We woke up in the morning, had coffee, and then headed to what is called the Blue House. And then there were some bureaucratic procedures. As we were waiting for the nurse, Moshe wanted to record a few things. He wanted his family to know that the end was peaceful, intentional, and with acceptance and love. So, we recorded some videos for them about this. He was crying a little bit; it was just very emotional. It was not sadness. It was love and gratitude. I think even happiness that things were about to be over.

And then the procedure started. He had an IV and there’s this machine that pushes a syringe with the medication. They first put IV fluid—saline water—in it. And he pressed the button to see what he should do and how things get pressed and so on. When he saw all of this, they replaced the saline syringe with the medication. They asked him if he was ready. I gave him one last hug. I told him I loved him. He said he loved me back. He said thank you for the last few days, that he couldn’t have imagined them being better. And then, with conviction, I sat back. I told him that he should know how loved he is. He said he both knows it and he feels it. And then he leaned forward and with a lot of positive conviction— his hand not shaking—he pressed the button, leaned back into his chair, and in a few seconds he was asleep. You could see the peacefulness setting in. Within, I don’t know, 20-30 seconds, he stopped breathing.

We sat there for a while—the staff left and I sat there for a while. And then it was so strange. I got up and got a taxi and went to the airport. It was only when I arrived at the airport that I started feeling physically strange. I had time before my flight, so I tried to write and I realized how much pain I had in my hands. I always have a little bit of pain, but this was a lot more. I couldn’t even write. It became clear to me that it was not just physical pain. It was a combination of the emotional, mental, and the physical pain together that I was experiencing. Together it was just too much. Then I noticed that my whole body was shaking. Not big shakes, just little shakes. It felt that something was wrong physically. Flying there with him and then flying back alone with some of his possessions; there was something very tough about that. But on the flight, just as we were about to land, I went over the last four days, and I felt that I really did a good job. I made him happy and they were contemplative and thoughtful. He shared and I shared. And we talked a little bit about things like procedures and the letters that he wanted to write. But it was a time that was psychologically rich with experiences, with thoughts, with friendship, with caring. And I really feel that I stood up to my commitment on this in the best possible way. I was thinking that this may be my purpose in life. I think I did it very well.

He will be missed. I don’t know exactly how I’ll process the grieving and the experience and so on. But what a guy. He left me with lots of thoughts.

Maybe the most salient now is that it is possible to go peacefully if you feel that you’ve achieved the main missions in your life. Not just peacefully, but with the acceptance and even happiness to end life if you feel that you’ve been successful and that happiness and sadness can live side by side about the end of life.

I’ll keep contemplating this.

It’s Thursday night. Tomorrow is Friday. Tomorrow is the day of the medication.

We’ve had a few very intense days for both of us. We spent many hours every day talking about lots of topics, got very close, and shared lots of things. In addition to sharing, I was also trying to figure out what is my role in this. How do I stay helpful? I don’t even know how to summarize all the all the things that happened.

Maybe I would say a couple of things that had the most impact on me. One, is the peacefulness of knowing the end that comes with it. It is surprising from an outside perspective to see that calmness about tomorrow—100% conviction, no question, and calmness. The second thing is the ability to enjoy things. Going for coffee, for ice cream, looking at the scenery. We talked all through the day and went for a few walks every day. We had coffee and drinks and ice cream and some food. The ability to appreciate the weather and the fountains and the streets, the taste of the coffee and the ice cream and being inquisitive. The conviction I thought would waver to some degree—I didn’t think it would go to no, but I thought the ability to extract a lot of joy from these days for both of us. And it’s a duality. It’s not joy and no sadness. It’s both things side by side. The third thing which we had lots of discussions about today, was about the fact that he feels that he has done his job in many areas of his life. He feels he’s been successful professionally as a very, very successful therapist has helped lots of people. He showed me some comments from patients. As a significant other—it’s amazing to listen to the love that they were able to develop. And as a father with three amazing kids with amazing relationships. You would say that somebody who has checked the boxes who is happy professionally and happy romantically and feel that they’ve done their job—you would wonder wouldn’t they want to just push on for another few days? Few weeks? Few months?

The answer was that’s one of the things that gave him the power to let go. What he said was that he does not have any unresolved issues. He figures that he’s done his best in each of those. He’s achieved what he wanted to achieve, and now it’s easier to let go. He said, is it sadder to give on a successful, happy life than to give on an unsuccessful, unhappy life? Yes, it is sadder. But does it help with the acceptance? Absolutely. And his level of acceptance is very high.

We just got back to the hotel. I did not sleep much the last two days. I don’t know what will happen tonight. We will see. But what a privilege. I feel that I got to meet someone for multiple days in a very intense environment, learn a lot about them, for them, for him to learn a lot about me. Shared lots of thoughts and ideas and gave me lessons for life, and some criticism, and suggestions.

It will be a lot of material that I will keep on digesting and thinking about.

That’s it for now.

And I thought that most of us don’t witness dying that much anymore. Think to yourself, how many people have you witnessed at the end of their life? A long time ago, when we lived in small communities with larger families, people would gather at the house of those who are terminally sick. They would bring food and help and be there at the moment of sickness and participate and know what was going on. Maybe that also created a lower level of fear. And now we have movies, but most of us have not experienced being at the bedside of somebody who’s taking their last breath. The experience Moshe described of witnessing the end of the life of his dogs is not very common. Maybe more for dog lovers than not. But maybe we need something like this. Maybe we need to witness the end of life to change how afraid we are of this.

