We knew that, at any time, we could push the button on the wall. Then the doctor would enter the room, take out her syringes, and end the life of this cat that we love. 

They told us we could have as long as we wanted with Merlin in the “euthanasia room.” Having as long as you want is beautiful and also terrible. How do you decide when the right moment is to end your cat’s life? Do you do it right away? Obviously not. Do you stay there all night? Then you risk being kicked out, or worse, his last moments being painful rather than pleasant ones. 

I was grateful for a Schelling point to help with the impossible decision – we learned that the doctor who had been caring for him was going off duty soon. We told the staff to let her know that we wanted her to be the one to do it before she left for the night.

I tried to memorize the feeling of Merlin’s fur running between my fingers. It was like tufts of velvet. I buried my face in his fur and tried to memorize his smell. Usually, deeply earthen, almost like the smell of wet clay. But now, with an added sharp note of rubbing alcohol.

The euthanasia room was pleasantly arranged, with a small sculpture with running water. It was also a bit too cold, especially after sitting in there for two hours. The only other bad thing about the room, other than its very nature, was a giant picture of a very sad-looking dog with a saccharin message written on it about hope. This is a picture for a pre-treatment room, not a euthanasia room. You go to this room when there is no hope left.

The contrast between how well Merlin seemed and how sick we knew he actually was blew our minds. What if we just snuck out of the hospital with him and brought him home? Maybe this was all some kind of horrible misunderstanding.

When the doctor finally came in, we could see the compassion in her eyes. She calmly explained to us the series of injections she was going to give Merlin – first general anesthesia, then saline, then a medication to stop his heart, and then more saline. She said that he would be fully asleep before his heart stopped. She promised us he would not feel any pain.

I asked her to wait a moment. He had gotten distracted by the doctor, and I wanted to make sure his last moments were calm. I gave him some more gentle strokes on the forehead and around the ears. He calmed down. I looked at Julie for confirmation and then at the doctor and told her it was time. 

We were in shock at how fast it happened. It takes literally less than 90 seconds to go from someone you love to lifeless fur. We looked at each other with tears streaming down our faces. Our hearts were broken. How could it be that he is now gone? Our brains couldn’t comprehend it. He was peering into our eyes just moments ago. It took millions of years to evolve these incredible beings and thousands of years of partial domestication, but 90 seconds for one of their lives to end. Can life really be that fragile?

Three days before, everything had seemed normal. He had spent the day watching birds at the window sill, trying to figure out how to play (mostly unsuccessfully) with his new cat sister, getting the occasional pet, and sleeping.  

Two days before, he had seemed sluggish. Not quite so bouncy on his stay. Maybe just a bit sleepy? 

One day prior, we realized that he hadn’t been eating much. We weighed him and were surprised to realize he had lost weight – something that we’d never seen happen before.

Maybe it’s just a stomach bug? Maybe his stomach hurts, and he can’t eat much?

I wasn’t too worried. Julie felt that something was really wrong. I trusted her judgment, even though his symptoms didn’t seem so worrying. 

So we cleared our work schedules (it’s hard to believe, but that was this morning), and we planned to take Merlin to the vet regardless of whether they said there was an opening. We’d just wait until they let him in. Thankfully, they did so right away. 

I got a call from the doctor that afternoon. Merlin has a fever and inflammation in his abdomen. A worrying sign but too non-specific for them to diagnose him. They recommended we come to pick him up and take him to an animal hospital immediately, which we did. 

Merlin was a very big boy. About the size of two normal-sized non-obese cats. Merlin was muscular and swayed his hips like a tiger when he walked. He had a majestic, confident, and semi-wild look. He was social and loving but also fierce. Many of our friends simultaneously loved and feared him – which, now that I write it, reminds me of Machiavelli’s famous advice for princes. I also loved and feared him. I learned that if he wanted to play, then it was time to bring out a dangling toy for him to hunt – otherwise, you might be the prey!

The only things that Merlin really feared were balloons and men in boots. Whenever someone working in our building came into our apartment, he would commando crawl to the closest hiding spot and stay there for two hours. One time, we were sent a big bouquet of balloons for my birthday. Its string got wound around his tail somehow, and he tried to run away, only to have the terrifying experience of the balloons following him around the house.

