Living While Dying

Living While Dying Thom's mission is to inspire others to embrace life fully despite the challenges of illness.

Through honest exploration and positivity, Thom seeks to offer support and motivation, celebrating courage and zest in navigating life's toughest challenges. Living Life Press is a publishing and media entity dedicated to raising awareness about prostate cancer through storytelling, speaking engagements, and multimedia. Founded by Thom Barrett, a best-selling author and stage IV prostate cancer thriver, Living Life Press focuses on sharing personal experiences, providing education, and inspiring hope for those affected by prostate cancer. Through books, podcasts, and public speaking, Living Life Press seeks to foster open conversations about men's health, highlight the importance of early detection and research, and encourage individuals to live life fully, even in the face of illness. All proceeds from the business’s endeavors go directly to support cancer research and awareness campaigns.

I used to chase peak experiences. The big trip. The intense moment. The dramatic breakthrough. Then I realized something...
08/06/2026

I used to chase peak experiences. The big trip. The intense moment. The dramatic breakthrough. Then I realized something that changed how I approach living: life isn't lived at the peaks. It's lived in the valleys between them. And if you're only alive at the peaks, you're missing most of your life.

The quiet mornings with coffee aren't dramatic. There's no postcard moment when I sit quietly watching the light change or the birds gather at the feeder. The daily walks around the same loop aren't heroic. The quiet hours of writing, when nothing brilliant emerges but I show up anyway, don't feel significant in the moment.

But these are the practices that have sustained me. Not the trip to Mallorca, though it mattered. Not the big decisions, though those shaped me. The daily showing up. The unglamorous consistency. The choice to be present in the ordinary moments that make up the vast majority of a life.

Most people glorify the mountaintop moments. I get it. I've had my share, and they're powerful. But what I've come to value more is the ability to show up in the ordinary. To find meaning in the mundane. To stay engaged when nothing exciting is happening. To recognize that this moment, right now, with nothing special occurring, is still my life. Still worthy of my full presence.

That's the practice. Not waiting for inspiration to show up for your life. But showing up for your life so consistently that inspiration knows where to find you. The edge of now isn't just the dramatic moments. It's every moment. Including this one.

Where do you need to show up more consistently in your ordinary life?

From The Edge of Now, available wherever books are sold.

Stepping into something new is dramatic. It's the big decision, the bold move, the leap into the unknown, like a trip to...
08/04/2026

Stepping into something new is dramatic. It's the big decision, the bold move, the leap into the unknown, like a trip to Mallorca after months of routine. Showing up is quieter. It's what you do the day after the leap. And the day after that. And the day after that.

Most people can step once. Few people can show up consistently.

Here's what I've learned after years of trying to live awake: intensity doesn't build a life. Consistency does. The grand gesture gets attention, but the daily practice creates transformation. You don't write a book in one inspired burst. You write it by showing up to the page every morning, even when the words don't come. You don't build strength with one heroic workout. You build it by showing up to the practice, even when you don't feel like it.

The trip to Mallorca was transformative. But you know what transforms me just as much? The ordinary mornings back home. Coffee. Dexter at my feet. The practice of sitting down to write whether inspiration shows or not. These unglamorous, repeated actions build the foundation that makes the dramatic moments possible, and worth returning home to.

Now that I'm back, I want to recommit to the small, consistent things. To value showing up over standing out. To choose daily practice over waiting for the next big adventure to feel alive.

Because the life you want isn't built in a day, or a single trip to a Spanish island. It's built in the accumulation of days where you showed up, even when it was hard. Especially when it was hard.

What's one thing you can commit to showing up for this week, no matter what?

People sometimes ask me how I hold two things at once: the adventurer who's climbing mountains and swimming in cold Icel...
07/30/2026

People sometimes ask me how I hold two things at once: the adventurer who's climbing mountains and swimming in cold Icelandic water, and the man writing seriously about AI governance and political accountability on his Substacks. The honest answer is that I've never seen these as separate parts of me. They come from the same root.

Enjoying life and living while dying aren't opposite instincts. They're the same instinct, pointed in different directions. One says: pay attention to the beauty in front of you, the orange groves, the mountain light, the people you love, because none of it lasts forever. The other says: pay attention to the systems shaping the world you'll leave behind, because none of that lasts forever either, and silence doesn't protect anyone.

