On Dying While Planning to Live, or: What a 2,500-Year-Old Buddhist Knew About Your Google Calendar

It's December 26, and I'm two episodes deep into the second volume of Stranger Things Season 5, which dropped yesterday on Christmas. This is what passes for Boxing Day tradition now: couch, blanket, the kind of sustained inactivity that would horrify your ancestors who spent the day after Christmas doing actual labor. Between episodes I've been scrolling through my phone, half-reading articles about what to do differently in the new year, which starts in five days but somehow feels both imminent and impossibly far away.

There's a particular species of day that December 26 represents. Christmas is over (the cleanup happened this morning, wrapping paper stuffed into garbage bags, dishes finally done). New Year's Eve hasn't started (that's still five days of regular life away). You're in the gap. The in-between space where you're theoretically supposed to be relaxing but you're actually just thinking about all the things you're going to start doing differently in January. Any minute now you'll pause the show and start planning. Get organized. Make your list. Figure out the optimal approach to becoming the person you keep telling yourself you're going to become.

Any minute now.

The Buddha, teaching 2,500 years ago in what's now India, told a story about a guy who got shot with a poisoned arrow. Before he'd let anyone remove it, the wounded man insisted on knowing: Who shot me? What was his caste? What kind of bow was it? Was the arrow made from wild or cultivated wood? Were the feathers from a vulture or a peacock?¹ The man, the Buddha explained, would die before getting his answers.

The story appears in the Cula-Malunkyovada Sutta, and it's meant to illustrate something about metaphysical speculation being a waste of time when you're actively dying.² Which, okay, fair point. But what strikes me now, sitting here in the strange temporal no-man's-land between Christmas and New Year's, is that the Buddha might have been describing something more immediate than debates about whether the universe is eternal. He might have been describing every planning session I've ever had about starting to exercise.

Here's what happens: You decide, usually around December 27th when your pants feel judgmental and you've had three days of eating cookies for breakfast, that this year you're going to get in shape. Not just get in shape but really commit to a comprehensive fitness program that addresses cardiovascular health, muscular strength, flexibility, and maybe some of those mobility issues you've been ignoring. You open seventeen browser tabs. You read about High Intensity Interval Training versus Zone 2 cardio. You discover that your running form is probably wrong and has been for thirty years, which explains the knee thing. You learn about periodization, progressive overload, the importance of tracking macros, and why your core weakness is basically the source of all suffering.

Three weeks later you still haven't gone to the gym once.

The research on New Year's resolutions is brutal in its consistency. Studies suggest that roughly 80 percent of resolutions fail by the second week of February, with many people giving up by mid-January.³ That's not a typo. Not 80 percent of difficult resolutions or unrealistic resolutions. Eighty percent of all resolutions. The thing that makes these numbers interesting (or depressing, depending on your current relationship with your own abandoned goals) is that they don't really correlate with difficulty. People fail at "drink more water" at roughly the same rate as "run a marathon."⁴

What's happening here isn't a failure of willpower or ambition. It's a failure of recognizing that information-gathering has become its own form of procrastination. Psychologist Barry Schwartz wrote about this as the Paradox of Choice: having more options allows us to achieve better results but also leads to greater anxiety, indecision, and dissatisfaction.⁵ We've taken the reasonable idea that informed decisions are better than uninformed ones and weaponized it against ourselves. Now we're so informed we can't move.

This week between Christmas and New Year's is when this impulse reaches its annual crescendo.⁶ You sit down, possibly with a new notebook you got as a gift (or bought yourself while Christmas shopping, let's be honest), and you make your list. Lose weight. Write more. Learn Spanish. Save money. Wake up earlier. Meditate. Read the books on that stack by your bed that's starting to resemble a jenga tower of shame. Each item gets its own sub-analysis. Should I try intermittent fasting or just count calories? Duolingo or Rosetta Stone or actual classes? How much money, and in which kind of account, and should I max out my 401k first or pay down the mortgage?

The questions multiply faster than you can answer them. Soon you're not planning to lose weight, you're researching how to research weight loss plans. You're three levels deep in a decision tree about decision-making frameworks. The arrow's still in there. The poison's spreading. You're wondering about the wood grain.

A friend of mine (let's call him Derek, because that's his name) spent the entirety of January 2024 optimizing his productivity system. He read Getting Things Done, then Atomic Habits, then about six other books about habit formation and time management. He built an elaborate structure in Notion with linked databases for projects, tasks, areas of responsibility, and resources. He color-coded everything. He set up automations. He spent probably forty hours across three weeks building the perfect system for finally getting his actual work done.⁷

Then he looked up and realized March had started and he hadn't accomplished a single actual task. The system was beautiful. The system was comprehensive. The system was so thoroughly planned that using it felt redundant. He'd already done all the thinking; actually executing felt like paperwork.

This is the poisoned arrow in modern form. The wound isn't a metaphysical question about the eternality of the cosmos. It's the gap between January's intentions and December's retrospective. What did you actually do this year? Not what did you plan to do, not what did you research doing, not what did you buy equipment for doing. What did you actually put into motion?

The Buddha's point in his parable wasn't about avoiding questions. Questions are fine. Curiosity is great. The problem is when asking questions becomes a substitute for the action the questions are supposedly in service of. When you find yourself conducting a feasibility study on whether to join a gym, you've crossed over. The man with the arrow isn't being thoughtful or prudent. He's dying while gathering data he'll never use.⁸

I thought about this yesterday while watching Stranger Things. Not because of anything in the show itself (though there's probably something to be said about binge-watching as passive consumption versus creating something yourself, but that's a different essay). More because I caught myself between episodes scrolling through my notes app, reading the list I'd made back in January 2025. Here's what I wrote: "This year I'm going to be more consistent with writing. Set up a schedule, stick to it, track progress."

