Best Laid Plans

You Only Die Once: Mortality, Planning, and So Much More with Jodi Wellman

August 5, 2024

In today’s episode, I was thrilled to interview Jodi Wellman on her work on mortality and how the concept of death / our finite lives can inspire living a life with vitality, meaning, and — for lack of a better term, more “aliveness.” Jodi holds a Masters in Applied Positive Psychology and spent years exploring and applying these tough topics to help others with her work on Four Thousand Mondays and her recent book, You Only Die Once. Jodi explains her fascination with memento mori, how it all relates to planning, the darker side of habits and routines, and so much more.

You can find Jodi’s work at fourthousandmondays.com and her book, You Only Die Once (which – as you can tell from this interview, I LOVED!), at all major book retailers.

Other works referenced:
Oliver Burkeman, author of 4000 Weeks
TIm Urban’s The Tail End

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4 Comments

  • Reply Marianne August 5, 2024 at 8:54 am

    This was a great episode! I’m suggesting this as our next book club read.

  • Reply JGold August 5, 2024 at 11:34 am

    Absolutely loved this interview. I’m inspired to read the book for sure. Thanks!

  • Reply rachelinwales August 7, 2024 at 1:01 am

    I so enjoyed this interview! I’ve asked my library to order her book now. I am a bit nervous about the routines section since my entire life is a routine at the moment, but it will hopefully be more of a way to think about things after baby stage. I thought about this when you wrote “what would you do if you have a week or month left to live” and my answer is probably to focus less on trying to get enough sleep and do other fun things instead… but that’s not really a sustainable solution if I have more than a week or month to live. Hopefully this book will help with that conundrum for me.

    • Reply Brooke August 9, 2024 at 4:15 pm

      Statistically speaking, adequate sleep probably increases your lifespan (both from a health standpoint and also not-doing-dumb-things-while-sleep-deprived), which ultimately gives you more time to do the things you love 🙂

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