12 January 2026. A Monday, the first day of school.

I always capture the first day of school, every single year, because it feels like holding water in my hands. You can see it, you can feel it, but you cannot keep it. The children only get this age once, and I know, in a way that is both peaceful and unsettling, that things will not stay like this forever.

Later that night, I was in my Idea Bank, scrolling through notes I wrote to myself when I was tired enough to be honest. I saw one line that felt like it had been waiting for me.

Death is easy. Choosing to live is hard.

It was not a poem. It was not a quote to impress anyone. It was a warning label.

Because the easiest thing for a human being to do is to end something. A conversation, a relationship, a commitment, a season, a promise. Ending is fast. Ending gives instant relief. Ending is clean on the outside, even when it leaves a mess on the inside.

And I keep noticing how the world is getting better and better at endings.

The Meeting That Could Have Been Over in One Sentence

A few days before school resumed, an incident happened that should have been simple.

We had a time pre-arranged to spend with the students. Not a random activity, not a filler in the calendar, but something I intentionally wanted, because I have seen the impact of presence. As founder of Stellar, and as principal, I wanted that time. Not because it was convenient, but because it was meaningful, and meaningful is essential to me. It drives almost everything I do.

Then I received a notice that the time might be rescheduled.

If I wanted the shortcut, the decision was easy.

I had all the rights and authority to cancel the discussion and insist on the original date. I could have said, “It is decided and final,” and the whole process would “die” instantly. No further decision needed. Nothing needed to be learned. Everyone could move on, and on the surface, it would look like leadership.

But as I listened, I could feel something inside me resisting that path. It was not about being rigid. It was about what happens to a team when the top ends every conversation with authority. Everything becomes efficient, yes, but everything also becomes shallow. People stop thinking. People stop owning. People stop growing.

So I stayed in the discussion.

I spent hours ironing out concerns one after another. One of the concerns was the retreat they felt they needed to sort out planning for 2026. I told them, you do not need to rely on the retreat. You can carry out even without it. Let the retreat serve a better purpose, not become a crutch. Form supports function. Do not be conformed by the form.

And in that meeting, I saw two schools of thought appear in real time.

One school of thought looks at this kind of process and thinks, Daniel is troublesome. He is trying to find fault. He enjoys torturing people. This feels like unnecessary work.

The other school of thought pauses and wonders why. Why would a leader with authority choose the slower path. What is behind it. What philosophy is shaping this.

Then that second school of thought splits again. Some understand the reason. Some do not understand but remain curious enough to find out.

That curiosity is built on trust. Without trust, nothing stands. Without trust, every delay looks like manipulation, and every question looks like an attack.

I did not open that room for discussion because I was indecisive. I opened it because I wanted to see where the team really was, to align hearts, to understand concerns, and yes, to let the process filter naturally who is ready to work with meaning, and who is only staying at the executive level without a higher perspective.

Easy authority ends everything quickly. Living leadership keeps the options open long enough for truth to surface.

Why We Are Addicted to Endings Now

I keep thinking about how disposable the world has become, because it is not just about products. It is about the kind of mind we are building inside ourselves.

Globally, the world produces about 92 million tonnes of textile waste every year. Clothing production roughly doubled between 2000 and 2015, and the duration of garment use dropped sharply, with estimates around a 36 percent decrease in how long clothing is worn. The numbers are not just numbers. They describe a civilisation practising replacement as a reflex.

I saw this spirit of disposability in a very personal way last month when I travelled to China. We stayed in a homestay, something like Airbnb, and instead of washable towels, the agent provided disposable towels. A full body towel, one time use, then throw away. We stayed four days, and they prepared four towels per guest. Even towels can be disposable now.

That moment stayed with me because I did not grow up in that generation.

When I had my first child, we used handkerchief. We washed. We reused. I even remember washable diapers at home. Now, between my first child and my fourth child, there is about nine years, and the world has changed. We feed our daughter milk now and we do not reach for cloth first, we reach for tissue. We do not wash hands as naturally, we reach for wet tissue, sanitizer, bulk packs. The MCO period accelerated this, and we never really slowed down after.

I am not moralising about tissue. I am noticing something subtler.

When you practise throwing away small things every day, it becomes easier to throw away big things when life gets hard.

That is why “ending” is so tempting. It is a trained behaviour.

The Phone in Our Hands, The Person in Front of Us

There is another layer to this that is harder to admit, because it sounds like an attack when it is actually grief.

A study tracking smartphone interactions found that average users touched their phones 2,617 times a day, with heavy users going far beyond that, and that people spent significant daily time on their devices.

We have hands trained for interruption, not for staying.

We can hold thousands of micro-interactions, but we struggle to hold one long conversation that asks for patience, humility, and endurance. Then we call relationships “too hard,” as if the problem is the relationship, not the attention we keep dividing.

This is how endings start. Not with drama. With neglect that feels normal.

A child is in front of you, and you are half there. A spouse is talking, and you are scanning a screen. A teammate is concerned, and you are ready to close the loop because it is faster.

Death is easy. Choosing to live is hard.

Because choosing to live requires attention.

Marriage, Repair, and the Courage to Stay

I used marriage as an example in my reflection because it is one of the clearest places where the temptation to end shows its true face.

To stay in a marriage can feel like choosing to remain in a marathon. You do not quit because you are tired, you quit because you decide the pain is not worth the meaning. And the world today no longer values fixing things as much as it used to. When something spoils, throw away. Replace it. Upgrade it.