I wrote Embracing the Cold and The Edge of Now because I needed to make sense of living fully inside a body that was failing me. I write on The Quiet Collapse and This Old Auditor because I need to make sense of living fully inside a society that's changing faster than most of us can track, especially when it comes to artificial intelligence and the lack of guardrails protecting ordinary people.

Both are acts of staying awake. Both refuse the comfortable option of looking away. Here on this page, I'll keep sharing the reflections, the books, the moments that remind us how to live fully. If you want the deeper dive into politics, AI, or the harder societal questions, that's where the Substacks come in.

Same person. Same values. Just different rooms in the same house.

Some of my best thinking happened over slow breakfasts in Soller. Bread, olive oil, strong coffee, and no particular pla...
07/28/2026

Some of my best thinking happened over slow breakfasts in Soller. Bread, olive oil, strong coffee, and no particular place to be.

It was in one of those unhurried mornings that I found myself thinking seriously about artificial intelligence, and how little conversation there is about protecting ordinary citizens as these systems reshape nearly everything. It's not a topic I expected to become passionate about. But living with a terminal diagnosis has taught me to pay attention when something feels urgent and unaddressed, whether that's my own mortality or a societal blind spot barreling toward us.

I've started writing about this more formally on This Old Auditor, my newest Substack. It's not really a departure from what I've always done here. Whether I'm writing about cancer, about legacy, about politics, or now about AI governance, the throughline is the same: don't look away from what's uncomfortable. Say the thing that needs saying, even if it's not popular, even if it complicates the tidy narrative people expect from someone in my position.

But I don't want to turn this space into a policy debate. This is where I share reflections, not arguments. So I'll say this simply: living awake means staying curious about the world, not just your own inner life. It means asking hard questions about the systems you're part of, even when those questions are inconvenient.

The rest of that thinking lives on Substack, for anyone who wants to go deeper.
Here, I just want to keep telling you what I'm noticing, what I'm learning, and what it means to live fully while the clock keeps ticking for all of us.

There's a particular feeling that arrives a few days after returning from somewhere that changed you. The suitcase is un...
07/23/2026

There's a particular feeling that arrives a few days after returning from somewhere that changed you. The suitcase is unpacked. The laundry is done. And you're left standing in your own home, looking at your own life, wondering what to do with everything you brought back that isn't a physical object.

I came home from Mallorca with sunburned shoulders and a mind full of questions. About technology. About attention. About what it means to live well when time is finite, which, if we're honest, is true for every single one of us, not just those of us with a diagnosis attached to that fact.

I also came home wanting to recommit to something simple: showing up here, consistently, not because I have something dramatic to say every time, but because the practice itself matters. Somoler taught me the value of slowness. But I don't want slowness to become an excuse for disappearing again.

So here's what I'm committing to as I settle back in: regular reflections, honest as always, sometimes about the books, sometimes about what I'm noticing in daily life, sometimes about the harder conversations happening on my Substacks for anyone who wants more depth.

The theme that ties all of it together hasn't changed. Enjoy life. Live while dying, which is really just another way of saying: live while you're alive, because none of us know how much time we actually have.

Thank you for being patient during the quiet weeks. I missed this. I missed you.
Let's keep going.

For the first few days in Soller, I kept reaching for my phone out of habit. Nothing was wrong. I just didn't know what ...
07/23/2026

For the first few days in Soller, I kept reaching for my phone out of habit. Nothing was wrong. I just didn't know what to do with my attention, my mind, when there was nowhere urgent to point them.

By the second week, that habit had faded. And something unexpected happened in its place: I started noticing things again. The specific way morning light hit the mountains behind the house I was staying in. The sound of a language I don't speak, spoken by people who weren't performing for anyone, just living their ordinary days. The smell of oranges everywhere, in the groves, in the markets, in the air itself.

I've written a lot about living awake. About refusing to sleepwalk through your one life. But I realized something in Soller: sometimes staying awake requires stepping away from the very platforms and habits that claim to keep us connected. The endless scroll doesn't wake you up. It numbs you in a different way, disguised as engagement.

Disconnecting wasn't about rejecting technology or turning my back on this community. It was about remembering that presence requires space. You can't be fully here if part of you is always somewhere else, checking, scrolling, responding.

I don't know if I'll take breaks like this often. But I know I needed this one. And I know I came back different, more present, more grateful for the ordinary textures of a day.

