It is better to be poor and alive than rich and dead

Part 1In 1864, in the middle of a war, Abraham Lincoln took the time to write a letter to a mother who had lost five sons. It couldn't bring anyone back. It could only say: I see what this cost you. That letter is where this book begins.Part 2It Is Better to Be Poor and Alive Than to Be Rich and Dead is a work of personal philosophy about what we trade for the idea of a successful life, and what it actually costs. Moving between history, research, and memoir, the book traces one argument across four parts: where our idea of success actually came from, what it has asked people to pay, what a different way of measuring a life might look like, and how to actually live it. Along the way, it examines Lincoln's letter to Lydia Bixby, Julia Ward Howe's 1870 Mother's Day Proclamation, three young professionals worked to death in London, Jakarta, and Tokyo, the 1994 Rwandan genocide, Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and Henry IV, and the Harvard Study of Adult Development, the longest-running study of adult life ever conducted.Part 3Throughout, the book returns to a single, real image: a grandmother who sets a place at her table every evening for a son the world has stopped being impressed by, and has never once treated that as a loss. Organized into four parts — The Accounting, The Cost, The Reckoning, and The Living — this is a book for readers questioning ambition, burnout, grief, or what they've inherited without choosing. It's a book about presence over accumulation, and about what it means to still be at the table.