We will see. I will tell you on the other end of this about my own fears. Actually, I can tell you already because I was there with my mother when she passed away. I wasn’t that afraid before, but it was very comforting to see that my mother did not suffer. That she basically went to sleep and overnight her sleeping got deeper and her breathing slowed to fewer breaths per minute. It became slower and then it just stopped. There weren’t any signs of stress or pain. It was comforting.

I’m sure this will be painful (for me). My mother’s end of life was painful and sad and I cried a lot. But it was also comforting to know that it’s not a gasping for breath and the feeling like you’re drowning.

He said if he only listened to the social pressures, it could go on for a very, very long time. It’s not clear when the social pressure would end. The only thing that is clear is that it’s not good right now. He said if things kept being just like this would I want them to continue, he said no. So why delay? Why not end things? The same thing went for saying goodbye. He said he could continue corresponding with his family members, he could continue telling them he loves them. But they had a very good ending and meeting and summary why procrastinate more? Why delay things more?

I think, in general, procrastination is a huge problem for human nature. It’s a cause for lots of the things we don’t do well. But maybe the end of life is one of the cases where procrastination is the worst for us—much worse than procrastinating on paperwork and filing our taxes and so on—that we don’t want to get to that moment. And because we don’t want to get to that moment, we’re doing lots of things that are not good for anybody.

He said that if he asked his family if today is the right day, they would have said no. And then tomorrow, they again would have said no. There’s a story of when is it worthwhile to stop smoking. And the answer is that if you think long term, you say smoking is terrible. But if you think about it one day at a time, it will never be a good day to quit smoking. Why? Because if you’re a smoker and you love smoking, every day you smoke is a good day. And every day you smoke is not going to kill you—not that day alone. So, if you wake up every day and ask if today is a good day to stop smoking? Every day you would say, not today, not today, not today. But if you say, do I want to keep on being a smoker? You would say, no, I don’t.

And I think the same thing is true here. If we think short term, every day we would say, not today, not today, not today. But if you say, do I want to live like this, in general? The answer is no. And if the answer is no, then you know what you should do sooner.

So very courageous. Picking a date. Sticking to it. Saying goodbye in the right way. Procrastination and end of life.

I think that in many ways his end was when he left home. The end is not the day after tomorrow. It’s not these few days here with me. The end, in the most important way, was when he said goodbye to his family and closed the door behind him and went to the airport.

But that’s outside of my control. But part of what is in my control is these few days. We have these four days together, and then of course the actual end.

We just came back from breakfast. We’re going to go for a walk by the lake. We’re having deep, meaningful conversation. I would say that I have a good sense that these days can be good and powerful and meaningful. I think they have been so far. We’re not talking about anything trivial, just about life wisdom and lessons and sharing—good and bad—some of his history. Kind of like a mutual confession, I would say. I think it’s cleansing. I think it’s good. It’s not easy. I think I’m in service. So, I keep thinking about how I can make this useful and valuable and rewarding in some way. Not pleasant; it’s not about pleasant, but it’s about some sense of satisfaction and joy. I keep thinking about his perspective and doing my best to give him what I think he wants. I would say that it’s taxing, it’s intensive, and it’s rewarding. But I think it’s very positive as well.

I’ll come back to report more as I learn more and I have more thoughts. But for now if the question is: Can the ending be good? I think the answer is yes.

One more thought. There’s this research on how important the ending is. That the ending really colors everything else that came before it. We end the meal with dessert and it colors everything before. And I think in that regard, a good ending is an ending that colors everything in a positive way. And I think that’s what I’m trying to think about and figure out how to do well.

Okay, it’s a good ending.

One more video having to do with end of life and the person that I’m traveling with to Dignitas in Switzerland. The story of that individual is that almost two years ago he decided that it was time to end things. He applied to Dignitas and was accepted. There was no date set, but there was the decision. He decided that’s how he wanted his life to end.

He applied to Dignitas to make sure this would be possible and then gathered his family to tell them about his decision even though there was not a date. There was just the general decision. As he finished, one of his kids said that they also had an announcement and pulled out an ultrasound of their eight-week pregnancy.

My person, of course, was very happy about this news and delayed things. It turns out that there were many delays for the next (almost) two years. All sorts of things that had a date that the family implied, that he wanted to wait for. And he kept delaying and delaying and delaying until he recently decided to not delay anymore.

There continue to be many reasons that he can delay for, but he has decided against any more. I asked him how he feels about the last year and a half when he extended his life and got to experience all kinds of wonderful things. He said he is positive about that part—that he got to do lots of things. But if his family would have been okay with it, he would have stopped a while ago. He said that he was happy he was there for them, for the celebrations and, not to sadden them before an event. But he said for him, it would have been better to part a while ago.

I asked him if, of the delays he had, how many were purely for him and how many were because he felt that his family wanted it—as a father, potential grandfather, husband—and he wanted to fulfill his duties? What was the percentage?

He said about 80% of the effect were that he wanted to do it for them. He wanted to do it—not directly for him. But because it was important for them.

It reminded me that in some of the research we did on end of life, we found that often the patient is in much higher acceptance. They accepted their fate and are not as anxious about it. And the family, of course, is in a different place.

I don’t know whether this delay was overall good or not. It’s hard to judge—retrospective judgment and so on. But I think the insight that people make lots of decisions including at the end of life, because of others, is certainly important for good and for bad. What do we ask people to do for us? I asked him for his perspective how much he did for himself vs. for them. I did not talk to his family and I don’t think I will. But how do they feel about asking him to continue something that is good for them but maybe not good for him?

This whole topic has lots of complexities. Hopefully over time there will be some answers.

