How a lifelong love of life became a philosophy
For as long as I can remember, I’ve been overly inquisitive. Some kids collect baseball cards; I collected questions. Why do people live as they do? What actually works in reality—and what’s just pretense? Why does one moment feel alive and radiant while another feels flat?
My parents were professional sculptors, hands-on adventurers who owned a traveling bronze foundry. We moved constantly. They shaped metal into art. I, meanwhile, was shaping a fascination with life itself: not just living it, but noticing it. Savoring it.
As an adolescent, I read Steinbeck, Farley Mowat, and Robert Louis Stevenson. I fell in love with the Cosmos series by Carl Sagan.
As a teenager, I read Defoe, Melville and Thoreau and scribbled in my journal about the “magic moments” in life. I wanted life to be a grand adventure—whether physical, like standing on a mountain ledge, or inward, like wrestling with an idea that wouldn’t let me go.
I walked through graveyards and pondered lives lived and lost. What would they give to be alive again? Had they been happy with their lives? Proud of how they lived?
I wondered what my life would be like. I wondered how people could stagnate while still alive. I wondered and cried at suicides. I drank in sunsets and summer thunderstorms. I craved more. I craved adventure. I wanted to see the world.
Testing the World
After high school, I took a gap year. It wasn’t just about travel—it was an experiment. I wanted to know: Could dreams survive contact with reality?
I worked on cruise ships, hitchhiked through New Zealand, wandered Fiji, and processed photos in Lahaina. Every adventure was my way of testing both the world and myself: does it really bend when you push on it? Or does it push back harder?
I learned two things. First: reality pushes back. Second: even when it does, the pushback is still part of the gift. And the adventure.
The Detour Through Roles
When I returned, I tried on roles like costumes. Fiction writer. Analyst. Screenwriter. Photographer. Painter. I loved the creativity of each path, but none felt complete. I thought I was failing because I couldn’t pick just one.
Then, in the late ’90s, something clicked. The internet was new, raw, full of possibility. I realized I didn’t have to reduce my love of life to a single format. I could build an umbrella, a home for the whole thing: Life Savor.
It was more than a name—it was a calling. I had already felt the shock of suicides in my community. The blunt finality of someone deciding life wasn’t worth it pierced me deeply. For me, life itself was already the miracle, already the jackpot. Life Savor would be my way to share that conviction, to offer others what I had always felt: life is precious, even when it hurts.
The Pause and the Return
Then came the practical years. Marriage. Children. Debt. For a decade, survival took center stage.
But the dream didn’t die. Once the debts were paid, I circled back to what felt most urgent: writing the book. Life Savor as a philosophy had lived in me for years; now it needed form. I devoured philosophy, psychology, and my own old notes. I argued with myself on paper. I validated, discarded, and refined. And eventually, I wrote the book I didn’t want to die without writing.
Practice, Not Just Theory
In those years, I also volunteered on a suicide hotline. The training was intense; the listening was humbling. It showed me the limits of what words can do—and also their power. I realized I wasn’t meant to be a traditional psychologist. My calling wasn’t only to listen. It was to communicate my own sense of life, to remind people of what’s possible, even in the dark.
Building the Oasis
From the beginning, I envisioned Life Savor as an oasis. A place people could turn to when the world felt parched with demands and expectations. A place with beautiful quotes, “recuperation stations,” music, stories, reflections—all designed to transfuse the spirit with wonder.
I wanted to pay forward what I felt since childhood: that the very fact of existence is astonishing. That noticing this gift changes how we live.
Final Thought
Life Savor began not as a brand or a project, but as a thank-you note to existence. A way of saying: I see the gift. I feel the weight and the wonder of being alive. And I want to share it before I’m gone.
It’s my hymn of praise, my reminder, my offering. And now, it’s here for you too—an invitation to savor your own life, in all its fleeting, fragile glory.
Life is precious not just because it exists, but because we know it exists. And that is the most human gift of all.
To learn more about Life Savor’s philosophy,
read Life Savor: Treasuring Our Gift of Life by Erik Victor Reed.
