It’s my birthday today (save the good wishes – I’m just mentioning because it’s relevant to this newsletter!)
There’s a way of thinking about birthdays that most people get wrong. We treat them as continuous. Another year older, another candle on the cake, time flowing like a river.
But birthdays aren’t continuous. They’re discrete.
Not “another year older.” One fewer year left.
That reframe changes everything.
Paul Graham once wrote about counting time in discrete units. If your child is two, you don’t have eighteen years until they leave home. You have sixteen summers. Maybe ten before they’d rather be with friends than with you. Suddenly, “plenty of time” becomes “not nearly enough.”
I’ve known intellectually that life is finite since I was a teenager. Everyone does. But there’s a difference between knowing something and feeling it. Between understanding mortality as a concept and recognising it as your reality.
Confucius said: “You have two lives. The second one begins when you realise you only have one.”
I think about this a lot.
Most people spend their first life chasing what they’re supposed to want. The job title. The revenue number. The status. The things that look impressive on LinkedIn and make your parents proud.
There’s nothing wrong with this. It’s how we’re wired. Society hands us a scoreboard, and we try to run up the numbers. I did it. You probably did too.
But somewhere along the way (if you’re paying attention) something shifts.
You hit the targets, and they don’t feel like you thought they would. You reach the summit and realise it was just a ridge. The goalpost moves, and you start to wonder if it ever stops moving.
This is when the second life begins.
Not with a dramatic moment. Not with a crisis. But with a quiet question: “Is this actually what I want? Or just what I was told to want?”
The second life is about choosing. Deliberately. Consciously. Not chasing someone else’s definition of success, but defining your own.
It sounds simple. It’s not.
Because choosing means saying no. It means disappointing people. It means looking at opportunities that would impress everyone else and walking away because they don’t align with what actually matters to you.
Most people never make this shift. They spend their entire lives in the first life, optimising for metrics that were handed to them, never stopping to ask if they’re even playing the right game.
The ones who do make the shift? They’re different. Not because they stop being ambitious. But because their ambition finally points somewhere real.
Birthdays are useful for this.
They force discrete counting. Not “I have plenty of time” but “I have X years left, give or take.” And when you count like that, the bullshit falls away. The things that don’t matter become obvious. The things that do become urgent.
So here’s my birthday thought, for whatever it’s worth:
If you’re still in your first life, that’s fine. Most of us are. But pay attention to the quiet moments when something feels off. When the wins don’t satisfy. When you’re successful by every measure but still feel like something’s missing.
That’s the beginning of your second life, trying to get your attention.
Don’t ignore it.
