"Why be saddled with this thing called life expectancy? Of what relevance to an individual is such a statistic? Am I to concern myself with an allotment of days I never had and was never promised? Must I check off each day of my life as if I am subtracting from this imaginary hoard? No, on the contrary, I will add each day of my life to my treasure of days lived. And with each day, my treasure will grow, not diminish"
About this Quote
Brault takes a cold, actuarial phrase - "life expectancy" - and treats it like an insult. The opening questions have the cadence of someone refusing to be managed: by doctors, by insurance tables, by the ambient cultural spreadsheet that turns living into risk assessment. "Saddled" is the tell. Life expectancy arrives not as guidance but as a burden, a number that pretends to be personal while being aggressively impersonal.
The intent is less to deny mortality than to reject the psychology of countdown. Notice how he frames the statistic as an "allotment" that was "never had and was never promised". That language smuggles in a critique of entitlement culture in reverse: we act as though we're owed a certain number of years, and then we live as debtors to that imagined contract. His string of rhetorical questions mimics the anxious habit he's trying to break - the daily mental subtraction, the compulsive bookkeeping.
The pivot is a neat rhetorical judo move: replace scarcity with accumulation. By redefining time as a "treasure of days lived", he swaps the fear-driven metaphor (dwindling hoard) for a gratitude-driven one (growing archive). It's not naive optimism; it's a strategy for resisting a modern obsession with quantifying the self. In a world where health metrics, productivity apps, and longevity hype invite us to live like auditors of our own decline, Brault insists on an older, sturdier measure: not how much is left, but what has been actually lived.
The intent is less to deny mortality than to reject the psychology of countdown. Notice how he frames the statistic as an "allotment" that was "never had and was never promised". That language smuggles in a critique of entitlement culture in reverse: we act as though we're owed a certain number of years, and then we live as debtors to that imagined contract. His string of rhetorical questions mimics the anxious habit he's trying to break - the daily mental subtraction, the compulsive bookkeeping.
The pivot is a neat rhetorical judo move: replace scarcity with accumulation. By redefining time as a "treasure of days lived", he swaps the fear-driven metaphor (dwindling hoard) for a gratitude-driven one (growing archive). It's not naive optimism; it's a strategy for resisting a modern obsession with quantifying the self. In a world where health metrics, productivity apps, and longevity hype invite us to live like auditors of our own decline, Brault insists on an older, sturdier measure: not how much is left, but what has been actually lived.
Quote Details
| Topic | Mortality |
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