Merlin was a people cat. He would want to be in whatever room you were. If we closed the door, leaving him on the other side, he’d stand at the door and meow pitifully until we let him in. Then he’d flop down near us. 

He would hang out by my feet on the chaise, and I would often stroke him behind his ears or gently rub his whiskers. On weekends, when Julie was away, he would be so excited to see me in the morning that he’d press himself against me while I attempted, with difficulty, to walk around in order to do my morning routine.

One of Merlin’s greatest achievements was reinventing the concept of blackmail. He discovered that it was not possible for us to get him out if he jammed himself into the space within my bedside table. Our only hope was to lure him out with a treat. This soon became a nightly ritual. Eventually, we didn’t even need the blackmail anymore – he knew he would get his before-bed treat regardless. But part of the deal is that we’d make him work for it – he’d have to give high fives when we asked and do a spin when we made a hand gesture. Some nights, I would give him “the mother load” and dump far more treats out than usual for him to enjoy. Just to reward him for being himself.

Merlin and I developed a language together. It involved using my wireless scale. If he weighed himself while I was eating food, he would always get a taste of a cat-safe portion of it. If he weighed himself when I wasn’t eating, then that meant I should try to pet him. If he dodged my pet, then that meant he wanted to play. So, I would first try one of the toys that I would swing to make him run and jump. If he didn’t go after it, then that meant he wanted to lazy play. I would dangle a toy just over him while he flopped on his back, and he’d attack it in a leisurely manner without even having to move. 

It breaks my heart that he is gone. Sadness is a funny thing. If a human described sadness to an alien, the alien might assume that when someone you love dies, you feel sad continuously for a long time. But for humans, or for me, at least, it comes in waves. A sudden swelling, like being punched in the gut with emptiness. And then, a few minutes later, it’s gone. The world is okay, and then – whoosh – it’s back again, and you feel queasy, and now the fact is staring you in the face again that the world is no longer okay, that it’s now missing something that was deeply important to you – forever.

Many people reported that Merlin had something magical about him. So, it was fitting that he was named after a wizard. But we didn’t name him – we meta-named him. Shortly after getting him, we ran a study where we showed pictures of him, along with a description of his personality, to 200 people, and they submitted name ideas. We then looked at names that more than one person had submitted, leaving us with “Merlin” and “Chester.” Our friend told us that Chester brings up the phrase “Chester, the molester.” We hadn’t heard that phrase before, but being on the fence, it was the feather that tipped us toward Merlin. 
 
Merlin was a mischievous and very goofy cat. He often liked to lick zip-lock bags. The noise of him doing so was shockingly loud – his tongue was basically like sandpaper. One of our cat sitters reported having no clue what that sound was or where it was coming from until she eventually found him hidden in a drawer, licking a zip lock bag into shreds.

When we got home, he would run to the door in a mad dash, dart past or between our legs, and go for an adventure in the hallway. Eventually, we stopped trying to prevent this, and it became part of our daily routine to follow him in the hall while he explored and sniffed around. Every once in a while, a neighbor would emerge by chance and, upon seeing him, exclaim something like, “Is that a cat?? But he’s so big???”

Another time, when I was in the shower, for no clear reason, he decided to leap onto the show curtain and then cling to it with his claws. This immediately caused the bar holding up the curtain to collapse, and to my great shock, the bar, cat, and curtain all tumbled to the ground.

Once, when I was alone with him, I couldn’t find him anywhere in the house. I began to panic. After eliminating all of his favorite hiding spots, I started checking weirder and weirder places. I finally found him sitting calmly inside a closed bathroom cabinet – he had opened it, climbed in, and then the door closed behind him.

Another crowning mischievous achievement was when he stole the sticky tape from the back of one of our paintings, one piece at a time. When I noticed him trying, I would stop him. Then, one day, the painting just fell off the wall onto my head (thankfully, I was not injured).

Today, at the cat hospital, I was a bit concerned, but the news was still very vague. His abdomen was swollen, but they had no idea why, so they gave him an ultrasound.

The doctor came in and gave us news. I tried to read on her face what it was going to be. She seemed calm, which gave me some relief. But then she blurted it out: a cancerous mass in his small intestine. Merlin was only 6 years old. Maine Coons often live 15 years.

