On 22 December 1849, Fyodor Dostoyevsky was led into a square in Saint Petersburg to be shot. He was sixth in line. At the last moment a pardon was read out. The whole thing had been staged, and his real sentence was four years in a Siberian labour camp followed by military exile.[1]
Hours later he wrote to his brother. “I lived with that thought for three-quarters of an hour,” he says, and then: “to be a human being among people and to remain one forever, no matter in what circumstances … that’s what life is all about.” He also looks back at “how much time was spent in vain” and adds, in French, “Si jeunesse savait!” If youth knew.
Greeks know the rest of that saying: Αν ήξερε η νιότη κι αν μπορούσαν τα γεράματα. If youth knew, and if old age could.
Most of us never face a firing squad. Ours comes more quietly.
Mine came in 2013. I was 54 and working at a software house. A workmate, a few months older than me, didn’t come in for a few days. When I rang to check on him, I learned that he and his wife had gone to bed one night and she had not woken up. She was the same age, fit and healthy. There had been something wrong with her heart that gave no warning at all. Within the next 30 days, two close relatives were diagnosed with breast cancer. Thankfully, both are well today.
Until then I had been, I can see now, a workaholic. Three children still at home, a large mortgage and the financial pressure that came with them seemed to justify putting work ahead of almost everything else. That month was a slap on the back of the head. None of us knows how much time we have.
Maria and I took a hard look at our lives. Nothing could change overnight, so we made a five-year plan: simplify, downsize, reprioritise. We mostly kept to it. At the end of 2017 I resigned. Since then we have travelled for long stretches, done some casual work when we’re home, and put freedom, community and family first.
Dostoyevsky got his reprieve in three-quarters of an hour. Mine took five years to act on. But the question he wrote down that December day is the same one that month in 2013 put to me: now that you know the time is not guaranteed, how will you spend it, and with whom?
[1]: Maria Popova, “Dostoyevsky, Just After His Death Sentence Was Repealed, on the Meaning of Life”, The Marginalian, 24 October 2026. Quotations from Dostoyevsky’s letter to his brother Mikhail are as given there. https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/10/24/dostoyevsky-execution-life/