I was thinking about the time that we will have together. The process takes a few days. You arrive one day, there’s a meeting with a psychologist and a clinician another day, another meeting with a psychologist and clinician to make sure that the person really wants to go through with this. And we’re going to have a lot of quality time together. And then there’s going to be the actual procedure.

But the procedure will be relatively short, and we’ll have quite a few days together.

The procedure, I’m sure, will be sad. I’ll do what I can to be there for him in the way that he wants me to. I am wondering what the multiple days will be like. He will be thinking about the clock counting backwards. I will be thinking about the clock counting backwards. What is possible under those conditions? He wants to learn new things, to think new thoughts, to get to know each other better, to share. He doesn’t want to be sad. He wants to be optimistic and think about life.

What will these conversations be like? Will I be able to set aside that countdown and focus on the moment? Will having the countdown make the moments feel more precious? How will it change from day to day? Maybe three days before will feel like a long time. Maybe the night before will feel different. I don’t know.

I am positive that I can be there for him. And I think I’ll do a good job with whatever he wants. I think he picked me for a particular reason that was good for him. I don’t know what other people would want, but I think he most likely can get what he wants from me. I will be there for him in the best possible way. But what will it be like for me? I don’t know.

He also said that he didn’t want his family to fly one way there with him and then back without him. He said that it will be less traumatic for me to do it. That’s also true. I’m sure it will be traumatic to some degree. I don’t know to what. Certainly, less for me than his family. So, he’s asking me to accept the burden and not his family.

But how will it be? How will it be to be there? How will it be over time? How will the procedure be? How will flying back alone be? I’m hoping that I cand do what he wants me to. That’s the main thing. I need to figure out how to do that in the best possible way.

The discussions about end of life are sad. But I think they also help us think about the positive things about life.

So, I used to think of quality of life as the main factor for deciding whether to continue or not. As you know, I’m helping somebody who’s going to end their life at Dignitas and I’ve been trying to help him think about when the right time is to make this decision. Imagine that you have options between a very miserable life, very good life, or neutral. Where are you in that? If you are on the positive side, that’s great. If it’s both positive and negative, it’s complex. If it’s just negative, it’s easier.

I thought that what people should do is take the pluses and the negatives and if you’re in the plus side all day then you’d choose to stay alive. If you’re in the negative side all day, then it’s time to end things. If you’re in both the plus and negative sides, it’s a complex computation of what to do (one day I might go into my thoughts about this). This particular guy’s quality of life is mixed but leaning more positive. So, it’s not positive all the time and it’s also not negative all the time. When I thought about the mix, I thought that it was pointing to staying alive for a bit longer until the mix gets worse.

But in discussions with him, I got the feeling that he thinks his current state of functioning is a disgrace to his own history. He said that if he had a different history then maybe the way he is now, would have been acceptable for somebody in terms of pure quality of life for a bit longer. Not for much longer but for a bit longer. He said his autonomy, his freedom, the ability to do things, the pride he had in himself and in his body, his ability to do his job, and the pride he took in providing for his family were a lot of the things that built his life. He said that the chapter he is in now is positive if you look at it by itself, but it’s a disgrace—he used this word—to his old self. He said that enters his computation. It’s not just about the moment; it’s about the fact that he feels that staying alive now is taking away from who he was.

I don’t know how to settle this thought. It’s still complex and I’m still thinking about it. But it means that when elements that build somebody’s identity (autonomy, pride, providing, a job that he loves, etc.) are taken away, it creates a negative feeling even though it’s relative. If he didn’t have the comparison this would have been fine, but he cannot help but think of it relative to the past.

And that feeling of betraying his old self—betraying what he always thought, believed, wanted to do—adds another component of making life unbearable. It’s a very complex thought. It’s very hard for me to put myself in his shoes and try to get a sense of whether I would feel the same or not. I don’t know. I do know that he has a lot of conviction around that thought.

I thought I’d share it with you and if I ever learn more about this, I will return to it.

Thoughts about death are very sad. But I hope you don’t find it only sad. It also helps us think life. About the positive things.

As you know by now, I became an end-of-life doula and I’m going with somebody to Dignitas in Switzerland. He decided that he wants me to go with him instead of his family. We had lots of discussions about this decision. Before I share his reasoning, think about what you would do and what you would want.

Now for what he told me. He said that during his last few days (the process requires about three days partially filled with meetings, verifications, and so on) he wants to focus on positive things. He said he wants to learn something new. He knows me a little bit, but he wants to get to know me better. He wants to talk about philosophy and ideals about life. He said he doesn’t want to be sad. He doesn’t want to look at pictures of himself in his youth. He doesn’t want to see the kids and the grandchildren he will leave behind. He said he wants to depart from his family, and he doesn’t want to feel that maybe he made a bad decision during these three days. He doesn’t want to feel guilt. He mostly doesn’t want to feel sad. He wants to try to be in a good place emotionally. He said that if he is with his family he’s worried that he will see them crying, that he will start crying, that it will be sad and difficult. He doesn’t want that.

Now, I will say that when my mother was passing away, she also did not want to look at pictures. There was a point in her illness where she did not want the sadness. I also felt very strongly that that at the end she didn’t want to see us crying and we tried very hard not to cry.

So, you know, when he initially asked me to join him, I thought that there were maybe friction in the family or maybe there were some things that were not going well and that’s why he asked me. But then he explained his reasoning and I have to say that I understand his perspective. It’s complex, it’s painful. But I do understand it.

I’m thinking about what I would want and I think I would want the same thing. I think going into this difficult process with a very fixed time, I don’t think I would want to see the sadness in anybody’s face. I think I really would want both—to be with the people I love but without sadness. But I don’t think that’s possible.

