A Note on Ben Sasse
I watched Ben Sasse’s 60 Minutes interview a couple of weeks ago.
I knew who he was in the vague public-figure way. Former senator. Historian. Conservative. Used to run the University of Florida. One of the Republicans who broke with Trump after January 6. But I didn’t really know him as a person.
The interview changed that.
Sasse has metastatic pancreatic cancer. He’d been told he probably has three or four months to live. And there he was, talking about death, faith, family, regret, America, work, neighbors, and dinner tables with a clarity that stopped me.
A few days later I read the piece his daughter Alex wrote in The Free Press. I sent it to my wife and my son because I wanted them to read it too. That piece made the 60 Minutes interview hit harder.
She wrote about a question Sasse would ask his kids growing up: “Tell me three true things about yourself.”
It’s a simple thing. But it says a lot. In their family, it was a way of returning to what was actually true — God’s love, the family’s love, the kind of person they were trying to become. It wasn’t just a nice phrase. It was something they had practiced before they needed it.
Then I listened to the Not Dead Yet interview Ben Thompson did with him on Stratechery, and I was honestly surprised at how much it stuck with me.
I originally cared about that one because of Thompson. I read him every day. He’s one of the clearest people writing about technology, media, business, and China right now. So the juxtaposition was interesting — Thompson the tech guy, Sasse the politics-and-history guy.
But I came out of that conversation more impressed with Sasse.
He has a way of talking about public life that keeps coming back to private life. Politics matters, but it isn’t the center. Power matters, but it isn’t the highest calling. Being a senator is something, but being a dad, a husband, a neighbor, a person of faith — that’s more.
That’s easy to say. What impresses me is that he actually seems to have tried to live that way.
Not perfectly. He’s honest about his regrets. He wishes he’d traveled less. He wishes he’d had more kids. He talked in the 60 Minutes interview about a box of thousands of hotel keys from work trips, and how heavy it was to look at. That image is hard to forget. A box full of proof that you were busy. And also proof that you were gone.
I’ve also been reading Living Life Backward by David Gibson, which is a walkthrough of Ecclesiastes. The whole argument of the book is that you should live your life with the end in view, because letting death sit in the room actually clarifies what your time is for. Sasse is what that looks like when it isn’t a thought experiment.
A lot of what he says sounds like it’s straight out of that book. Money, achievement, status, even being a United States senator — none of it survives the test of the end. What does survive is smaller and closer. Family. Faith. The people who actually know you. The table you eat at.
I think that’s part of why the whole thing has stuck with me. Two separate inputs landing in the same place at the same time tends to mean something.
A few things I want to remember.
The best titles aren’t professional ones. Dad. Husband. Friend. Neighbor.
You should practice saying true things before life gets hard. When it gets hard, you’ll need words you already trust.
Faith isn’t mainly interesting as an argument. It’s interesting when you see what it does to a person under pressure.
Regret is clarifying if you tell the truth about it.
Dinner tables matter more than we act like they do.
The ordinary stuff is not ordinary.
Life can really, really suck. It can be unfair and terrifying and painful. No amount of intelligence or success or achievement gets you around that. But how you respond to it matters. Maybe that’s one of the only things that finally defines you.
That’s what’s impressed me about Sasse. He’s staring down one of the scariest things a person can face, and he’s doing it with grace and dignity. Not fake positivity. Not denial. He’s sad about what he’ll miss. He hates cancer. He knows death isn’t how things are supposed to be.
But he also seems grateful. Rooted. Loving. Honest. Focused on the right things.
I’m not trying to produce a theory of Ben Sasse here, or some grand argument about American life. I just wanted to write down something I noticed so I don’t forget.
I watched the interview. I read his daughter’s piece. I listened to the Thompson conversation. I kept reading Gibson on the side. The cumulative effect was that I found myself genuinely impressed by who Sasse appears to be.
More than impressed. Challenged.
Not in some dramatic, life-overhaul way. More in a quiet way. A reminder to pay attention to what I’m building, what I’m repeating, what my family hears from me, how I spend my time, and whether the things I say matter actually show up in my life.
Because when everything gets stripped down, those are the things that seem to remain.