Last week my son David — nine years old — started playing “Dumb Ways to Die” in this the show he’s watching.
I knew it instantly. That song is from 2012 — an Australian train company made it to stop people walking in front of trains. I’d half-forgotten it existed. Fourteen years later it’s colonising the home through my son, and it’s exactly as catchy as I remembered.
If you don’t know it: it’s a cheerful little tune listing absurd ways people get themselves killed.
“Set fire to your hair. Poke a stick at a grizzly bear. Eat a tube of superglue.”
The genius of it is the framing — none of these deaths are tragedies. They’re choices. Preventable, avoidable, slightly embarrassing choices.
And somewhere around the third replay, it struck me that the song stops too early.
Because the dumbest ways to die don’t kill the body. They kill the version of you that was supposed to exist. The business you were given the exact skills to build. The family culture you were positioned to start. The thing you’d do if you actually believed your time was running — which it is. Those die quietly, with no jingle, and the person carrying them keeps walking around for another forty years.
Here are the ones I’ve watched. I’ve personally run at least one of them, more than once.
Waiting for the manual…until you die.
Some of us were handed a playbook — a father who built something, a family that talked about money, a mentor who said “do this, not that.” Some of us were handed the opposite: a live demonstration of every default to avoid, and no instructions for the inverse.
The dumb death is concluding that because no one handed you the manual, you’re not allowed to start. I had no mentors and no capital when I started. I didnt even have network or supporting family cos I was a foreigner to Singapore.
The manual doesn’t exist (if you have, good for you!).
Most of us “cycle-breakers/starters”, we write it by going first and taking notes. Waiting for it is just dying slowly with good posture.
Burying the talent to keep it safe…until you die.
There’s a story Jesus told about a master who gives three servants money before a journey. Two invest it. One buries his in the ground and hands it back intact, proud of himself: here is what is yours.
He’s the only one condemned. Not for losing the money — he didn’t lose a cent. For the safe choice. For treating preservation as faithfulness when he’d been given the capital precisely so something would happen with it.
That story rearranged something in me, because most of us have been taught the opposite: that the careful path is the responsible one. But unexpressed capability isn’t being preserved. It’s being buried.
And the master in the story does not say “well done, good and careful servant.”
Polishing instead of publishing…until you die.
This is mine. I’ll name it plainly.
I have rewritten taglines and mulled over categories and ported nigelchua.com over different platforms again and again since 2009 with so many posts that nobody had read yet. I have refined positioning for an audience that didn’t exist, restructured category systems for posts I hadn’t published, and called it work. It does feel like I was building. It was burial with better aesthetics — the third servant, except I kept digging the hole up to admire the coin before reburying it.
But it’s just looking or acting busy, nothing really was being built, kinda like preparing all the ingredients for a dish, set it to cook in a pan, then taking them out to put in oven, then taking it out to put into airfryer, then back to pan…its just busy work that goes nowhere and wastes ingredients, effort and time.
Potential doesn’t usually die in one dramatic refusal. It dies in revision rounds. The polish never ends because the polish was never the point — not shipping was the point, and polish was the respectable costume.
Renting out every hour…until you die.
If every hour you have is sold — to an employer, to clients, to a clinic schedule that collapses the moment you stop showing up — then your potential has a landlord, and the rent is due daily.
I ran on rented time for years. Many do.
The escape wasn’t working harder inside the rented hours. It was deliberately, slowly converting time into things that run without me: systems, people, premises, words on a page that work the night shift. You cannot build the long thing if 100% of your hours are already spoken for. Something has to be bought back first, on purpose, at a cost.
Carrying what was never yours…until you die.
Some people spend their best decade trying to manage another person’s chaos — re-litigating old wounds, holding themselves responsible for outcomes they don’t control, mistaking proximity for obligation.
I’ve learned, expensively, to split everything into three piles:
- what I control,
- what I influence,
- what I touch neither.
The third pile is where potential goes to bleed out. Not because the people in it don’t matter — they do, and some of them I love — but because energy spent there is subtracted, hour for hour, from the children in my house and the work in my hands. Grief over that is appropriate. Residence in it is fatal.
Calling drift “waiting on God”…until you die.
This one I’ll say carefully, because I believe in waiting on God.
I’ve done it and watched it pay.
But there’s a counterfeit version where “I’m praying about it” means “I’m avoiding it,” and the spiritual language is load-bearing for fear. The third servant had theology too — I knew you to be a hard man, so I was afraid — and his fear wore the costume of reverence. The test I use: waiting on God produces preparation. Drift produces excuses with verses attached. One of them has callouses on its hands.
The song ended. David replayed it. I let him — it’s a good song, and apparently it has another decade in it.
But sitting in that car I knew what I actually want him to inherit isn’t the tune. It’s the habit underneath this whole piece: the ability to look at a default — the safe burial, the endless polish, the rented hours, the borrowed burden — see it for what it is, and choose the deliberate thing instead, on purpose, while there’s still time on the clock.
The trains are well marked.
Most of us were never going to die that way.