Like Sand in an Hourglass…40 Years, 11 Gone

My high school class graduated in the mid-1980s, when the future was so bright we had to wear shades. I haven’t kept up with many classmates directly, but I still go to the reunions. They feel a bit like family gatherings in that even after five or ten years since we last met the conversations pick up with a familiar rhythm, as if we had just seen each other at the last holiday.

The other reason I go is that a high school class is an exclusive club that never admits new members, and over time its membership only declines. Showing up is a way of keeping track not just of people but of time itself.

The 40th reunion invite listed eleven of us who have passed. For a group of 300 American, college-educated professionals nearing 60, that’s right in line with actuarial expectations saying roughly 10–16 of us should be gone by now. And since I was very nearly number 12 on the list from a near-fatal bike accident just six months ago, I was more than happy to volunteer to make the “In Memoriam” poster that has our deceased classmates’ pictures and names, to be with us in spirit during the reunion.

Looking at those eighteen-year-olds (the poster uses the pictures from the yearbook), it’s hard not to pause and wonder… what happened?

The causes follow familiar patterns. A cluster of car accidents, mostly years ago. A few “died suddenly” in midlife, which usually means an undiagnosed heart condition or other health problem. One suicide. A couple of early aggressive cancers.

I didn’t know most of them well in school, but I remember one from the 20th reunion in 2006 when she was photographed smiling right next to me. She died in 2019 and will just be a picture on a poster this time.

The numbers suggest we’ll lose another ten or so by the 50th reunion. That’s how the curve works. And eventually, much further out, there will be no one left to keep the list. The tables suggest one or two of us might make it past 100, so the class won’t fully disappear until sometime around 2070, long enough that the world we shared at 18 will feel even more distant than it already does.

For now, we gather. Fewer each time, but still enough to recognize one another, to fall into old patterns, to share fragments of a common past that no one else quite understands.

And to look at the slowly growing poster to quietly note who is no longer in the room.

Review: The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

I ran across the term anemoia - nostalgia for a time you never experienced - on the internet and traced it back to this book.  The author made up a list of words, or re-purposes existing phrases, for obscure feelings we feel as we age, experience the passage of time, realize how little of it we have left.  Besides anemoia I mentioned, one of the words that has made it from the book into the "real-world" is sonder - the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own. 

While reading I made a list of the words I liked that hit me, so the book is fun and thoughtful, even if your favorite ones never make it beyond the book.  And due to the introspective nature of the topic, this book would be better appreciated by older, thoughtful readers, less so by those in the earlier stages of life.

And I have my own term to add: “college degree” as a unit of time, which equals four years.  Its use is when you realize an event took place four years ago, which seems so recent, then you think “I could have gotten a college degree since then!”  In contrast to your real college degree, which seemingly took forever.

Remember, Your IRA Balance is Inflated by 25% Since the Government Still Gets Its Cut

 

Before I retired, my “retirement income planning” meant shovel as much as possible into my IRA, then throw some extra into taxable savings.  Then one day I’d add Social Security (if it still existed). That was my entire plan, and I suspect many of you reading this are in that same boat.

Fast-forward to my first year of retirement, when I discovered I suddenly had to become an expert in:

• Taxes, surprisingly more complex than when you have straight W2 income
• Roth conversions
• Required Minimum Distributions (RMDs)
• Return of Capital (ROC), meaning that clever investment choice I made actually has a hidden capital gain down the road
• IRMAA, not my great aunt, but a Medicare surcharge if your retirement income passes a threshold
• The Rubik’s Cube of mixing pre-tax, post-tax, and Social Security income, and figuring out the best moves more than a decade in advance

And this is years before I have to deal with Medicare, supplements, and that IRMAA surcharge I didn’t even know existed before 30 days ago.

A surprising number of decisions need to be made years in advance, and some, like when you take Social Security, are permanent.

