What Die With Zero Did To My Brain
Or: how a book I listened to in my car changed the way I think about everything.
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I didn’t read Die With Zero. I listened to it. Over the course of a few days it played while I drove to work, while I sat on my back patio in the evenings, while I got ready in the mornings. Bill Perkins’ voice became the background track to my ordinary routine, and somewhere in the middle of all that ordinary routine, something shifted.
The premise of the book is simple enough to fit on a bumper sticker: stop hoarding your money and your experiences for a future version of yourself who may never arrive. Die with zero. Use your life to actually live it. Don’t leave a pile of unspent money and unlived experiences behind when you go.
I already knew this. That’s the thing I keep coming back to. I didn’t read this book and discover a new idea. I read it and heard someone say out loud the thing I had been quietly believing for years without ever fully acting on it. And something about hearing it said so plainly, so directly, while I was driving down Highway 63 on a Tuesday morning, made it impossible to unhear.
The idea that hit me hardest was what Perkins calls memory dividends. The concept is this: experiences keep paying you back long after the money is spent. Every trip you take, every thing you do, every moment you actually show up for — it compounds in memory. You don’t just get the experience once. You get it again every time you think about it, talk about it, dream about it. The return on investment for a good experience never fully stops.
I sat with that idea for a long time. I’m still sitting with it.
The Years I Didn’t Go
Because here’s what I had to reckon with: I’ve wanted to travel my entire life. Not as a vague wish, not as a someday fantasy, but as something that felt urgent and necessary and mine. And for the past several years I had the financial means to do it. I wasn’t broke. I wasn’t struggling. I was just…not going. For reasons that felt real at the time and feel embarrassingly thin in retrospect. Work was busy. The timing wasn’t right. I hadn’t found the right travel companion.
That last one is the one that stings the most. My husband has never had any desire to travel. That’s not a criticism, it’s just true, and we always knew it was a gap between us. But somewhere along the way I made his lack of interest into my reason not to go. I waited for someone who was never going to want to come. And the years went by.
Listening to Die With Zero on my back patio one evening, I did the math I’d been avoiding. If I take one significant trip a year from now until I’m too old to travel enjoyably, I’m looking at maybe 25 more trips. Twenty-five. That’s the whole list. Munich and Bruges and the Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta and Montpellier and everywhere else — that’s 25 chances to actually do the things I’ve been saying I want to do.
Twenty-five is not a lot. Twenty-five goes fast. I’ve wasted more years than that already.
I won’t lie, there was some anger in that realization. Not at my husband, not at anyone in particular, just at the accumulated weight of all the mundane reasons I’d let pile up between me and the life I actually wanted. Busy. Expensive. No one to go with. The timing. I had let those things win for years, and Die With Zero made me look at them clearly for maybe the first time.
Money Is a Tool. Experiences Are the Point.
The book also changed how I think about money more broadly. Not recklessly. I’m not suggesting anyone blow their retirement savings on first class flights. But there’s a difference between saving responsibly for the future and hoarding out of fear or habit while your actual life sits waiting. Money is a tool. Experiences are the point. I had confused the tool for the point for a long time.
There’s a reason experiences matter beyond the bucket list too. I genuinely believe that seeing how other people live, really seeing it, not from a resort chair but from a café table or a canal boat or a cobblestone street, makes us better. More curious. More patient. More willing to understand perspectives that aren’t ours. I grew up and spent most of my adult life in communities where the world felt very small and very certain. Travel is my answer to that certainty. It’s how I intend to stay open.
What I’m Doing About It
So I booked Amsterdam — you can read the full story of why in my last post — and signed up for a French class one night a week, something I couldn’t have done a year ago. I spent over 17 years living in a town of 1,600 people in rural Missouri where that simply wasn’t an option. Moving to Columbia changed that. Suddenly there were things available to me that I’d wanted for years and had quietly stopped expecting. I started saying yes to things I’d been deferring. Not because Die With Zero told me to, but because it gave me permission to act on what I already knew.
That’s what the book actually did to my brain. It didn’t give me new information. It took away my excuses.
I think about the memory dividends idea a lot now. Every time I’m tempted to put something off, to wait for better timing or a travel companion or a version of my life that feels more settled, I think about the return I’m declining. The memories I won’t have. The future self who will wish I had just gone.
Amsterdam is in September. I have approximately 24 trips left after that.
I don’t plan to waste any of them.
— Jen