But the human heart is not a gadget. A family is not a subscription.

Research-based relationship work like the Gottman framework talks about patterns that destroy marriages, not just big betrayals, but repeated behaviours that signal disconnection. Contempt is often highlighted as especially corrosive, and stonewalling, the shutting down, the refusing to engage, is part of that same path of ending while still physically present.

Stonewalling is a kind of living death. You stay in the room, but you end the relationship in small installments.

That is why I said something in my reflection that I want to keep, even if it makes me look less heroic.

There are times when I face my own spouse and I question myself, why should I brace through all these challenges when I could be better off by myself.

That thought is not neutral. It is a sign.

It is the sign that I have started looking at life through self-justification, through a lens that asks, “What do I get,” instead of, “What do I give.”

And when that lens shows up, I have to return to something deeper, something I chose for this year, not as a slogan, but as a discipline.

Love truth. Love life. Love people.

If love is only a feeling, it will not survive difficulty. Feelings come and go like weather. But if love is an active verb, a decision to serve, to endure, to repair, then the whole perception changes. Not because the problems vanish, but because the point of staying becomes clearer.

The Myth of “One Ending Solves Everything”

In Chinese, there is that phrase, 一了百了, end it once, solve everything.

I understand why people love it. It sounds efficient. It sounds mature.

But it is rarely true.

An ending can solve a situation right in front of you, while planting consequences behind you that you will meet later, quietly, repeatedly, sometimes through your children, sometimes through your own inner life.

That is why when I hear stories of families spending half a million to hire private medical transport, selling homes, spending hundreds of thousands to buy time for a loved one who may still pass away, I notice how quickly outsiders ask, “Is it worth it.”

That question reveals distance.

It is easy to measure worth when it is not your family.

But when death is near, every hour becomes precious. People do not regret loving too hard. They regret not being there. They regret choosing convenience over presence.

And that is the paradox. Death makes people learn how to live, because it forces us to see what endings really cost.

Leadership, Disruption, and the New Feeling of Being Unprepared

There is a wider leadership context to this too. The world is moving fast, and leaders are feeling it, sometimes without admitting it.

A McKinsey report referencing a resilience pulse check found a large majority of leaders reporting they feel underprepared for future disruptions.

When leaders feel underprepared, the instinct is to seek control. To close loops quickly. To end discussion. To reduce uncertainty.

But when you reduce uncertainty by ending dialogue, you also reduce learning.

That is why, in my meeting, I did not want to use authority as a shortcut. I wanted the team to learn to think. I wanted to observe whether people would interpret my questioning as torture, or whether they would interpret it as impartation, alignment, value.

Because building leaders is slower than issuing orders, but it is the only way to create sustainability beyond a single person.

That aligns with how we talk about culture at Stellar, that we lead with servant leadership, that we are empowered not entitled, that we live gratefully not blaming, that we love truth, life, and people.

Culture is not proven by posters, it is proven by what we do when we could take the shortcut.

Why Endings Stay in Our Memory

There is another quiet reason endings feel so powerful.

Psychology describes a tendency where people judge an experience largely by its peak moment and how it ends, rather than by the full duration. This is often referred to as the peak-end rule.

This explains why endings carry such emotional weight. It is not just philosophy. It is how memory works.

So when you end something, you do not just stop it, you write the final paragraph that the brain will replay.

That is why it matters how you end a conversation, even a hard one. How you end a season. How you end a disagreement. How you end a day with your child.

And it also explains why choosing to live is hard, because living means you must keep writing, even when the previous paragraph was messy.

Mentorship, Being Used, and the Difference Between Transaction and Relationship

I also talked about my mentee, my first mentee, a journey of about 10 years, on and off.

I know he is opportunistic. He approaches me when he has an issue.

If I only look through the lens of being used, I will become bitter.

But if I look through another lens, it becomes simpler.

If a mentee has no issue, why would he seek help.

Even trash is being used to be recycled. If you are never used, maybe it is not because you are protected, maybe it is because you are not valuable enough to be needed.

Every transaction is an exchange of value.

The question is what kind of exchange you are living for.

If I serve expecting repayment, it becomes transactional. Even if it looks polite, it becomes a hidden contract. But if I serve with clarity, without expecting anything in return, then the reward becomes relational. You receive the value when you see the person supported, strengthened, redirected.

This is also part of choosing life.

Because death says, “Enough, I am done, I will not be used, I will not be inconvenienced.”

Life says, “I will keep giving while I still have something to give.”

The Choice That Keeps a Person Alive

By the end of my reflection that night, the conclusion did not feel like a conclusion. It felt like a quiet recommitment.

To die is easy.

It is easy to end a life, end a relationship, end a conversation, end a marriage, end a mentorship, end a commitment. Just stop. Cut off. 断绝关系. No more.

But choosing to live is hard, because living asks you to stay when you could run, to repair when replacing would be faster, to keep the options open when authority would end it cleanly, to love as an action when feeling is no longer helping.

And the deepest part is this.

A person can end something and call it peace.

Or a person can endure something and grow into peace.

The first looks easier. The second becomes meaningful.

That night, I went back to the same line in my note, and it felt less like a dramatic statement and more like a daily decision.

Death is easy. Choosing to live is hard.

And maybe that is why life, when it is truly lived, becomes precious.

Good night.