Sure, there are plenty of experts out there, but they all have strong (and conflicting) opinions. Just look at the permanent cage matches among YouTube financial gurus:

• Roth IRA conversions: brilliant or disastrous? (Dozens of people on both sides.)
• Social Security: take it early at 62, or delay to 70? (Pros and Cons for both)
• RMD strategy: panic now or panic later? (Arguments on both sides)

There is no one-size-fits-all.  At some point, you have to learn enough about all these topics to make decisions based on your goals, whether that’s leaving a legacy to your heirs or partying it away while you’re still around. Most retirement software assumes “maximize assets at death,” which may not match your priorities, plus you can’t take it with you.

So my advice as I sit here rooting for your continued employment to pay into my Social Security is: Look into this stuff now, not the year you retire.

Believe me, as I’m currently kicking myself for some IRA vs. taxable investment decisions I made twenty years ago.

AI as a Russian Lit Study Guide: Good, with Some Precautions

Having recently retired, I finally started my long-promised Russian Literature Phase, something I promised I would do “when I had the time.” I had read Crime and Punishment about 15 years ago and loved it, picked up Brothers Karamazov (BK) soon after, and then let it sit in my digital bookshelf for a decade and a half while I kept grabbing contemporary novels and “beach reads”, which are fun but don't challenge you.  I even read the first chapter of BK once and put it down as it just didn’t hook me like C&P did.

Now that I actually have time, I decided to give BK another shot, but the first thing I did was check the translation and found that was the issue.  The copy I bought 15 years ago was a bargain-bin 1905 Constance Garnett translation in full Victorian English. I switched to the modern Pevear/Volokhonsky translation from 1990 (same team as the C&P I enjoyed) and immediately felt the difference with a modern reading flow.  But I ended up keeping both versions open so I could compare passages and deepen my understanding.

This time around, I also used AI as a personal study guide. Dostoevsky tosses in historical, philosophical, and cultural references that a well-educated Russian in the 1880s would have understood instantly, but a modern American, even one as reasonably well-read and well-traveled as moi, might not.

For an AI study guide I found Grok was not that good.  It literally made-up quotes that were not in the book, then apologized for it when I pointed out the mistake.  And it was a little too smarmy, saying things like:

Keep going — the best 600 pages are still ahead

You’ve got this.  The baby dream is 200 pages away. It’ll break you open.

Keep going. The trial is next — and it’s brutal.

Like I was a GenZ college student who needed encouragement to finish my assignment.

ChatGPT was better, and I used it the way you’d might talk to a lit professor during office hours or at the pub, tossing theories around, digging into the psychology of the characters, and chasing down historical context. At one point I was exploring whether a one of the brothers had a Madonna–Whore complex with the two major female leads.  Another time I was comparing a line from The Usual Suspects (“I don’t believe in God, but I fear him”) to a passage in BK, not something you will find in a written study guide. It even gave me crash courses on 19th-century Russian politics and Pushkin when I needed them.

All of that kept me far more engaged in the book than I would’ve been otherwise. It let me go deep into the novel’s theological and philosophical arguments which include questions about God, society, scientism, morality, and the messiness of being human. BK deals with ideas that feel like they could have been written last week instead of the 1870s. The brothers themselves read like psychological archetypes we all carry around: pure passion, pure reason, pure faith, nihilism. Dostoevsky basically anticipated the major existentialists and psychologists of the 20th century.

Ultimately it is an amazing and rewarding book, worth the time and effort. When the AI asked me the main theme I got from the book, I put the line "Love life more than the meaning of it", one of many lines and passages that hit me deeply.

So this is definitely not a “beach read”, and more like a college course that requires outside work to get its full appreciation and understanding, something I think is required of most great literature.  In this case I think AI as an interactive study guide is a great tool to help, and I will continue using it through my Russian Literature Phase.

Short Story: "In the End, Everyone’s Heir Is a Potential Client."

 “This is a call to order for SoulCast Corporation. We have a quorum. Nancy will take notes and fill in the niceties.”

Bruce scanned the table, mentally tallying his fellow board members’ net worths: fifty million, eighty million, both well short of his own three commas. Then there was the anomaly: ten million. His board wasn't supposed to be a charity, but the VCs forced that one on him.

His VP of Marketing, Mike, stood nervously at the front of the room. Bruce pegged him at maybe six figures (one comma!).  But it was his first startup, no inflated stock value yet, no experience in selling “new technology” to a gullible public. He’d learn soon enough.