So maybe he is correct.

Very sad and I hope you also find it very interesting.

The continuation of discussions about end of life. As you know, I became an end-of-life doula and I’m going with somebody for the first time to Switzerland to end their life at Dignitas. A place where you can do it legally and safely and at the right time.

I was thinking about timing. So, we got the documents from Dignitas, and there’s meeting one meeting with a physician and meeting two with a psychologist, and then there’s the meeting for the medication.

It’s at 10 a.m. on a particular date.

When I think of the people who I helped toward the end of their lives or the people from my family that I got to see—nobody had a date and an hour that was this precise. Think about it. When is it that we have a date so precisely?

You might be summoned to a court date. Or maybe there’s a discussion with your boss and you think that maybe they’ll ask you to leave. There are a few things that we have dates in advance, that are very, very precise. But even the dates that are very precise, maybe the meeting with your boss you think will not go well but you’re not 100% sure. You have a court trial, you’re not really sure how it will turn out.

This one is so precise. And I think it’s a unique perspective.

I have to say that this question has probably crossed all our minds. Would you like to know when you’re going to die? I think I would like to have like a general sense. Is it five years or ten years or twenty years from now? Would I like to know the exact date well in advance? I don’t think so. If I knew in ten years on April 13^th that I’ll die? I don’t think I would want that. But in the short term, the person I’m escorting, he’s finding that date incredibly positive.

He knows there’ll be a date when he stops suffering. He has a list of things he wants to accomplish between now and then. He’s meeting with lots of people. He said he’s not explaining his choice to anybody. We can talk about other things, but he’s not interested in explaining his choice over and over.

Maybe for me—and I wonder what it is for you—I would like to have a general sense and only when I get very close, I think I would like to have a specific sense, like the exact time to prepare, to settle things.

You know, when I thought about getting that letter, I thought it would be frightening for him. I thought the date would be, even though he wanted it, I thought that every day that would pass would be that hour and that date would be difficult, but no, it’s just positive.

I don’t know if I’ll ever be in his shoes and able to make such decisions. I’m very curious. The good thing about all of this is that he is positive. Very positive. And much more positive than I was expecting with that.

Some things to think about.

This person decided to end their life in Switzerland at a place called Dignitas. It’s a place that you can legally go and physicians are allowed to end someone’s life. There are lots of terms, forms, conditions, somebody has to be terminally ill, etc. A little while ago, this person I’m helping received the date on which they would give him the medication. I asked him how it was to get the letter with the date—there’s something very concrete about that—and how his well-being has been before and after receiving the date. He told me two things: one I think is interesting and one is fascinating.

The first one, interesting, he said how much relief there was to get the letter. He wasn’t dreading it. He was waiting for it. The moment he got it, he was hoping for it. He filled out all the paperwork and so on. And he said how much relief was in that. I think that’s interesting.

What’s the fascinating part? The fascinating part is when I asked him about his quality of life. How was his day to day since? And he said it has been dramatically better than before. He said that before, he was paying a lot of attention to his body parts that were not working. Getting up off of a chair, the pain here, the pain there—difficulty in all kinds of things. He’s had cancer for a while and there are lots of systems that don’t work as well. He said that before he got the letter and before he had a date, most of his attention was directed at the things that were not working. If he was trying to get out of a chair, for example, the things that were not working took his attention.

He said that after he got the letter, he stopped paying attention to the negative things and started paying attention only to the positive things. He said the signals of the illness (things that were getting worse, things were not working well), he knows will be taken care of in three weeks and he can focus on the positive things. He said it was a shift in attention.

It reminded me of research by Lara Carstensen, who showed that young people focus on the negative and the positive, but often more on the negative. As people get older, we start focusing less on the negative and more on the positive. This is why young people think they must be really miserable. They’re not. They’re focusing more on the positive. She attributed it to the idea that there’s lots to learn from negative things. And when you’re young, you should focus on the negative things. But as you get older, there are still a lot of things to learn from negative things, you just have less time to use it, so why not focus on the positive things?

In my friend’s situation, it is an extreme. Negative things in life give us information, signals, what to avoid, and what to worry about. But the moment he knows the date that thing becomes less important, and suddenly he has room to only think of the positive. He said he’s expecting a fantastic three weeks ahead, focusing only on the positive things.

I hope you find this both sad, as I do, but also important and fascinating. I’m both heartbroken about him and also relieved for him that his suffering will end soon.

It’s a complex emotion.

Bye for now.

So, I gave a talk in an organization. We covered lots of topics and among them, we talked about romantic life. Not my area of expertise but clearly it has important relevance to social science. Toward the end there was a very nice woman who described very openly and caringly and with concern, that she had been with her husband for a very long time and they were diverging for a very long time. He had his career, she had her career, they met to do all kinds of chores but they’re very divergent. She said that it’s very clear that she needed to make some real adjustments. It’s possible that he would make some adjustment, but she needed to make some real adjustments—giving up things in her career, timing, and so on to make it work. She asked me why she couldn’t make those changes. She was on this path, she knw what she was supposed to do to reunite with her husband or at least noticed some of the things that she should do for them to get back on the same path but said she can’t do it.

