Hey guys, it's Non here.
Coffee in hand. The architect Louis Kahn said that good architecture ages beautifully. I read that line years ago and stopped. That is it.
That is exactly how I would like to get old — not preserved, not fighting it, just aged the way a good building ages.
Think about the difference between a plastic chair and a stone bench. If you leave a plastic chair outside in the sun for ten years, it doesn't age. It just degrades. It becomes brittle.
It loses its shape until it eventually snaps. That is what happens when we try to refuse to age. We try to freeze ourselves in a specific moment, using products and habits to stop the clock. But the moment stops, the meaning stops too.
Now, look at a stone bench in a public square. It gets weathered. The edges might smooth out. Moss might grow in the cracks.
But the bench doesn't lose its purpose. It becomes more integrated into the world. It looks like it belongs there because it has endured the rain and the heat. That is the difference between being preserved and aging beautifully.
I think about this often when I look at the way we spend our days. You might be sitting in your office right now, or perhaps you're on your commute, looking at your phone. You are making choices about what to prioritize today. You might be choosing to optimize for a very specific look, or a certain level of status that feels like a shield against time.
But ask yourself: if you do this for thirty years, will it look better or worse? If you spend your life building a reputation that relies on being "current," you are building with plastic. It will snap. If you spend your life building a character that relies on your values, you are building with stone.
This matters because if you get this wrong, you end up at seventy with a life that feels hollow, a collection of things that didn't actually grow with you. We are going to figure out how to tell the difference between what we do to hide from time and what we do to inhabit it.
Think about what you are doing right now that will look worse in thirty years. Maybe it is a specific way you dress to stay relevant, or the way you constantly check your notifications to stay "in the loop." These things are designed to be used today. They aren't meant to be lived with.
If you do them for three decades, they won't have grown with you. They will just be old versions of things that no longer matter. Compare that to something you do that actually gets better the more you do it. A joke that gets funnier the more you tell it.
A skill that becomes more fluid the more you practice it. These things age beautifully. They gain weight and depth. They become part of the structure of who you are.
I want to look at how people have tried to figure out what makes a life "good" in the long run. "Ancient philosophers seem to be convinced that the purpose of life has to do with maximising the quality of life, i.e., how to live one self in accordance with some basic rules that make life worth living and fulfilling." When I say "maximising the quality of life," I don't mean buying a faster car or a bigger house. I mean making your life feel like it has a solid foundation.
It means finding a set of rules—not laws handed down by a king, but personal principles—that make the day feel worth living. It is about finding a way to be a person that you actually like living as. There was a thinker, Jean-Paul Sartre, who was deeply worried about how we let ourselves become slaves to other people's expectations. He watched how people often adopted roles, like being a "perfect" employee or a "perfect" neighbor, just to avoid the scary reality of their own freedom.
He called this bad faith, which is when we lie to ourselves by pretending we don't have a choice in who we are. If I look at the world through his eyes, I see that we are constantly making choices. Every time you choose a habit, you are choosing who you will become. If you choose a habit just because it is what everyone else is doing, you are in bad faith.
You are letting someone else write your life story. You are building a life out of borrowed bricks. It might look nice for a while, but it isn't yours. It won't age beautifully because it wasn't built by your own hands.
I think we have to be honest about the fact that life is often hard and sometimes feels pointless. But that is exactly where the "quality" comes in. It is not about avoiding the hard parts. It is about choosing which hard parts are worth facing.
If you choose to face the hard parts that build your character, you are building with stone. You are creating something that the weather of time can only make more beautiful.
Perhaps you’re thinking that I’m being a bit too romantic about the "stone bench" of character. You might be right. It is easy for me to sit here and talk about building a life of deep principles, but life is often messy and inconvenient. A smart person would point out that building character takes a massive amount of energy.
It is exhausting to constantly check your own values before you act. It is much easier, and frankly much more efficient, to just follow the path of least resistance. Why would anyone choose to build a life that is "heavy" with meaning when they could just be comfortable? You could argue that "aging beautifully" is just a luxury for people who have the time and the resources to think about it.
For someone working two jobs just to keep the lights on, "maximizing the quality of life" feels like a fairy tale. They don't have the luxury of choosing which hard parts are worth facing. They just have to face all of them. That is a fair point.
I have to give you that. If we only talk about the "stone" path, we risk ignoring the reality of the "plastic" world many people are forced to live in. But here is where I have to push back. If you choose the path of least resistance solely because it is easier, you are essentially choosing to let the weather do the eroding for you.
You are letting the world shape you, rather than shaping yourself. The goal isn't to live a life without friction. The goal is to ensure that the friction you experience actually leaves a mark on you that you chose. I want you to look at your own daily habits through this lens.
Think about the things you do just to keep up with the crowd. If you do those things for thirty years, you aren't building a life; you are just occupying a space in one. It is a way of staying invisible to time, but it also makes you invisible to yourself. We exist because we live in the moment, but those moments only matter if they belong to you.
If you spend your day satisfying a social convention you don't believe in, that moment is gone the second it passes. It leaves nothing behind. But if you act on a principle that feels true to you, even if it is difficult, that moment stays. It becomes a part of the structure.
That is how you build something that doesn't snap when the wind gets high.
Think about the work you do when the lights are off. Not the work that gets you a promotion or a public review, but the tiny, invisible standards you keep when no one is looking. There is a specific kind of integrity in doing a task well simply because doing it poorly would be a betrayal of your own sense of order. I think about a repair person who fixes a pipe under a floorboard.
They could do a messy job, slap some tape on it, and walk away. No one would ever see it. But if they do it right, they are honoring a standard that exists only in their own mind. That is a way of aging beautifully.
It is a habit that doesn't just serve a purpose today; it builds a type of person who is reliable to themselves. When you are faced with a requirement at your job that feels like a bit of nonsense, how do you handle it? You might find yourself doing it perfectly just because it is the rule. That is the easy path.
It is the plastic way of working. It feels safe because it offloads the responsibility of choice onto a handbook or a boss. But if you do that for twenty years, you aren't building a skill or a character. You are just becoming a more efficient machine for someone else's goals.
You are letting the "weather" of your career erode your sense of agency. Now, consider the opposite. Think of a time you chose to do something the hard way because it was the right way. Maybe it was a project where you took the extra hour to double-check a detail that didn't technically matter to the client.
Or maybe it was a conversation where you chose to be honest instead of convenient, even though it risked a bit of awkwardness. I think Sartre is right. We should life both a free and intense life; "free" in the sense that we shall follow no nonsense order to continue doing work that we hate even if that work pays bill. And "intense" in the way that we must put all efforts into doing things we want to do without holding anything back. By that, I mean we have to stop letting the "nonsense orders" of the world dictate the quality of our internal lives.
If you do the work just to pay the bill, you are letting the bill own your time. If you do the work with intensity—meaning, with a personal commitment to doing it well—you are reclaiming your time. You are making the work a stone bench. It becomes a solid part of your history.
Tomorrow, when you face a task that feels like a chore, ask yourself: am I doing this just to get it over with, or am I doing this in a way that I will be proud of when I look back at it in thirty years?
To me, I take what Sartre means as to eat a lot of spice, travel as much as you'd like, share with as many people who care. And drink as much as your body could possibly process (by the way, Nietzsche never liked alcohol which have, for years, made me puzzled about he derived so many great ideas -- while sober). Life is absurd, as it's about getting to Point A to Point B, and through the process we'll experience many unpleasant experiences.