The remarkable thing is that I actually did it. Not because I'm particularly disciplined or because I finally figured out the secret formula. I did it because I recognized this exact trap and decided to just start writing badly instead of researching how to write well. I didn't optimize my schedule. I didn't read books about writing routines first (I read them later, after I'd already been writing for months). I didn't figure out whether morning or evening writing better suited my circadian rhythms.⁹

I just wrote. Badly, at first. On days when I didn't feel like it. Without waiting to feel ready or inspired or properly caffeinated. Because writing one mediocre article was infinitely more valuable than an imagined perfect article that never got written. My circadian rhythms might improve my writing, sure, but there needs to be writing to improve in the first place.

The psychologist Jonathan Alpert, who writes about behavioral change, points out that one of the main reasons New Year's resolutions fail is that people try to change everything about their approach before attempting the thing itself.¹⁰ You don't just want to exercise, you want to research the optimal exercise program, buy the correct shoes, understand the biomechanics, plan your meals to support your training, and basically become an exercise scientist before you've done a single push-up. By the time you've finished preparing to start, you're exhausted.

There's a particular species of hell reserved for the over-prepared. It's not that preparation is bad. Obviously you need some baseline knowledge before attempting certain things (please don't try to learn skydiving exclusively through trial and error). But we've developed this cultural mythology that suggests the right amount of preparation approaches infinity. That more research always equals better outcomes. That if you just read one more article about the thing, you'll finally feel ready to attempt the thing.

You won't.

The readiness you're waiting for doesn't arrive through information accumulation. It arrives, if it arrives at all, through action. Through trying the thing while you still don't completely know what you're doing, making mistakes, adjusting, and trying again. This is uncomfortable to admit because it means accepting that you're going to do things badly at first, and accepting that you're going to waste time, and accepting that some of your questions will only get answered by making the errors you were trying to avoid.

The man with the arrow in his chest, if he'd just let the doctor pull it out, might have survived. Maybe he'd have died anyway. Maybe the poison was too strong or the doctor incompetent or the wound too deep. But by refusing treatment until he'd answered every question, he guaranteed the outcome. The poison wasn't what killed him. The questions killed him. Or more precisely, the belief that he needed answers before acting killed him.

Here's what I'm trying to figure out as I write this (and yes, I'm aware of the irony of writing 2,000+ words about avoiding overthinking): When you look back at this year's resolutions next December, how many will you have actually attempted? Not completed, not perfected, but simply started? How many arrows will you have pulled out, even partway, even clumsily, instead of dying while researching removal techniques?

Christmas has this weird effect where it simultaneously feels like the year just ended and like the year still has five days left. You're supposed to be relaxing but you're also supposed to be getting ready. For what? For the person you're going to become on January 1?¹¹ That person who wakes up at 5:30am and goes to the gym before work and meal-preps on Sundays and has finally, finally, after all these years, figured out how to be the optimized version of themselves?

That person doesn't exist. Or they exist for about four days before reality reasserts itself and you remember that you're still you, just you with slightly more ambitious Google Calendar entries.

The specific mechanics of how to stop this pattern are probably less important than recognizing you're in it.¹² Though if you want mechanics: Set a deadline for research. Give yourself exactly one week to learn about the thing, then you have to start doing the thing with whatever knowledge you've gained. Make your first attempts deliberately bad. Aim for mediocre execution of a mediocre plan. The goal isn't excellence; the goal is motion. Action beats analysis. All the information in the world means nothing if it never converts to actual behavior.¹³

What worked for me with writing was recognizing that I could always research better methods later. After I'd already been writing. The information about optimal schedules and productivity techniques and circadian rhythms didn't disappear because I started before learning it. It was still there, waiting, available to consult once I had something actual to improve. But if I'd consumed all that information first, I would have convinced myself my approach was wrong before I'd even tried it.

Better to pull out the arrow now and study archery later.

What's strange about sitting here on December 26 is feeling the weight of both the year that's ending and the year that's about to start. You can almost see the discontinuity. On one side: everything you didn't do this year, all the plans that stayed plans, all the research that never became action. On the other side: the imagined future where you finally get it together, where you finally become the person who does the things instead of planning to do the things.

The Buddha's monk, the one demanding answers about the arrow, probably had excellent questions. They were probably worth answering in some context. Just not that context. Not while dying. Not when action was the only thing that mattered. We are, most of us, standing in that same moment more often than we realize. The poison is spreading. The questions feel important. They're not. Or they are, but later. First the arrow has to come out.

There are five days until midnight on December 31. People all over are making their lists, formulating their plans, imagining the transformed versions of themselves who'll emerge in January. Some percentage of them (probably you, let's be honest) will spend the first week of the new year researching how to implement those plans. Optimizing. Preparing. Gathering information. Making sure, above all, that when they finally start, they'll do it right.

The Buddha's monk is still asking questions. The doctor is still waiting. The arrow is still poisoned. Time keeps moving the way it always does. I'm going to finish this episode. Then probably one more. Then maybe, possibly, I'll open that document I've been meaning to work on. Or I'll just do it badly first and figure out the right way later. The show will end eventually. The year will turn. The questions will still be there, same as always, ready to kill you if you let them.¹⁴