I told her to imagine her husband had an accident—I’m not wishing an accident on anybody—but imagine he had an accident and suddenly needed more of her time and attention. Would she find the time? Would she be able to adjust things in her life to help him. Even if it was a long-term injury, not just something for a week. She answered yes. And I asked if she would go ahead, and do it? Not whether she could, but would she actually do it? She said that she loved him very much and would make all the changes. I asked, why not do it now? (By the way, this applies for all genders and all roles.) But I said, if you recognize the need, and recognize that if it was a sharp need created by injury, you would be there, why not when it’s not a sharp need? When it’s just something that happened slowly over a long time. She said she didn’t know exactly. That the two things felt very different to her. An injury feels like the commitment is easy to come up with—it’s urgent, it’s important, it’s now, it can’t be delayed by another day. She said on the slow divergence, there’s no forcing function. She didn’t use those terms, but basically there was no forcing function for her.

More generally, I think it raises the point of what is easy for us to do on our own. And how easy it is for us to delay things that we know are good, but we’re still tempted to delay. The things that we think we will do another time and the benefit of forcing functions. I’m hoping nothing bad will happen to your loved one but think about this as a thought exercise: If you’re not finding the time for something, how would you behave differently if there was an injury involved? Can you turn around and clear some time?

That’s the thought exercise for today.

Let me first tell you what the researchers actually did.

What happened in the lab

In 1997, the psychologist Arthur Aron and his colleagues — Edward Melinat, Elaine Aron, Robert Vallone, and Renee Bator — published a paper with the unromantic title “The Experimental Generation of Interpersonal Closeness: A Procedure and Some Preliminary Findings”.

Notice that the word “love” does not appear in the title. Neither does “romance.” Aron was not trying to build a matchmaking device. He had a much more mundane problem, the kind researchers complain about over bad coffee: closeness between two people normally takes months or years to develop, and you cannot ask a grant committee to fund a study that runs that long. He needed a way to manufacture closeness on a schedule — in about the time it takes to watch a sitcom — so that he could then study it.

So he built a ladder. Thirty-six questions, arranged in three sets of twelve, each set slightly more revealing than the one before. Pairs of strangers were sat down together in the lab and given forty-five minutes to work through them, taking turns.

Set I is gentle and almost silly: Given the choice of anyone in the world, whom would you want as a dinner guest? By Set II you are on shakier ground: What is your most treasured memory? And by Set III the floor has quietly disappeared: When did you last cry in front of another person? By yourself? And: Share a personal problem and ask your partner’s advice on how they might handle it.

The control condition is the part almost nobody mentions, and it is the part that makes the study a study. A second group of strangers spent the same forty-five minutes together answering a matched set of small-talk questions — pleasant, harmless, the conversational equivalent of an elevator ride. Same room, same time, same amount of talking.

The pairs who answered the designed questions ended up reporting substantially more closeness to each other than the pairs who made small talk. Forty-five minutes with a stranger, and some of them reported a sense of connection they described as comparable to their closest relationships.

Also, one detail that has been retold so often it has become folklore: a pair from Aron’s lab reportedly went on to marry, and invited the research team to the wedding. Aron himself tells the story. But it is an anecdote.

Then the internet got hold of it

For eighteen years the procedure lived where such things usually live — in citations, syllabi, and the occasional conference talk, under the affectionate nickname the “fast friends” paradigm.

Then, in January 2015, the writer Mandy Len Catron published an essay in the New York Times Modern Love column called “To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This.” She had tried the questions in a bar with a university acquaintance. She wrote about it beautifully. The essay went off like a firework, and the Times ran the full list alongside it as “The 36 Questions That Lead to Love.”

On the staring. Catron and her partner finished by looking into each other’s eyes for four minutes, and this has since fused onto the 36 Questions exercise as though it were step 37 of the protocol. It was not part of Aron’s 1997 study at all. The idea comes from a separate line of research — Kellerman, Lewis, and Laird’s 1989 work on mutual gaze, which had strangers hold unbroken eye contact for two minutes and found increases in reported feelings of passionate love. It is a real finding from a real study. It is simply a different study. Catron combined them, which was a lovely piece of writing and a slightly confusing piece of citation.

The dinner party where small talk was banned

A few years ago Kristen Berman, my longtime collaborator and the co-founder of Irrational Labs, hosted a dinner for twenty-seven people with exactly one rule: no small talk. Not less of it. None. Guests all had to arrive at the same moment, so that nobody could ease in with the weather while the host took their coat. Where the place cards would normally go, there were index cards with questions on them. And the enforcement was handed to the guests — if a conversation drifted toward traffic, or real estate, or what somebody did for a living, anyone at the table could call it and change course.

People were still talking three hours later. Some of them were still thinking about those conversations a week later.

The line from Kristen’s account of that evening that I have not been able to stop repeating is this: the questions are not the technology, the permission is the technology. Asking someone at a dinner party what they would spend the hour on in a therapy session is prying — you made a unilateral move and you own the consequences. When a card asks it, nobody made a move. The card is the one being nosy, and if the answer gets uncomfortable you can both blame a piece of printed cardboard.

The basic idea is that we are not choosing small talk because we like it. We are simply following the social norm of not asking anything that could be interpreted in a bad light.

That dinner party eventually became a deck. Kristen and the team at Irrational Labs turned the index cards into No Small Talk, tested it in the field, and put up a free online version:

nosmalltalk.cards

Recently I took that version of the No Small Talk cards and built it into an app for two people, sequenced and tuned for romantic purposes rather than for dinner parties, and it is the version I recommend for couples when people ask me about the 36 questions:

decisionaids.danariely.com/romantic-journey

Three design choices in it are worth explaining, because each one is there to solve a specific failure of the original.

You choose the deck together, before you start. Aron’s list has a fixed depth, decided in 1997 by people who had never met you. Here you decide how far you are both willing to go, and you decide it jointly. That negotiation is not a preamble to the game — it is the first move of the game, and it is important as well.