What would it feel like to disconnect, even briefly, from whatever keeps pulling your attention away from what's actually in front of you?

I've been away for a while, and I wanted to tell you why.In June, I spent a few weeks in Mallorca, mostly in a small tow...
07/16/2026

I've been away for a while, and I wanted to tell you why.
In June, I spent a few weeks in Mallorca, mostly in a small town called Soller, tucked into the mountains away from the crowds of Palma. Palma had its own charm, but it moved too fast for what I needed. Soller was different. Orange groves. Narrow stone streets. Mornings where the only agenda was to notice what was right in front of me.

I needed that kind of quiet. Not because I was tired of living awake, but because staying awake sometimes means stepping back from the noise, including the noise of social media, to hear yourself think again.

While I was there, I also found myself circling back to something that's been on my mind for a while now: how unprepared we are, as a society, to handle the changes coming from artificial intelligence. I started writing about it more seriously, in the first person, unfiltered, on a new Substack called This Old Auditor. It's a departure from what I usually cover here, but it comes from the same place everything else does. A refusal to stay quiet about things that matter, whether that's mortality, politics, or the systems shaping our future. If you've followed The Quiet Collapse, you already know I don't shy away from hard conversations.

But mostly, these weeks were about living. Walking mountain trails. Kayaking. Eating slowly. Talking with people whose lives look nothing like mine. Remembering what it feels like to have nowhere to be.

I'm back now. Grateful for the break, and even more grateful to be returning to this space, to these conversations, to you.
More soon.

After you step into growth a few times, you begin to notice something unexpected. The discomfort does not disappear, but...
04/30/2026

After you step into growth a few times, you begin to notice something unexpected. The discomfort does not disappear, but it stops feeling like a warning. It starts to feel familiar. You recognize the sensation of being slightly outside your comfort zone, and instead of pulling back, you lean into it.

This shift happens quietly. At first, each step requires a deliberate decision. You weigh the options, question yourself, and then move forward. Over time, that process becomes less complicated. You trust the pattern. You know that uncertainty usually leads to discovery.

Looking back, the value of these steps is not in any single experience. It is in how they change your relationship with life. You become more willing to explore, more open to possibilities, more comfortable with not knowing exactly how things will unfold.

The places that once felt distant become accessible. The decisions that once felt intimidating become manageable. You start to see growth as something you participate in regularly, not something reserved for rare moments.

What waits on the other side is not a finish line. It is a wider view. More capacity. A deeper trust in your ability to move forward, even when the path is unclear.

And once you experience that, stepping stops feeling like a risk and starts feeling like a natural way to live.


Looking back, the moments that stand out are rarely the comfortable ones. They are the times you stepped into something ...
04/28/2026

Looking back, the moments that stand out are rarely the comfortable ones. They are the times you stepped into something uncertain. The trips that required adjustment. The decisions that stretched you. The experiences that asked more than you expected.

Those moments expand your sense of what is possible. You discover capabilities that remain hidden when everything is predictable. You learn that uncertainty often leads to insight.

What waits on the other side of growth is not perfection. It is an expansion. A broader understanding of yourself. A deeper trust in your ability to adapt.

Each step contributes to that direction. Some are quiet. Some are challenging. All of them move you forward.

Over time, movement begins to feel more natural than staying still. Growth becomes something you recognize. You follow the pull toward what feels alive, even when it includes uncertainty.

That is where discovery continues.


After stepping into growth a few times, the process begins to feel familiar. The hesitation still appears, but it no lon...
04/23/2026

After stepping into growth a few times, the process begins to feel familiar. The hesitation still appears, but it no longer feels final. You recognize the pattern. Doubt, decision, adjustment. Each cycle reinforces the last.

You begin to trust that clarity often comes after movement. Waiting for certainty becomes less appealing. You understand that understanding grows through experience.

This familiarity changes your relationship with uncertainty. It no longer feels like something to avoid. It becomes part of the process. You expect questions, and you move anyway.

Growth becomes less about single bold actions and more about a steady rhythm. You notice resistance. You move forward. You adapt. Then you repeat the process.

Over time, stepping into the unknown begins to feel natural. Not easy, but recognizable. You know how to enter that space. You know you can navigate it.

That rhythm builds confidence in a deeper way than motivation ever does.


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