The person pictured above is Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman. Wikipedia tells us that Kahneman was an Israeli-American psychologist best known for his work on the psychology of judgment and decision-making. Kahneman died in March 2024, having turned 90 only a couple of weeks earlier.
On March 15, 2025, The Wall Street Journal published an extensive article on Kahneman, authored by Jason Zweig, who was a friend. Zweig's article was titled, "The Last Decision by the World's Leading Thinker on Decisions." Unfortunately, I think that non-subscribers who click the link I have just provided may well find a paywall foiling their efforts to read the article. My apologies if that turns out to be the case. If you can read the article, I think you will find it worthwhile.
Zweig's article is about Kahneman's decision to terminate his own life, at a time when Kahneman was in "reasonably good physical and mental health," and when he had no specific "problems" of any kind. One of Kahneman's principles of good decision-making, apparently, was that a person should always know when to quit. One of his close friends, as a matter of fact, wrote a book called, Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away. That book was really directed to business-related decision-making, but Kahneman applied the principles to his continued existence. The Zweig article postulates that it was an application of Kahneman's "peak-end" rule that onvinced him to terminate his life when he did. In an email sent to various friends, prior to terminating his life, Kahneman said this:
Not surprisingly, some of those who love me would have preferred for me to wait until it is obvious that my life is not worth extending. But I made my decision precisely because I wanted to avoid that state, so it had to appear premature. I am grateful to the few with whom I shared early, who all reluctantly came round to support me.
Zweig's article "makes the case" for the kind of deliberative, rational decision-making process that led Kahneman to terminate his life when he did. As I thought about it, the decision made all kinds of "good sense," but there was a presumption, not mentioned, that was essential in the decision-making process that ultimately led Kahneman to end his life.
To my way of thinking, Kahneman simply assumed that he "owned" his life, outright, and that it belonged to him, and that it therefore made sense for him to deal with his life the same way that he might make a decision about whether or not to buy or sell an important asset.
But what if that assumption is not correct, as we consider our own, personal lives? This is, it seems to me, a profoundly "religious" question. If my life is, in fact, not something that I either "made," or "own" - if my life is a kind of gift to me, a gift that has been given to me "in trust" - then the decision to terminate my life looks quite a bit different to me from the way that Kahneman saw his own life.
I have a close friend who absolutely does see her life in the way that Kahneman saw his, and she applauded the article, which I did give to her to read. As I have already said, I encourage anyone reading this blog posting to find a way to read the article. Think, though, after reading Kahneman's story, whether or not you believe that your life is really "yours," to do with as you wish, or whether you have received this mysterious gift of life "in trust," and that terminating the trust is not a decision that you are, in fact, properly authorized to make.
Foundation of Freedom
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