I wake up every morning at nine and grab for the morning paper. Then I look at the obituary page. If my name i... — Benjamin Franklin

I wake up every morning at nine and grab for the morning paper. Then I look at the obituary page. If my name is not on it, I get up.

Author: Benjamin Franklin

Insight: There's something oddly practical about this joke that hits different when you think about what most of us actually do first thing in the morning. We check our phones, scroll through bad news, or mentally review everything we're behind on. Franklin's ritual—however tongue-in-cheek—inverts that. It's a permission slip to exist, a daily confirmation of the most basic fact that matters. The real insight isn't about morbidity. It's about priorities becoming bizarrely clear when you strip away everything else. If you're alive, that's the win. Everything else—the frustrations at work, the social media drama, the petty failures—they're technically bonus material. We know this intellectually, but we don't feel it most days. We treat minor annoyances like they're catastrophic and forget that showing up conscious is already the hard part that most of the people in yesterday's obituary section don't get to do anymore. What's slightly counterintuitive is that this isn't depressing—it's actually liberating. When you genuinely absorb that you're fortunate to have another day, it rewires how you spend it. Not in a toxic-positivity way, but in a honest one. You have less patience for wasting time on things that don't matter, and more grace for the messy reality of being human.