I opened Instagram on an ordinary morning and the profile that had taken three years to build was not there. In its place sat a single grey line the platform writes once and never explains further, this page isn't available. I refreshed it the way a man checks a pulse he already suspects has stopped, four times, five, waiting for the numbers to reassemble themselves, for @refinedmoney and its four hundred thousand and some followers to return the way they had every other morning for three years. They did not return. Somewhere in the previous day, between a copyright flag on a clip I had not uploaded myself and what the platform's appeal form later called, in its clipped automated language, manual account manipulation, someone or something had decided the page should stop existing, and for a stretch of time that felt considerably longer than it turned out to be, it did. I filed the appeal that same afternoon and then did the only thing left available to me, which was check the screen twice a day, at the exact hours a carousel and a reel would ordinarily have gone out, as if punctuality could still count for something with a page that no longer existed.

Three years of daily posting had gone into that page, one carousel a day for most of them, a following built one person at a time without a single paid advertisement, hundreds of messages a week from readers I had never met who told me, in their own words, that something in it had landed. All of it sat behind a single grey line now, unreachable to the very people who had followed it there. I want to be honest about what that morning was and was not. It was not a loss I chose. I had done nothing to invite it and would undo it without a second thought if undoing were on offer. This matters, because the rest of this letter concerns a different kind of loss entirely, the sort a small number of people give up on their own terms, deliberately, while they still hold every reason to keep it. In the weeks since, I have wondered what these two kinds of loss actually have in common. Whether a man who has practiced letting go of things he was free to keep arrives at the forced version of losing better equipped than a man who has never let go of anything in his life.

The answer turned out to hinge on a single word, rehearsal, which is a strange thing to bring to a conversation about loss until you notice how much of what breaks a person is the discovery, made for the first time under duress, of what remains of him without the thing. That discovery is available to anyone in advance. Almost no one goes looking for it early. A small number of men across a very long stretch of history sought it out on purpose, at the exact moment they had the least reason to, and what happened to them afterward, set beside what happened to the men who never went looking at all, is the whole of what follows.

To lose something on purpose is to give up a position, a title, a level of control, or an amount of money while you are still fully entitled to keep it, and to hold the decision as your own, made on your own schedule, before anyone else gets the chance to make it for you. The distinction matters more than it first appears. A man who is forced out has learned something narrow, which is what happens to him under force. A man who walks out on his own has tested something far rarer, which is whether his sense of who he is depends on the thing he is holding or survives without it. Most men reach the end of a long career, a marriage, or a fortune having never once put that question to the test voluntarily, and so they answer it for the first time at the worst possible hour, with the answer already being decided for them by somebody else.

The practice works less like sacrifice and more like a controlled experiment. A person steps back from an office, a following, a level of income, while still healthy, still capable, still wanted, and watches what stands. If the identity holds, he has learned something durable about himself that no title, account, or bank balance can now take from him, because he has already proven it was never the source. If the identity buckles the moment the position is gone, he has learned something more useful still, and learned it while there was time and money enough left to act on it. Either result repays the exercise. The only losing move is never running it at all, because then the question waits, unanswered, for the day life runs the experiment on your behalf, without asking your consent and typically without any warning attached.

This is why the men who practiced it tend to describe the experience afterward as relief, a description that puzzles anyone who has never tried it. Sacrifice implies a thing taken from you against your will. This is closer to a weight you finally set down yourself, on your own morning, after months or years of carrying it without noticing the carrying. A man who has released something voluntarily discovers he no longer has to guard it, negotiate for it, or wake wondering whether today is the day it gets taken. He already took it from himself, on a date he chose, and there is nothing left for circumstance to threaten him with.

Napoleon Bonaparte lost his throne twice, and he accepted neither loss as final. After the disaster at Waterloo in June of 1815 he was forced from power a second time and delivered, ten weeks later, to the island of Saint Helena in the middle of the Atlantic, a rock chosen by the British specifically because nothing could be organised to rescue him from it. He spent the next six years there, and in every account left by the men who shared his exile, he spent them behaving as though the previous chapter had not actually closed.

His residence at Longwood was, by every description that survives it, a damp and rat-infested former cowshed converted in haste, nothing resembling a palace by any measure that mattered. Napoleon nonetheless insisted his household appear there each evening in full court dress, the officers in uniform, the women in gowns and jewels, for dinners served with the formal choreography of an empire he no longer possessed. Being addressed as Emperor mattered to him more than almost anything else the island had left to offer, and he fought a six-year standoff over that single word with the governor, Hudson Lowe, refusing to answer to anything less and making Lowe's refusal to grant it the defining grievance of his captivity. Correspondence went out and memoirs got dictated in the voice of a reigning sovereign, an imperial household run on an allowance the governor raised, at one point, from eight thousand pounds a year to twelve, on an island most of Europe had already stopped thinking about. He died there in May of 1821, still disputing his own rank with the one authority left who could confirm or deny it, and the argument outlived him. Lowe would permit no mention of either his name or his title on the tomb, so the stone above him, for years, carried nothing at all. It took nineteen more years, and a different king entirely, before France sent a ship to bring him home to Paris and bury him properly under his own name at Les Invalides, the recognition arriving on someone else's schedule, decades after the man himself had stopped being able to negotiate for it.