The doctor explained that removing the mass would be a very dangerous type of surgery. Should we biopsy it or just wait for the serum test to come back first? How great is the infection risk from a biopsy? I pressured the doctor for probabilities – what’s the chance that the serum test will be inconclusive and, therefore, a biopsy will be needed regardless? Doctors don’t like to give probabilities. I changed tactics. “If it were your own cat, would you biopsy right away or wait to get the serum test back first?” “I hate when people ask me that.” She said, looking momentarily stricken by grief. She has cats of her own. “I’ll tell you what,” she said. “I can go take a closer look at the serum cells – if there are lots of cells there, the serum test is likely to be conclusive, so no biopsy will be needed.” We thanked her.

When she returned to the room, her voice was different. She was not calm anymore. “He has sepsis,” she said. “We could do emergency surgery. He would be fairly likely to die during the surgery. If he survives, he’ll be fairly likely to die a few days after surgery. But if he survives that too, you can put him on chemotherapy, and he might live 6-12 months.”

That’s the moment when your heart lurches, and suddenly, it is real. Before that moment, it was hazy, a cloud of possibilities. Now, death was staring into my eyes, inches from my face.  

“Would you do the surgery if he was your cat?” I asked. “No. No, I wouldn’t.” We called our cat’s main doctor. Merlin’s life is worth a second opinion. He told us we can keep fighting – that it is our right not to give up – but that the right choice is to stop fighting.

How could it have progressed so far? The doctor explained to us that cats are masters of masking their pain. In the wild, they have the strange predicament of simultaneously being predator and prey – and as potential prey, they never want to appear weak. Five months prior, they found nothing wrong with him during his checkup. I could not help but replay subtle interactions over the past months and wonder – was there any sort of sign that I had missed?

Tributes are a strange thing. They pretend to be for the dead, but the dead can never benefit from them. They are stranger still when they are about a cat. Even if you could get a cat to understand what a tribute is, I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t care. So tributes are about the dead, but for the (temporarily) living. And, of course, most of all, they are for the tribute writer to do something that feels productive with their despair. 

I still can’t believe that this happened today. It’s uncanny to have someone you love be missing. Hearing me crying, Merlin’s cat sister just nuzzled up beside me. There’s no way she knows yet that her brother is gone forever. But she seems to know I could use her affection.

I’m sure that some people reading this think that it’s ridiculous to love a cat. I think that if you have one nearby, it’s ridiculous not to.

We can:

A. Lie to ourselves about them,

B. Avoid thinking about them, or

C. Try to accept the parts we can’t change and change what we can.

If you’re in camps A or B, don’t read this post!

Here are Thirteen Difficult Truths:

1. Irrationality – we humans are not rational, despite the fact that most of us want to believe we are. Our beliefs and behaviors are influenced by nearly-invisible social forces and numerous cognitive biases.

But I believe we can learn to become significantly more rational and that there are important personal and societal benefits from doing so. This is a major part of why I created Clearer Thinking. 

2. Wrongness – we’re wrong about some of our deeply-held beliefs. We don’t know which (being right and being wrong usually both feel like being right). We want to believe that our tribe is right, the enemy tribe dangerously wrong, and the other tribes irrelevant. The truth is much more complex and interesting.

We can be right more often by seeking out the strongest contradictory perspectives, by creating feedback loops with respect to our ideas, and by learning to play devil’s advocate to our own views.

Try, for instance, the “Belief Challenger.” 

3. Challenges – we each will experience big losses, stressors, and setbacks. Some of these could send us into a negative spiral.

This will suck, but we can build up mental health skills that help.

Try, for example, our apps https://www.uplift.app (for depression) and https://www.mindease.io (for anxiety).

4. Aging – as we grow older, we will lose physical strength, attractiveness, and perhaps also cognitive abilities.

However, by exercising regularly and eating healthy food, we can likely slow our decline. We can create hobbies and sources of joy that we can benefit from at all ages.

5. Bereavement – we will lose many of the people we love. Friendships will fray, relationships will end, and the people we love will die.