You alternate. Every card gets two answers. This is the symmetry constraint from the lab, enforced by the software instead of by your goodwill.

You can always skip — and the skip is visible. This one I am fondest of. Forcing an answer turns a game into an interrogation, so passing has to stay available. But a pass that vanishes without a trace is just an escape hatch, and you will use it forty times. So the app keeps count where you can both see it. Nothing happens as a result. Nothing needs to. Knowing that the other person can see that you have skipped four times is quite enough to make you answer the fifth — and if it is not, then the pattern of what you are skipping has become its own conversation.

I recommend this exercise for people who are just starting dating and for people who’ve been together for a long time. Try it out, even if just a few cards to get the conversation started. I’m promising you that it’s going to be more meaningful than you expect it to be.

decisionaids.danariely.com/romantic-journey

So when #MeToo happened, it was clear that something had to be done. And there were lots of things, the details don’t matter now, that went overboard. The justification was that the way to fix things is for the pendulum to swing the other way, and then it would swing back. I have to say that I didn’t always buy that argument because I was worried about the swinging back that would happen later.

Well, I just heard about this term, masculinism. And I have to say with a very broken heart that I think the pendulum is swinging back in a way that is much worse than I thought was possible. I don’t think any of the people who said that the pendulum would swing back at some point imagined anything like this. And it got me to think a lot about the conflict in the Middle East and how there is no question that hate begets hate. We will overreact and they will overreact. We will overreact and maybe they will be deterred, etc. And it just gets worse and worse and worse.

I think that this model of the pendulum swinging is the wrong model. Think about it, the idea that there’s gravity and the pendulum swings, but over time the swinging stops. It’s really about friction, right? If there was no friction it would continue in the same way. But the physical model we have of the pendulum swinging is that it’s too much in one direction, it will swing in the other direction, then it will swing back. And slowly, slowly, slowly it would swing into very small changes and maybe even stop at its natural point.

I don’t think human nature fits with that model. I think when the pendulum swings, it actually swings in a more extreme way. Not always, and not for everybody, but to some degree. I think that conflicts like the one in the Middle East are like that. Without real external intervention, I think things are getting out of hand. I think that the model of things getting out of hand is stronger than this. And in masculinism, I’m not justifying it, of course, but there are now people who are not just mistreating women badly but are using it as an ideology.

So first, it’s very sad. I was terribly sad to read about this phenomenon. I had no idea it happened, but once I started reading, I went into my own rabbit hole of reading about it. If you want to have a difficult day or week or a month, go into it. But if not, just make yourself aware. It’s a very sad movement. Sad for humanity, sad for people, sad for women.

In addition to that, I’m wondering whether the pendulum model is just not the right model. And what we need to understand is that overreaction creates overreaction. That the model is a model of acceleration and not a model of slowing down. And what we need is strong external forces to add some force, because naturally things tend to get more out of hand instead of evening out.

I wanted to end this with something optimistic. I don’t have one. I just think we need to understand it and then try very hard not to think that if the pendulum overswings, it will correct itself.

The sad thought of the day.

I was reflecting this week about the good old times. I know, I know . . .

I was thinking about a discussion I had with the CEO of a very large pharmaceutical company. Years ago, I met this CEO and it turned out that we had overlapping interests. He was very interested in medication adherence—how often people take their medication as prescribed. I was interested in this question as well. It has to do with motivation and habits and what happens when people fall off the wagon and so on. And I proposed that he fund a research project so we could work on this question. He asked how much it would cost. I said, $500,000 a year. And he asked what exactly we would do? I told him I didn’t know exactly but we would dedicate some manpower and explore different aspects to justify the cost.

A few days later, I got a call from his assistant letting me know that he—let’s call him B—didn’t feel comfortable committing to a contract for $500,000 a year without knowing what the exact deliverables would be. I thought about it for a couple of seconds. And I said, “Would you tell B for me that if he doesn’t think that research should be flexible, and if he’s not willing to risk $500,000 a year on flexible research, then I don’t think he should be the CEO of this large company.” I’m sure you’re guessing how the story ends. We got the contract. We worked with them for quite a while. We produced lots of valuable research. But the point was not just my audacity (which I’m still proud of) but rather that flexibility is incredibly important.

Let’s say you get into a new topic. You don’t know exactly where it will go. But while creating the contract you add strict deliverables. What happens if, along the way, you find out that there could have been something better to do? What happened to first exploring? I think that the lack of trust and the lack of flexibility are basically killers of productivity. They look like they’re the right thing to do. But if you know exactly what you’re going to do, is there really a real point in doing it? I mean, there is some, but not as much. The whole point of doing research is to explore what we don’t know to try to understand something.

Anyway, I was lamenting. I was thinking about the time that we had flexible research projects where there was trust and flexibility between us and our sponsors. Everybody gained more when they existed. These days, this is no longer a possibility. These days, nobody has the flexibility. Everybody wants an exact process. How many hours? What’s the deliverables? When will they be delivered?

What is the outcome? The outcome is less exciting research, more predictable processes, and everybody loses. The research sponsors lose, the university loses, the students who are part of the research lose—all because we love bureaucracy.

Let’s think about how we can reintroduce flexibility into the process.

But I want to focus on the shelters in the city. Often what would happen is we would all run around, looking for a shelter, and people would invite us into their shelters. By the way, lots of apartment buildings kept their doors open all the time so that people could go into shelters. But there was one occasion that somebody saw me. They stepped out, opened the door, and invited me in. I went with them into their shelter. And there we were, a group of strangers, brought together by an alarm, a fear of a missile landing somewhere. And there’s a feeling of stress. There’s no other way to say it. Everybody’s a little worried. What would happen here? What would happen elsewhere? Are people going to be injured? Will somebody die? Is this the last missile? Is more going to come? How many? A lot of stress.

