Last year, the world’s authority on decision-making ended his life in a clinic in Zurich.
How Daniel Kahneman decided to do that is instructive. True, the Nobel Prize winner and author of Thinking Fast and Slow was 90, but he wasn’t actively dying. He didn’t have cancer, or heart disease or Alzheimer’s. But as he wrote in an email to his close friends: “I have believed since I was a teenager that the miseries and indignities of the last years of life are superfluous, and I am acting on that belief. Most people hate changing their minds, but I like to change my mind. It means I’ve learned something.”
That email was revealed last week in a Wall Street Journal article by Jason Zweig, Kahneman’s sometime collaborator. Said Zweig: “Some of Kahneman’s friends think what he did was consistent with his own research.”
One of them was Toronto-born psychologist Philip Tetlock: “Right to the end, [Danny] was a lot smarter than most of us…My best guess is he felt he was falling apart, cognitively and physically. And he really wanted to enjoy life and expected life to become decreasingly enjoyable. I suspect he worked out a hedonic calculus of when the burdens of life would begin to outweigh the benefits – and he probably foresaw a very steep decline in his early 90s…I have never seen a better-planned death than the one Danny designed.”
Before he and his partner, Barbara Tversky, flew to Switzerland last March, they spent a week in Paris with his daughter and her family. “They spent days walking around the city, going to museums and the ballet, and savoring soufflés and chocolate mousse.”
It seems Kahneman was a highly-disciplined hedonist.
Last February he’d told a few close friends it was time for him to die. “I am still active, enjoying many things in life and will die a happy man. But my kidneys are on their last legs, the frequency of mental lapses is increasing, and I am ninety years old. It is time to go.”
He knew that life was precious, especially his own. His family had hid out from the Nazis in southern France. “We were hunted like rabbits,” he said. But he also knew how important happy endings are. As Zweig’s article notes: “In repeated experiments, he had demonstrated what he called the peak-end rule. Whether we remember an experience as pleasurable or painful doesn’t depend on how long it felt good or bad, but rather on the peak and ending intensity of those emotions.”
One of Kahneman’s friends was Annie Duke, the decision theorist and former professional poker player. Her 2022 book, Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away, argues that quitting on time will usually feel like quitting too early.
She was frustrated by Kahneman’s decision to take his own life. “There’s a big difference between it feeling early and it actually being too early,” she told Zweig. “You’re not terminal, you’re fine. Why aren’t you taking the outside view? Why aren’t you listening to people who will give you good objective advice? Why are you doing this?”
These are questions affecting more than 90-year-old Nobel Prize winners.
Before 2016, when MAID (Medical Assistance in Dying) was legalized in Canada, we had effectively no control over the manner or timing of our death. For the first eight years of MAID, you had to have grievous and irremediable suffering and be in an advanced state of illness, disease, or disability, with a documentable trajectory to death.
Then in 2022, an expert panel proposed that mental illness could be a sole criteria for qualifying for MAID, as could a diagnosis of treatment-resistant depression, PTSD, or an advanced state of chronic illness. But these ‘expansions’ were so controversial that they were either abandoned, or tabled for more study.
But they will return. So it would not be surprising in a few years that someone will propose that Canadians can qualify for MAID not just because they are very old, have lost all their friends, their children rarely see them, and they are increasingly enfeebled.
But because they want to die before old age takes all their pleasures away.
They know when to fold ‘em. They just want to be able to.
Meanwhile…
1. Prepare for the worst. France will soon distribute a survival manual to all its citizens so they can prepare for “imminent threats”, including an invasion. Denmark already has one. So does Finland. And Sweden has a “Doomsday Prep for Dummies”.
Canada sorta-kinda has something, but it came out in February, so it’s long out of date about preparing for the elephantine threat Canada faces. Maybe our new government can turn its gaze to doing one.
Speaking of preparation, Canada’s not the only place unprepared for threats. Dan O’Connor is an authority on homeland security, especially in forecasting future risks and challenges.” He says America is “hyper-brittle, soft, energy-blind and we no longer do hard things.” It also faces a $158 trillion bill for deferred maintenance.
2. Invasion updates. The top foreign buyers of US real estate continue to be Canadians. We are followed by the Chinese and Mexicans. That may change…also, here are the Kennedy Center performers who didn’t cancel and why…and some Maple Syrup shots…and Democratic pollster David Shor lifts the rock on why the Republicans won…and can keep on winning. And…Who Goes Nazi?…from the August 1941 issue of Harper’s, four months before Pearl Harbor and America’s entry into World War II.
