The Machine Will Not Love You Back

The counselor asked the question over the phone, in the middle of a treatment session. “If you were to die tomorrow, what would it say on your tombstone?”

Dagan Van Oosten sat back in his chair. He had never thought about it.

So the counselor started listing things for him. Sniper. Recon. The patches. The t-shirts. All the things a Marine Corps career hangs its hat on.

Dagan said yes to all of them. That would be on the stone.

Then the counselor said, “Okay. What else could it say? You’re not even halfway done yet.”

He let that sit. And then it hit him like a bolt of lightning. Those things on the list were jobs he had performed. They were not who he was.

Dagan deployed to Iraq with 1st Battalion, 5th Marines as a Scout Sniper, taught at Quantico Sniper School, then spent fourteen years contracting overseas. He was very good at every line on that list. He loved every one of them. And one Friday at Quantico he watched a Sergeant Major retire. Flowers, ceremony, the whole thing. The following Monday a brand new PFC checked into that same unit with no idea that Sergeant Major had ever existed.

“This machine is never going to love me the way I love it,” Dagan told Jeremy on this week’s episode of the March or Die podcast.

That sentence is for every man wearing a uniform, a badge, a title, a job he has built his identity around. The institution that defines you today will replace you on a Monday with someone who has never heard your name. That is how institutions work, and it is no betrayal of the work that they do.

The tombstone question is a forcing function. It cuts through the noise and reveals what you have actually been investing in versus what you say matters.

If the honest answer is only the patches and the awards and the deployments, the work is not done. Those are verbs. They are things you did. They were never you.

Dagan has chewed on the question for years now. He says the answer today is three words. Husband. Father. Friend. The end.

*Psalm 90:12 says, “Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.”* Numbering forces wisdom. The end exists. Let the certainty of it shape what gets done today.

A Marine knows how to re-zero a rifle when the rounds are not landing where the sights say they should. The same correction works on a life. Here is the diagnostic to run on the drive home today.

Picture your job ending on Friday afternoon. The ceremony, the handshakes, the box of personal effects in the back seat. Now picture Monday morning. Tuesday afternoon. Wednesday at five. Without the title, without the team, without the calendar the institution was filling for you, who are you by Wednesday?

If you cannot answer in five seconds without naming the job, the institution has been carrying your identity for you. Treat that as data. The man who runs that diagnostic at forty still has time to build something the machine cannot take. The man who runs it at sixty-five for the first time, the morning after his retirement, has run out of runway to do anything about the answer.

The badge will retire. The contract will end. The rank will roll over to the next man. The wife at the kitchen table, the kid waiting at the soccer game, the friend on the other end of a hard phone call. None of those retire when the institution moves on.

The machine will not love you back. Decide what does. Then live there.

Check out the companion article on MarchOrDie.com: https://marchordie.com/episodes/what-you-did-is-not-who-you-are/