What I found reminded me of old research in psychology. Imagine there’s a bridge, a very, very narrow, shaky bridge over a canyon. They tested people who were walking on that bridge. So, imagine a guy walking across this bridge. And there’s a woman, the experimenter, who catches him, let’s say, in the middle. And she asks him lots of questions about some research—nothing particularly interesting. But at the end, she gives him her phone number with the offer for him to call her to find out the results of this study. Sometimes she meets him at the middle of the bridge where things are shaking the most and people are stressed. And sometimes she meets him at the end when nothing is shaking and he’s already in stable ground. When do you think is the guy more likely to call her?

The answer is on the bridge when things are shaking a lot and much less when he finished crossing the bridge. Now why is that? Well, in the middle of the bridge, the arousal is the highest. The arousal comes from being afraid, but it is attributed to experimenter. They feel their heart pounding; they might be sweating. And they think it’s because the experimenter is just a wonderful person. People who crossed the bridge didn’t really care about the research that much and didn’t want to call. The people who were in the middle also didn’t care about the research, but they cared about the research assistant and felt kind of an arousal toward her and wanted to talk to her.

The same thing happens in shelters. You get into shelters, there’s arousal, fear, anxiety, and some of it creates a wonderful community. Suddenly, it’s us. We care about the people we are with; we share something. Now, I can’t say that I miss those days. It’s been quite a few months since we had the last bombing. But there was a feeling of wonderful camaraderie. There was a feeling of something that united us, that got us together. People helped each other, like the person who opened that door for me. I just wish we could keep that without the missiles.

So sometimes there’s a silver lining even in bad things. In the case of the missiles, it was very, very small compared to the tragedy. But it’s good to recognize that the camaraderie, the caring, the shared arousal, all were quite wonderful.

There’s a rumor that sometime tomorrow, or maybe even later today, there’ll be a new round of war between Israel and Iran. I don’t know how these rumors start and I don’t know what they’re based on, but there’s this rumor. Of course, we’ve been through a few rounds of this. They were all tough and scary and stressful and with no sleep and lots of bad things. Lots of destruction on all sides. I think that when we’re in a war and running to shelters multiple times a day and hearing the bombs and the sadness of the injured, the dead, and destruction and so on, there’s a certain level of getting used to it. Not a lot of getting used to it, but a certain level. And then it stops. Let’s say there’s a wave of war that lasts a month. Every night we run to the shelter as well as during the day. It’s tough and we get used to it—to some degree. Then—at least in the center of Israel—there’s a couple of months without missiles. And suddenly, the idea of going back into war creates this unbelievable heaviness.

I think that once you’re in that period, you deal with it and then you get out. Now I’m with such a heavy heart of going back into that. A real cloud of depression, I would say, is coming on. Because when you’re in it, you kind of use all your resilience and then breathe. And then now I have to fight another wave of this. Let’s hope it won’t happen. But the feeling since yesterday is, “Here we go again. Do I have the resilience to deal with it?” I know I will. I know I’ll get used to it. But the need to get into it again is very tough. But I wanted to say something else. Not just talk about the waves of difficulty, how we deal with them, and the dread of the next wave.

In a previous round with Iran, I was sitting in this house, and a group of Iranian students asked me to talk to them about the psychology of money. Of course, I was very happy to do so. We talked over Zoom. My camera was on. Their cameras were not. I think mostly because of bandwidth. It was scheduled for an hour, and I finished about 10 minutes early. And I said, “Before you ask questions, I want to tell you I’m calling today from Israel. It’s true that I’m a professor in the U.S. at Duke University, but right now I’m in Israel. I know that you are bombing us and we’re bombing you. More correctly, our government is bombing you. Your government is bombing us. And how are you feeling?”

We all had a very, very shared experience of lack of control and fear. Not really understanding what the purpose is. It was a very sad and very beautiful human moment of people who are stuck, supposedly, on two sides of a war, really being on the same side. There were no negative emotions between me and them and them and me. There was no clarity on what was really going on, why it was going on, who has incentive. We all felt like pawns in a war, where the birth lottery decided where we were born, and some big forces were playing with us. It is depressing because we all felt that we really don’t have a say. And what’s going on in the name of our country does not really represent us. So that was the sad part. I’m part of this country. These things are happening to this country. This country is doing things. But I don’t feel connected. Nobody asked us. Nobody consulted us about this. That was the pessimistic side.

The optimistic side is that we felt a very, very strong connection to each other. Despite the war, despite the missiles flying on that day in both directions, we felt that we, as people, are highly connected—and could be more connected.

So, the waves of emotions come, and we need to gather energy for the next wave in case it comes. We’ll see. And then we, the people, must figure out what we do with our leaderships to create a better and saner world.

Bye for now.

I would like to propose that in general we’ll have a problem, but I want to propose one part that I think is interesting, bright, and hopeful. It’s the idea that consumption of information is influenced by who produced it. Think about a painting. Is the painting the same no matter who produced it, no matter what you know about the person, about the time in history? Of course it’s different. What about the poem? What about the bottle of wine?

