[Daniel] Kahneman was one of the world’s most influential thinkers—a psychologist at Princeton University, winner of the Nobel Prize in economics and author of the international blockbuster “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” first published in 2011. He had spent his long career studying the imperfections and inconsistencies of human decision-making. By most accounts—although not his own—Kahneman was still in reasonably good physical and mental health when he chose to die [at age 90].
Kahneman was widely mourned nearly a year ago when his death was announced. Only close friends and family knew, though, that it transpired at an assisted-suicide facility in Switzerland. Some are still struggling to come to terms with his decision.
That article linked to another WSJ piece, Some Final Personal-Finance Advice From Jonathan Clements: The former Wall Street Journal columnist faces a terminal cancer diagnosis the only way he knows how—with practical suggestions about family finances, written last November. At the time, Mr. Clements was 61 years old.
Because I work for a financial planner, and much of my job description is helping clients with the logistics of managing their financial accounts, these paragraphs could have been copied from my task list:
I thought my finances were well-organized and pretty simple. Yet, since my diagnosis, I’ve spent endless hours trying to simplify them even further.
I’ve closed a small inherited IRA, canceled two of my four credit cards, made Elaine the joint account holder on two bank accounts, and rolled my solo Roth 401(k) into my Roth IRA. This should save my family a bunch of work after I’m gone. I’ve also revised my will, had financial and medical powers of attorney drawn up, and updated the beneficiary designations on various retirement accounts.
There’s still more to do. For instance, if time allows, I’d like to move various utility bills and insurance policies into Elaine’s name. All this might seem rather tedious. But at a time when I’m losing control over my life’s trajectory, it feels good to have control over something, even if it’s just humdrum financial matters.
That Mr. Clements was only 61 years old was another connection because I turn 60 this year. An "anchoring" number for me (a concept from Kahneman's research findings mentioned in the piece above), I have designated this year as a time for reflection.
And maybe, just maybe, I will take to writing more here to mark this new decade. In the early 1990s, I came across May Sarton's book A Journal of a Solitude in a bookstore somewhere in Seattle, which she wrote around age 60. I read and re-read that book, along with another journal she wrote ten years later, At Seventy. I was intrigued by her account of living alone in a rural area, her housekeeping and gardening tales, and I relished her book recommendations.