Six years ago, I wrote my own obituary. Found the document recently and the memory came flooding back — I didn’t actually write it, I dictated it during a long walk through “das Buch,” a green pocket in Wangen. Yesterday I read it to one of my sons. He said it was 95 percent accurate.
He wouldn’t tell me which five percent was missing. Fair enough.
I’ve devoured Harald Welzer’s recent books (favourites: Selbst denken and Smarte Diktatur), so I looked forward to “Nachruf auf mich selbst: Die Kultur des Aufhörens.” Like the book itself, I’m split on it.
The first half is too cerebral. Welzer plays to the sociology gallery when he doesn’t need to. His polished aphorisms delight as always, but I kept wondering how he’d manage the transition to the actual obituary stuff. He meets interesting people and weaves their wisdom about action, stopping, dying, living into the narrative. Fascinating insights, but the book only gains momentum when it gets personal.
For a second reading, the back half is enough. And what a back half it is.
Welzer drops his bombshell late: he recently had a heart attack. Initially, he wouldn’t accept it. Rode his bike to the doctor’s office. There he learned he’d had a massive coronary and was incredibly lucky to make it to hospital at all.
That kind of wake-up call rewires your thinking. Forces action.
With life’s finite nature suddenly front and centre, this book emerged. If I had to summarise it briefly: We should stop talking about the future and act now. But we also need to learn how to stop — cultivate it, celebrate endings.
My notes and thoughts (mixing Welzer’s words with mine):
- Innovation vs progress: We need progress. But where should those steps lead?
- Hollow heroes: Tech-bro Elon Musk only offers mobility utopias from the 1950s — rockets, cars, hyperloops. Gets you somewhere fast. Question is, what do you want there?
- Don’t optimise, eliminate: The car doesn’t need improvement, it needs to disappear. We waste time perfecting things we don’t need.
- Stopping is strength, not weakness: We have no methodology for stopping. That’s why it’s so difficult.
- Life without death isn’t life: We live as if we’ll never die. Lifelong learning — so what? What have we actually learned? What have we done?
- Brake progress with goals that demand action: It’s more comfortable to shift today’s problems to tomorrow. Our children will hate us for it.
- Goals block the path: Too much blather from brake-pullers. Future problems must be solved now, not in the future. Why do we still listen to old men in suits?
- Consciousness loosely connects to action: Sustainable awareness doesn’t guarantee sustainable behaviour.
- Chains, not crises: We’re not dealing with isolated crises but unfolding event chains. We stand around hands in pockets, watching the live streams and breaking news as the chain lengthens.
- Act now: The time for change is the present. Not past, not future. That’s all there is.
- Drunk and stupid: We all act like the drunk man in the joke who only looks for his lost keys under the streetlight because everywhere else is too dark.
- Finally stopping: Stopping needs a reason, but being able to stop needs skill. You have to practice that.
- Be an adventure-minimalist: Progress through reducing effort, not increasing it. Lightness, shedding ballast, effort, technology.
- Celebrate stopping: Don’t just switch off — celebrate the switching off beforehand. After all, what we’re stopping was important to us. Now it isn’t and must go.
- We just want to be loved: Fear of not being loved, or not being loved anymore, is the core behind everything unresolved on our deathbed.
- If only I had…: When we speak in conditionals before death, we haven’t acted or let go enough.
- Life is only bitter for those who imagine it sweet (from Chris Marker’s film “Sans Soleil”).
- The reckoning: Other things matter. Better to collect emotions where causes have nothing to do with effects.
- Life (and death) is not for cowards: Only those afraid of life fear death.
- Welzer’s resolutions: Stop optimising; make good mistakes; simply say what you think; ask the right questions instead of rushing to wrong answers.
I like that. I’m adopting it too.
I write these book notes only for myself. They might read a bit cryptically. Just read it yourself. More book notes here.
The German original lives at reinergaertner.de, my blog since before most of the internet existed (1997). Translation: AI. Quality control: me, squinting. Apologies in advance.