The point is that a lot of time when we consume something, we also consume the background, the history, what came before, and then what became part of it. Think about one of my books (if you happen to have read one of them). When you read one of my books is it really independent of knowing something about me? I don’t think so. I think those things are connected. So, imagine you read one of my books and you either thought it was produced by AI or you thought it was produced by me and I told you some things about myself. Which one will be a more fulfilling consumption experience? Which one would you read more carefully? In which one would there be a paragraph that is less interesting, but you would say, “I’m trusting that this will be OK.”

I think that the person producing will still have an impact. Now, I think that’s important. It means that when I produce something, it has to be me. I can’t tell you that I created it when it was really AI. I think we need to differentiate between those things. But eventually I think that we will be surrounded by lots more. And I think we’ll have a choice. Do we consume things that are made by AI? I think then we will enter into a production mode. We will read as quickly as possible. Digesting. It’s not about enjoyment. It’s about processing. And then there’ll be a different mode. Consuming with some thought and appreciation and understanding of the person behind it. I think there’ll be both of those. I think we’ll have some consumption that will be just about quickness and efficiency. And some that will be about the value underneath it and the meaning that it gives. In those instances, I think we will read slower and enjoy and savor more, maybe even take more seriously.

So, I think we’ll have these two buckets. The question will be how much time do we spend in each of those buckets? How much time do we spend in the bucket of efficiency and how much time do we spend in the bucket that’s more meaningful? I think it will be hard to compete with AI producing things very, very quickly and very, very efficiently compared to human effort. But I think that we will still pay for good wine, good poetry, paintings that are made by a person, a movie that has a story behind it, good books, and so on. Maybe less than now, but I still think we will.

So, the bad news is that we’ll be absolutely bombarded by lots and lots of information. But I think the good news is that the information produced by humans will continue to have a story behind it, have a meaning, and I think we’ll treat it differently and enjoy it more.

That’s my prediction.

So, I think about ideas for experiments a little bit like art. If you think about somebody who is drawing or painting, they’re usually not representing the whole thing. They’re representing the essence of it. And they have to convince us, the viewer, that they have captured the essence. And I think about experiments in the same way. They are field experiments, but regular experiments are like that. So maybe I do an experiment on how much people are willing to pay for annoying sounds and how that changes over time. Or do people choose a chocolate that costs three pennies or one penny? Or what about building Bionicles? When I do these experiments, it’s not about the specifics. Like I would hate to say, “I have a conclusion about chocolate for one penny” or “I have a conclusion about building Bionicles.” No, we’re trying to create an idea and represent that idea in a way that the audience, hopefully you who are reading about it, will be convinced that we have captured the essence.

So very much like art, I look at the problem in the world. People seem not to make a lot of progress with something. People seem to not take their medication. People seem to not save enough. And I try to distill it down to some principles, and I try to create an experiment to test those principles. But between me, who is designing the experiment, and you who are reading about the experiment, I need to convince you that what I represent, and I leave some things out, but an experiment—not field experiments—regular experiments abstracts things, and only some of the information remains, some of it is outside the system.

Even if I say, “This is like a prisoner dilemma game,” it’s only a very small part of the whole system, but I have to convince you that it is the essence. So that’s what I think is the real nugget—is to look at the world and ask yourself, “What is the essence here?” And once you convince yourself that you know what the essence is, then you decide to prove that. Let me change the essence one way or another and see how the behavior changes.

So for example, I can take an experiment, let’s take the Bionicle example, and I can get people to build Bionicles and they stand or they build Bionicles and I take them apart and I basically say that there’s a difference between those two conditions. In one, people don’t feel their work being destroyed in front of their eyes. In the other one, they feel that it’s futile because they don’t see any kind of progress and let’s see how that changes.

That’s basically the story. Okay, taking reality, abstracting, focusing on the essence, abstracting it and then playing with the essence. And I think it’s a very good skill. It’s a very good skill because it tries to help us understand the essence of something, the social science essence of a situation.

Okay, so this is how we come up with experiments.

Now, why do I want to talk about this and AI? There are lots of things that AI can do to make people very productive and get more out there. But one of the things that I find about myself is that I don’t use AI for any of my core tasks. I don’t use it to write. I don’t use it to think. I don’t use it much to plan. But instead, I use it to do all kinds of things that I’m just not good at.

So, for example, I created an app for smart electricity in my apartment. I created a decision aid to help think about finances. I’m now thinking about another decision aid to think about whether we should stay in the same job or not. But I’m doing all of this and it’s not my top skill. I’m taking AI to use for something I’m not that good at, And I’m using it to do something that I could never achieve without it. And I’m unbelievably grateful.

But why do I connect this to structured procrastination? Because what I find is that I do lots of little things that don’t matter that much, but it gives me a sense of progress. I change the icons. I change the size of the font. When I say I change, I mean, I look at the output and I give Claude Code my instructions on how to do things differently. And I’m creating all of those things, or I’m giving instructions to create all of those things, and there’s lots of extra effort and extra time that goes into things that are not real progress. Eventually those things are just for me to look at. Nobody else sees them. Why is it that important? It is important.

And I do want to say one other thing that is more positive. It sounds like I’m blaming AI for giving me more structured procrastination. And I’m doing that a little bit. But I also think that it’s giving me an artistic outlet. You know, I think that people in general have a desire for an artistic outlet. And I think it’s not easy to generate one. But with AI, we can create more artistic outlets. Now, is it an artistic outlet at the level of real artists? No. Would it be a shame if all artistic outlets are satisfied with what AI can provide? Absolutely yes. But for me, it gives me a few more hours of structured procrastination and a few more hours of something that I feel is an artistic outlet.

So, let’s not fall too much into structured procrastination—but a little bit of it, especially if it comes together with an artistic output, I think it’s certainly worthwhile.