Monbiot: Choose Life. In a recent visit to the website of one of my favorite writers, British journalist and author George Monbiot, I stumbled upon his advice for young writers. I love his advice about living frugally that flies in the face of American more-is-more career ambition: "If you can live on five thousand pounds a year, you are six times as secure as someone who needs thirty thousand to get by." But I especially appreciate his critique of "progress":

So my final piece of advice is this: when faced with the choice between engaging with reality or engaging with what Erich Fromm calls the “necrophiliac” world of wealth and power, choose life, whatever the apparent costs may be. Your peers might at first look down on you: poor Nina, she’s twenty-six and she still doesn’t own a car. But those who have put wealth and power above life are living in the world of death, in which the living put their tombstones – their framed certificates signifying acceptance to that world – upon their walls. Remember that even the editor of the Times, for all his income and prestige, is still a functionary, who must still take orders from his boss. He has less freedom than we do, and being the editor of the Times is as good as it gets.

You know you have only one life. You know it is a precious, extraordinary, unrepeatable thing: the product of billions of years of serendipity and evolution. So why waste it by handing it over to the living dead?