I want to share a story I come back to at the end of every year to get my mind right before the ball drops.
It starts in Paris and ends with you.
L’Intransigeant was a popular Parisian newspaper known for investigative news, metropolitan gossip, and incisive editorials. It also dreamed up big questions and asked French celebrities to chime in.
One asked, “What do you think would be the ideal education to give your daughter?” Another asked, “Do you have any recommendations for improving traffic congestion in Paris?”
But, in the heat of the summer of 1922, the paper offered a peculiar question:
An American scientist announces that the world will end, or at least that such a huge part of the continent will be destroyed, and in such a sudden way, that death will be the certain fate of hundreds of millions of people. If this prediction were confirmed, what do you think would be its effects on people between the time when they acquired the aforementioned certainty and the moment of cataclysm? Finally, as far as you’re concerned, what would you do in the last hours.
The last person the paper consulted on the question was the novelist Marcel Proust, author of the masterpiece In Search of Lost Time.
His reply did not disappoint.
This is Proust typing…
“I think that life would suddenly seem wonderful to us if we were threatened to die as you say. Just think of how many projects, travels, love affairs, studies, it—our life—hides from us, made invisible by our laziness which, certain of a future delays them occasionally.
But let all this threaten to become impossible forever, how beautiful it would become again! Ah! If only the cataclysm doesn’t happen this time, we won’t miss visiting the new galleries of the Louvre, throwing ourselves at the feet of Miss X, making a trip to India.
The cataclysm doesn’t happen, we don’t do any of it, because we find ourselves back in the heart of normal life, where negligence deadens desire. And yet we shouldn’t have needed the cataclysm to love life today. It would have been enough to think that we are humans, and that death may come this evening.”
What, exactly, does a life we love consist of?
How should a reminder of our mortality change the remainder of our lives?
I haven't worked out all the answers yet. But I know if we wait for the reaper to knock on our doors, we'll be too late.
See you next year.
P.S. Quick note before the year ends: The 0ffbrand Newsletter Playbook is free until tomorrow night. If you've been meaning to grab it, now's the time.
P.P.S. What's top of mind for you as you step into 2026? Hit reply and let me know. I'd love to help.