“A lot of writers seem really dumb, but you don’t, so I thought I should write to you.”

I can’t find the first email Jake Seliger sent me, but that was the gist of it—delivered with bluntness that cloaked genuine hope. Then in his mid-20s, Jake wanted me to read a draft of his memoir about cancer treatments he’d undergone when he was in college. His take was contrarian: Cancer was an annoyance that delivered no epiphany—although it did start him thinking about what gives us meaning in life.

Thus began an unlikely but rewarding 15-year friendship, cultivated through millions of emailed words, two lunches, and a few phone calls—until Jake died in August 2024 of head-and-neck cancer, just weeks before his wife gave birth to their daughter. He was 40.

In his writing and blogging, no matter the subject, whatever his angle, Jake tended to poke at the same sprawling question: How do we see through the haze of conventional wisdom and other people’s self-interest to make our own good choices? His most popular pieces were warnings not to go to grad school in the humanities and an assessment of the pitfalls of med school based on his wife’s experience as a doctor. He had no patience for “follow your heart” naivete or the pronouncements of elders who had prospered under vastly different conditions. His insistence grew from his own misgivings: He regretted his year in law school and rued his time in a doctoral program in English. He wrote a dissertation about academic satire in modern novels only to conclude that academia in the 21st century was so absurd as to be beyond satire. His practicality irked his advisor, but Jake wasn’t about to cringe and writhe like Uriah Heep for a shot at a likely imaginary job.

Yet Jake became a teacher, snagging adjunct positions in New York and Arizona, eager to share his hard-earned experience as a writer and reader. By giving college kids writing that shaped his own thinking, he hoped to show them how to read closely and think clearly—skills he wished he hadn’t struggled to learn on his own. When he met students who used their brains to cultivate a worldview, even if he disagreed with them, even if their lives and backgrounds and goals were alien to him, he was delighted, and told me about the best ones.

Like most of us, Jake was frustrated by the disparity between the work that goes into writing and its meager returns, both social and financial. It was a cruel irony, but one he accepted, that his posts about cancer in 2023 and 2024 found a wide readership, especially among others who were suffering as he was. Most of us avert our eyes from the subjects Jake had no choice but to discuss, including the torturous maze of clinical trials and the need for a “right to try” for terminally ill patients seeking experimental treatments. I hope Jake helped his readers. I know he made some of them feel less alone.

The day before he passed, Jake made me laugh. “Tons of response from Twitter, Hacker News, and elsewhere to the recent posts,” he wrote to me. “Nothing like dying to amp up the traffic for a bit, I guess.”

And that was another irony: Before cancer, Jake rarely looked to his own life for inspiration. He was a successful grant writer. He had an intimidating knowledge of advances in battery technology and other trends in tech. He wrote novels about sexual politics. He corresponded with pundits and writers whose names you would recognize, as well as many others who caught his attention: bloggers, independent publishers, literary critics, tech gurus, even a sex worker writing a memoir. Starving for fiction that didn’t bore him, he was amazed not by books about Brooklynites’ social-emotional minutiae but by Lonesome Dove, The Name of the Rose, and other big, ambitious novels that used heaps of broken images to celebrate the why and the how of living. Jake felt hampered by a lack of solid guidance as a kid. He regretted wasting some of his teen years on video games and self-pity. I think that’s why he craved fiction with characters whose goal in knowing themselves was to make better sense of life itself.

Long before cancer, Jake knew that we need to make the most of our too-brief lives, and that most of us don’t.

Jake thrived on thoughtful disagreement. He disliked two things I really like—poetry and long car trips—and he was comically vague in his efforts to avoid insulting me when those topics arose. So help me, I reciprocated at times with my own graceless silence. I could live to be a thousand and never share a sliver of Jake’s arcane passion for residential zoning reform. He was a techno-optimist; I took a drearier view. But for fifteen years, we two very different friends kicked around ideas and learned from each other. Sometimes weeks passed between emails—and then we’d volley several replies in a week. We talked about art, writing, social trends, teaching, bureaucracy, nonprofit work, our long-term plans, our families—our whole lives, really. Anyone who aspires to see what’s true in the world should have a friend as gloriously unswayed by popular opinion as Jake was.

“One virtue of a prolonged end is that I feel I’ve said everything I have to say,” Jake wrote after more than a year of struggle. But only cancer forced that clarity, cramping an otherwise ravenous mind. He’s been gone for months, but every week I see articles and stories that make me think, “I’ve got to send this to Jake,” or a notion pops up that I want to run past him. And then I remember why I can’t. For the rest of my life, I’ll have conversations with Jake in my mind. I don’t expect them to fade.

And in the end, he left all who knew him an example of how to reckon ourselves honestly, to use our time well, and to be sad without despairing. Jake wasn’t religious, but he died the way those of us who are religious know we should, but rarely do: with gratitude and peace—even after losing his tongue, after struggling to eat, speak, and swallow, and knowing he wouldn’t live to hold his daughter:

Though having my life cut short by cancer is horrible, I’ve still in many ways been lucky. Most people never find the person who completes them, I think, and I have. I’ve been helped so much. Numerous oncologists have gone above and beyond. Many people, friends and strangers, have asked if there is anything they can do to help.

[. . .]

The gift must be given back, sooner or later, willingly or unwillingly, and sadly it seems that I will be made to give it back before my time. I have learned much, experienced much, made many mistakes, enjoyed my triumphs, suffered my defeats, and, most vitally, experienced love. So many people live who never get that last one, and I have been lucky enough to.

When our time comes, how many of us will say the same?