times i’ve feared death

posted oct 2025

Thrice in my life I’ve truly believed that I was maybe about to die1.

Each of these times, I did all the tropey things like thinking of what my final goodbyes would be, thinking about my regrets and the apologies I never got to make, applying Pascal’s Wager despite never being religious, etc.

One of the three instances was something medical which is pretty lame. The other two are related to travel which is more fun!

on a wooden boat in the Indian Ocean

In September 2019 I flew to the Maldives because there were crazy cheap flights just before Scoot killed them off.

While many visit the Maldives for their high-end resorts (>$1000/night) that they take private speedboats to (~$1000/trip), one can actually plan a trip visiting “local islands” (guesthouses ~$30/night) taking the only form of public transport that can exist for a country with >1000 geographically-dispersed tiny islands: dhoni ferries (~$2/trip).

I did that! Unfortunately, on my first dhoni trip from Male to Thulusdhoo, I

in a van in Cambodia

  1. This excludes a time I skidded on a motorcycle (and dropped the bike) turning into a main road, but I didn’t actually have enough time to consciously fear death between T(start skidding) and T(ending up between some parked cars / definitely not in the path of potential oncoming traffic). ↩︎