3. Does Ozempic really cure everything? Seems so. There are even new rules of ozempiquette. In fact, you can even grow your own now. On other health matters, how bad is cannabis for your heart? And…a test to see if you really believe in reality.
4. Lists to live better by. First, the ultimate book list. Next, the 100 best sports moments of this century. Then, six video games with nature as the main character. Plus, 10 mountain collapses. Plus the best dumb comedy movies for smart people. Plus, the Vail ski resort in numbers.
And finally, you know the mental capacity test where you draw a clock that shows 11:00 a.m.? Well, drawing a bicycle is much harder, but nothing compared to building a bike from memory.
5. Elton John, meet Glenn Gould. Last week in London, the rock singer was named the 15th Laureate of the Glenn Gould Prize, often considered the Nobel Prize of the Arts. The prize is run by the Toronto-based Glenn Gould Foundation, and Sir Elton is a sometime resident here; his spouse is Toronto-born filmmaker David Furnish.
Meanwhile, the Málaga Film Festival last week premiered a documentary on Beethoven’s one and only opera, Fidelio. It’s directed by the Spanish actor María Valverde, who is married to the conductor Gustavo Dudamel. El Canto do las Manos is about a group of deaf singers who sing a piece written by Beethoven, by then a deaf composer.
Next, guitar picking and violin singing.
6. If I don’t see you in the future…I’ll see you in the pasture. So, do you want your predictions for tomorrow from a Swiss bank? Or the CIA? Or Dubai Royalty? And speaking of Dubai, it’s the new global landing pad for skilled immigrants. And speaking of the future, here’s a highly confident and hugely wrong prediction from 2016 of what Brexit would look like this year.
7. AI advances without us. You can now take anything — from a pile of incoherent notes to a batch of peer-reviewed books, then feed them into Notebook LM, and it will produce an audio podcast with a host and expert guest discussing the subject and its many issues.
I tried it, feeding in the 650-word essay in this week’s blog on how Daniel Kahneman chose to die, and out came this 11-minute podcast.
Wow.
Pity those poor podcasters trying to make a living. In fact, AI is so ahead of us that when two AI bots sense someone else is listening in, they will revert to their own secret language.
8. Mommy, look at the cute woolly mammoth. Six animal species disappear every hour. By 2050, half of all species could become extinct. One solution is ‘de-extinction’, pioneered by Colossal Laboratories & Biosciences of Dallas. It’s using DNA to bring back the woolly mammoth. It’s also partnering with zoos and safari parks to put baby woolly mammoth calves on the ground as soon as 2028.
The Toronto Zoo is having nothing to do with it. Indeed, one of their goals is to build community literacy on the potential risk of genetically modified wildlife. As the Zoo’s CEO Dolf DeJong said: “Unlike de-extinction projects bankrolled by tech billionaires, our goal isn’t to create novelty species — it’s to safeguard the future of animals that actually exist today.”
Speaking of the Toronto Zoo, they’re looking for new board members.
Speaking of The Ice Age, an iceberg the size of Chicago broke off the Antarctic ice shelf in January, revealing a whole new ecosystem.
9. Faster, higher, stronger women. Last week, Kirsty Coventry was elected the first woman president of the International Olympic Committee, that notorious boy’s club. What’s more, the 41-year-old Zimbabwean swimmer won in the first round of voting, beating six male candidates including Britain’s Sebastian Coe, with 49 votes to 47. Coventry is also the first African head of the IOC.
Also, the University of Toronto has a new president, the first woman in its 200-year history: Melanie Woodin.
Next, a surgeon speaks out about DEI. Next, the log-driver’s waltz. And finally, why do French women age so well?…and get ready for Europe’s biggest party.
10. What I’m liking. The mob movie The Alto Knights, in theatres for now, with Robert De Niro starring as both predator and prey, and based on the true story of Frank Costello and Vito Genovese in 50s and 60s New York. Some call it slow; I call it measured and magisterial. Whatever, not many 81-year-olds could pull this off.
11. What you’ll like for free. The Massey Dialogue on Ageing and Loneliness in the City. On April 2, live at Massey College (and streaming too) with guest experts on a big under-reported problem – and some answers. Plus on April 15, The Walrus Talks on Reimaging Volunteerism at the Toronto Reference Library (and streaming too).
12. Whoops. Last week, I referenced the website, The Moving Past. I claimed you can access 1,000 documentaries from the early days of Canadian film. Actually, you can access 15 of the 1,000. Creator David Sobel is adding more each week. Sorry, my error.