But we can focus on finding lifelong friends, exert effort to detect and repair fraying, make new friends proactively, and squeeze in all the love we can. We can also encourage our loved ones to engage in healthy habits to extend their lives.

See, for instance, “Daily Ritual: A Habit-Creation Tool.”

6. Mortality – one day, we’ll be gone.

However, by taking great care of your body, you can likely give yourself more years. By being as grateful as you can to exist each day, you may be happier during those years. By funding more rigorous life extension research, we can one day give more years to many.

See, for instance, “Longevity FAQ“.

7. Extinction – one-day, humanity will go extinct.

However, the actions we take over the coming decades/centuries could determine whether humanity lasts only a little more time or a VASTLY longer time. Our wisdom must grow faster than the power of our technology. Support and fund “existential risk” work.

See, for instance, “The case for reducing existential risks“.

8. Randomness – we’re at the mercy of a tremendous amount of luck. Some are born sick orphans in squalor, some healthy, into loving families, in wealthy countries.

We didn’t choose, but we can make the world better for others and give more people good luck.

See, for instance, “Leaving Your Mark on the World.”

9. Rejection – some people won’t like us. And whatever we do or create, some people will think it sucks.

But we can surround ourselves with people who really like and value us, who support us even if they sometimes don’t like our behavior or think our projects are pretty dumb. They help us be better.

10. We will mess up and fail many times.

But by accepting (to the best of our ability) that we (and everyone else too) will fail many times, it frees us to try harder things and to have self-compassion when we do fail. If we learn what we can from each failure, we create a silver lining (“sometimes you win, sometimes you learn.”)

See, for instance, “Learning From Mistakes.” 

11. Uncertainty – there are deep, important mysteries we will never know the answer to and major unknowns we can’t resolve. Major philosophical and personal questions of the utmost importance will go unsolved.

But we don’t need certainty to be happy. We can live with the big unknowns, even while striving as a species – and as individuals – to understand the world as best we can. We can also, at least, learn to be less of a mystery to ourselves.

See, for instance, “Life-Changing Questions.” 

12. Disappointment – we won’t get all the things we want. At some point, we’ll badly want to get a certain job, achieve a certain goal, or be with a certain person, and we’ll never get it.

But we can learn to better accept reality for what it is. And even though we can’t have all that we want, we will get some of what we want, and we can get over the things we wanted and didn’t get.

See, for instance, our article on resetting your psychological baseline.

13. Animality – we are creatures who can reason, speak, understand physics, invent ideas, write stories, think abstractly, transform the world, etc., and yet we are also animals at the same time. We aspire to be something more than animals, and yet we have animal bodies, drives, constraints, reactions, and impulses.

But we can learn to work with, rather than against, our animal nature. When our inner mouse is afraid of something we know is not dangerous, we can learn to soothe it. When our inner dog badly wants something that we know is not in our long-term interest, we can make a compromise by giving ourselves something else we desire that is not so out of alignment with our goals. When our inner bee wants to copy others in doing something that violates our values, we can find other ways to fit in without compromising our integrity, or we can find a new colony that suits us better.

Importantly, since these are difficult truths for all of us, we can face them together, seeking to help one another.

For me, reflecting on the difficult truths that we all face gives new meaning to the idea that we should “be kind because everyone is fighting a great battle.”

It’s tough being a human. But thankfully, we are not alone. Let’s make the best of this together.

This piece was first written on March 5, 2021, and first appeared on this site on October 28, 2022.

Your happiness, like the level of the ocean, is caused by a superposition of waves of different frequencies. Each operates on a distinct scale – they sum up to determine your well-being at any given point in life. Each wave tends to oscillate around its mean or neutral point (except for the slowest waves, which take your whole life to unfold). One useful way to think about becoming happier is to take care of your life at the level of each of these waves.

Your Waves From Highest to Lowest Frequency

(1) Your Reactions [~a few seconds]: the fastest, highest frequency waves are your emotional shifts based on what just happened a moment ago. If you just had a sip of a delicious beverage, you’ll feel better than if you just knocked your beverage over.

(2) The Setting [~1 minute]: the next fastest wave is based on what’s around you right now and what activity you’re engaged in. Are you walking outside enjoying nature, shopping in a grocery store, talking to a friend, or reviewing your taxes? Your emotional state depends on what you’re doing and where you’re doing it.

