Last week I crossed the 100-subscriber mark.

That’s a small number in internet terms, but it’s a real one in human terms. So thank you to the hundred or so people who’ve found something worth their time in what I write about Stoicism. Attention is not nothing; it’s one of the few things people still give freely.

A little earlier than that, an anniversary passed more quietly: the anniversary of my hospitalisation and the beginning of treatment for amyloidosis. I could very easily not be here to mark it at all.

The average life expectancy after diagnosis is often cited as two to five years, with a significant number of people not making it past six months. That particular statistic was one my haematologist very sensibly kept to herself until I had safely exceeded it.

The disease is wildly unpredictable. Some people deteriorate and die within months. Others live ten years or more. There is no clean narrative arc, no reliable lesson embedded in the timeline. It is, in philosophical terms, contingent—meaning it could easily have been otherwise, and still might be.

Which, in a strange way, makes it an unusually honest teacher.

From a Methodic Stoic perspective, this is the point where the system either earns its keep or gets exposed as decorative. A philosophy that works only when outcomes are stable is just mood management. One that still functions when the future is opaque has a stronger claim to usefulness.

Stoicism didn’t make the illness meaningful. It didn’t turn it into a gift. What it did do was clarify where the work actually is. Not in predicting outcomes, bargaining with fate, or performing optimism, but in staying oriented toward what is still within your power: how you reason, how you respond, how you conduct yourself toward others while the rest is in flux.

I’m grateful—genuinely—for a few contingent facts that sit well outside any philosophical system.

I’m grateful to live in a time when treatments exist at all. Twenty years ago this diagnosis was a death sentence.

I’m grateful that I developed it in my fifties rather than my twenties or thirties, after I’d already had time to live, fail, learn, and revise myself (and after medical science had advanced).

I’m grateful to live in a country that decided healthcare should be socialised, because my treatment costs roughly half a million dollars.

Stoicism doesn’t demand gratitude for everything that happens to you. That would be moral masochism. Methodic Stoicism in particular is cautious about romanticising impediments. An illness is an illness. A disability is a loss of function. Calling them “blessings” doesn’t make you wiser; it just makes language less precise.

And yet.

I’m still here. With a changed body, a narrowed energy budget, and a much sharper sense of how provisional everything always was. Still here, still able—if imperfectly—to practice attention, restraint, and decency. Still able to fumble around at doing and being good.

That, from a Methodic Stoic point of view, is enough to justify continued effort. Not because the universe guarantees anything in return, but because this is what the method is for: helping you live coherently as long as you are alive, under whatever constraints happen to apply.

So, in the spirit of end-of-year cheer—unsentimental, conditional, and quietly sincere—

Live well.

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