A record of your life is a kind of insurance

I spent a chunk of my career around risk and value, so I tend to think in terms of insurance — paying a small, certain cost now to protect against a larger loss later. We do it everywhere. We insure houses against fire, cars against accidents, incomes against illness. Most of those things may never happen.

There's one loss, though, that isn't a may. Everyone you love will one day be out of reach, and so will you. The stories, the voice, the way someone saw the world — all of it goes, and unlike a house, it can't be rebuilt. It's the most certain loss there is, and it's the one almost nobody insures against.

A record of a life is that insurance. A small effort now — some conversations, captured and written down — against a guaranteed future where the only alternative is trying to remember, and slowly failing to.

The math is lopsided in a way that would make any underwriter laugh. The premium is tiny: a few hours of talking. The payout is enormous and lasts for generations: your children, and their children, able to actually know who you were instead of inheriting a few photos and some secondhand stories. I can't think of another policy with a return like that.

And like real insurance, the entire value is in buying it before you need it. Nobody can take out a policy after the fire. You cannot record a person's stories once they're gone; you can only wish someone had. The window is always now, and it only ever gets smaller.

What's strange is how rarely we think of it this way. We'll spend hours comparing insurance quotes for things that probably won't happen, and not one hour protecting the thing that certainly will be lost. Partly that's because, until recently, "recording your life" meant writing a book or hiring someone — expensive, effortful, easy to defer. So we deferred.

That part has changed, which removes the last excuse. With MemoirTalk the premium is about as low as it gets: you just talk, and your life becomes a written record automatically — no writing, no cost of a ghostwriter. The hardest part of buying this particular insurance used to be the effort. Now it's just deciding to.

Insure the house. Insure the car. Then spend one of those careful hours on the one loss you already know is coming.

— Jeff

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