(3) Your Body [~10 minutes]: how do you feel in your body? Are you hungry? Do you have to go to the bathroom? Does your back hurt? Are you overheated? These states tend to persist until something changes and more often make us feel bad than good – though you can, of course, have positive body states too (e.g., the feeling of taking a warm bath, getting a massage, or experiencing a post-workout high).

(4) Your Mood [~a few hours]: some days, you may wake up in a funk. Sometimes, after a few hours, your mood might change due to something good or bad happening, or perhaps due to nothing at all that you can put your finger on. Your mood may well shift a few times throughout the day.

(5) Your Circadian Rhythm [~1 day]: you likely have a time of day when you tend to feel your best. You might be a morning person or a night owl. Additionally, once enough hours go by without sleeping (especially after it gets dark), you’ll start to feel sleepy. If you slept badly during the previous night or your circadian rhythm is disrupted, that is very likely to impact how you feel the next day.

(6) An Acute Illness [~1 week]: do you have an acute viral or bacterial infection? Typically these reduce our functioning and make us feel bad for a few days to a few weeks. Of course, some illnesses are much worse than this, and some end up as a chronic health problem operating on a longer scale.

(7) Hormones & Nutrition [~1 month]: the most obvious cycle of this type is the change in female hormones during the menstrual cycle. Some scientists claim male hormones also have periodic (though not necessary monthly) fluctuations, but this is more controversial. Some nutritional deficits also operate on this time scale.

(8) Loss & Gain [~4 months]: if you lose something you care a lot about (e.g., you break up with the person you love, or your house burns down), it will typically take at least a few months to start feeling mostly normal again. And of course, sometimes it takes far longer than that if the loss is especially severe or if it’s something that is extremely important to you that you believe can never be replaced. On the positive side, a big gain can cause months or more of substantially boosted happiness. The obvious example is the “new relationship energy” of falling in love. But a new job you love, getting your dream home, a baby, a sudden windfall of cash, etc. may also cause months of elevated happiness before the hedonic treadmill starts to kick in to bring you closer to baseline. Of course, these positives can have long-lasting benefits, but usually they give us a burst of delight when they are new to us, and that burst fades.

(9) Satisfaction & Health [~ a year]: are you making progress towards your goals? Are you happy with your city, the people you hang out with, and your job? Do you have a romantic relationship, and if so, does it make you happy? Is your body fit or out of shape? Do you have chronic health issues? This yearly scale is often about our overall satisfaction with life, which involves an evaluation of how things are going overall compared to how we want them to be going.

(10) Identity [years]: Are you the person you want to be? Do you love (or like) yourself? Do you have lifelong friends? Is your life path one you feel good about? Do you feel positive about your past? This time scale is often about how you feel about yourself as a person, which usually shifts over multiple years (though it can occasionally undergo a rapid shift in the face of big life changes).

(11) Aging [decades]: as we age, our bodies and minds obviously change. Our aging bodies can feel worse and become less reliable. Yet there is at least some evidence of U-shaped happiness curves, with more happiness on average for the young and old (until very old age) – though it may be culturally dependent. Aging is the longest wave of them all. Good habits such as exercise and healthy eating can slow the negative impacts that come with age.

Your well-being is the sum of many waves operating at many scales. It’s easy to get lost in this sea of complexity and over-focus on just a few waves at the expense of the others. Here are questions for you to help you evaluate how each wave is going:

(1) Did your emotion just shift?

(2) How do you feel about the activity you’re doing right now and about the setting you’re doing it in?

(3) How does your body feel right now? Are you hungry, thirsty, in pain, etc.?

(4) How has your mood been for the past few hours?

(5) How sleepy or tired are you, and did you sleep well last night?

(6) Are you sick right now?

(7) Have you been eating healthy and nutritious foods lately, and are you being affected by your hormone levels?

(8) Are you processing some form of loss right now?

(9) How satisfied are you with your life?

(10) How satisfied are you with who you are?

(11) Are you taking care of your body for the very long term?

This piece was first written on October 17, 2020, and first appeared on this site on April 1, 2022.