Bruce nodded. “Mike, go ahead and let the board know where we are.”

Overwhelmed by the wealth in the room, Mike fumbled with the clicker, projecting his PowerPoint onto the screen. “As you all know, our AI companion technology lets people take the personal data of deceased loved ones - think emails, writings, social media, videos - and with surveys and interviews of family and friends, we recreate the deceased’s persona for the AI to mimic. This is the SoulCast.”

The fifty-million board member leaned forward. “And how accurate are these SoulCasts to the real person?”

Bruce rolled his eyes. The man was the oldest in the room, and certainly the least tech-savvy.

“Accurate enough that even close friends can’t tell the difference,” Mike said. “We do, however, tweak them a little to make them more sycophantic and agreeable to the customer. Since we collect the customer’s own personality data during the process, we know exactly how to please them.”

The ten-million member asked, “And how much do we charge?”

Bruce wasn’t surprised. If you have to ask the price…

“Well, data mining and surveys are resource heavy. And quantum AI isn’t cheap. We’re targeting high-net-worth individuals at one million per SoulCast.”

Ten Million blanched. Bruce smiled. When something costs ten percent of your net worth it must seem out of reach.

Eighty Million frowned. “That’s a limited market. We’re talking about bereaved tycoons who want to keep a spouse, parent or loved-one around digitally.”

Bruce interrupted. “Yes, but I’ve found a way to expand the user base, without lowering margins!”

Fifty-million, the tech-savvy one, perked up. “We use the AI to predict when a rich family might lose a loved one and then pre-sell one of them a SoulCast?”

Bruce was impressed. “Close. But we’ve gone one better. That’s why I’ve called this meeting. I’m asking for funding for a new customer acquisition team: the Disruptive Synergy Unit.”

Mike sank into his chair as Bruce continued.

“Our AI already accesses health records, travel plans, purchases, everything. We can forecast deaths with decent accuracy, but it’s not enough to meet our growth targets. So instead, we’ll accelerate customer acquisition through the AI’s control of connected infrastructure.  Think garage doors, smart cars, e-bikes - anything dangerous that is connected to the cloud.  And with humanoid robots quickly expanding penetration into high-net-worth homes we'll hit a goldmine!"

Mike shot up. “But, sir, you’re talking... you’re talking... tech companies don’t kill people!”

The board roared with laughter. The richer they were, the harder they laughed. Except Bruce. He only smiled, studying his young protégé and wondering if he’d misjudged him.

“Mike,” Bruce said, “if you ever want to get past one comma, you have to do what it takes. We need more million-dollar customers.  And after this, you’ll have enough to buy a SoulCast of your own.”

“I don’t need a SoulCast! My wife and I are...”. He stopped. Bruce had pressed a button. The PowerPoint faded into a live feed of Mike’s own home security camera showing his wife leaving their house in her cloud-connected electric car.

Bruce’s smile didn’t waver. “Mike, you’ll be able to afford a SoulCast. Whether you need one is up to you.”

---

SoulCast Corporation Board Meeting Minutes

Date: October 7, 2025
Time: 10:00 AM PDT
Location: Silicon Valley HQ
Minutes By: Nancy Thompson, Secretary

Attendees:
Bruce Carter (Chair, CEO), Robert Lee ($80M), Sarah Kim ($50M), Mary Johnson ($10M), Mike Powels (VP Marketing, non-voting)
Quorum: Confirmed

Call to Order
Bruce called the meeting to order at 10:00 AM. Nancy to record minutes.

Technology Update
Mike Powels presented SoulCast’s AI companion technology:

• Recreates deceased personas using personal data and interviews.

• Cost: $1M per client, targeting high-net-worth bereaved.

New Business: Disruptive Synergy Unit (DSU)

• DSU to expedite customer acquisition via cloud-connected systems (smart cars, e-bikes, home automation, home robots).

• Motion to fund DSU by Q1 2026 moved by Mary Johnson, seconded by Sarah Kim. Approved unanimously.

Personnel
Board unanimously approved promotion of Mike Powels to Executive Vice President, accepted by candidate.

Adjournment
Meeting adjourned at 10:45 AM.
Approved: Pending next meeting.