None of this makes Napoleon a fool. It makes him a man who had never once, in a life spent seizing and re-seizing power, practiced the specific motion of setting it down while he still held it. When the loss finally arrived, forced and total, he had no version of himself on file that existed apart from the throne, so he simply continued performing the part in the one place left where an audience could still be made to watch, his own household, at his own table, for six long years. The tragedy is not that he lost. Every man in his position eventually loses. The tragedy is that he had spent no part of his life discovering who he was without winning, and so the discovery happened to him in public, over six slow years, instead of being something he had already settled on his own terms decades earlier, at a time and place of his own choosing.

On the twenty-third of December, 1783, George Washington rode into the Senate Chamber at Annapolis and handed back his commission. At that moment he was the most powerful man on the continent, commander of an army that had just won a revolution and remained fiercely loyal to him personally, at a time when at least one of his own officers had floated the idea of installing him as king outright. He gave the idea no second look, read a short farewell, returned the paper that made him commander in chief, and rode home to Mount Vernon to resume farming. Word of it reached London, where King George III reportedly asked the painter Benjamin West what Washington would do once independence was secured. West guessed he would retire to private life. If he does that, the king is said to have answered, he will be the greatest man in the world.

Washington performed the same motion fourteen years later, stepping down from the presidency after two terms at a moment when no law required it and a considerable number of his countrymen would have gladly supported a third. Between the two resignations sits the entire discipline this letter has been circling. He treated power as something a man picks up to complete a specific piece of work and sets down again once the work is finished. He never allowed it to become a fact about his own worth requiring permanent defense, and it is that single habit, repeated twice at the height of two separate careers, that historians still point to as the rarer achievement than anything he did on a battlefield.

He also declined, years earlier and in writing, a suggestion from one of his own colonels that the army simply install him as monarch outright, a proposal he rejected in terms sharp enough that no one raised it with him a second time. A man capable of refusing a crown before it was even offered was, by the time Annapolis arrived, already well practiced in the specific motion this letter is about.

A very different man performed a version of the same motion fifteen centuries earlier, for a stranger reason. The Roman emperor Diocletian, a soldier of humble birth who had clawed his way to the purple and spent two decades reorganising an empire in genuine collapse, abdicated in the year 305 and retired to a palace he had built for himself on the Dalmatian coast, where he spent his remaining years, by every surviving account, growing vegetables. When his former co-rulers wrote to him years later, begging him to return and settle the chaos that followed his departure, he answered, in essence, that if they could see the cabbages he had grown with his own hands at Salona, they would never dream of asking him to trade them back for an empire. He meant it. He never returned, and among the several dozen men who held that office across three centuries, he is remembered as one of the very few who left it standing upright, alive, and on a date entirely of his own choosing.

The relationships absorb it too. A fortune with no defined purpose becomes a question hanging over every inheritance, every marriage, every introduction. The children of such fortunes often spend decades trying to locate themselves in relation to a number they did not create and cannot escape. The capital, meant as a gift, arrives as a kind of sentence, because a gift has a defined edge and this thing has none. It is the absence of the threshold again, reproducing itself in the next generation. The founder never decided what the money was for, and so the money became its own purpose, and a purpose like that is heritable.

None of this argues against wealth. It describes what wealth does when it is held without a decision attached to it. The fortune is not the problem. The unanswered question at the centre of the fortune is the problem, and the question grows louder, not quieter, as the fortune grows. A person who has crossed the threshold without marking it has not failed to become rich. He has succeeded at becoming rich and failed to notice that the success was complete, and the failure to notice costs him the one thing the money was supposed to buy.

I did not choose to lose the account, and I want to be careful not to dress that morning up as something it was not. Napoleon did not choose Waterloo either, and I am not claiming any kinship with an emperor over a suspended Instagram page, that would be its own small delusion. But there was a decision inside the loss that was genuinely mine, arriving only after the account came back, throttled and half trusted by an algorithm that had decided to watch it for a while before deciding anything else about it. I could have rebuilt the way a man rebuilds who has never once practiced losing anything, chasing every old number back with links and calls to click and a fresh story every hour, treating the whole recovery as an emergency that demanded to be seen immediately. Or I could rebuild the way I had just spent this letter watching other men handle far larger losses, which is to fund the thing properly, at a high standard, and let the rest take whatever time it required.

We chose the second one. One carousel a day at six in the evening, one reel at nine, no links out, no request stapled to the bottom asking for anything at all, because an account openly clawing for attention reads to a suspicious algorithm exactly like the thing that got it flagged in the first place, and because I had, without entirely meaning to, already run a version of the experiment described earlier in this letter. The rebuilding is slower this way, and there are mornings it would be considerably easier to beg for the old numbers back outright, but a page that begs is a page still convinced the number was what mattered, and I already know, now, that it was not. I had found out, over the weeks the page stayed dark, that the newsletter and the work and whatever I actually am underneath an account name had not gone anywhere at all. The number had gone. I had not.

That is the whole of what those men were after, I think, whether they arrived at it by choice at Annapolis and at Salona, or by force on an island in the Atlantic, or by neither, on an ordinary morning, in front of a grey line of text that offered no explanation for itself. What survives, once the thing is gone, and whether a man already knows the answer before the morning arrives that decides it for him without asking.

Until Sunday.

PS. I write one of these every Sunday, in shorter form, and send it to the readers who have chosen to receive it. If that interests you, the address is below.

refinedjournal.com