Dr. Andrew Brunswick has watched too many people run out of time.
As a neurosurgeon, he has spent nearly 15 years inside operating rooms in Los Angeles working through the night to save lives—sadly, sometimes without success. What that job has given him, beyond surgical precision and medical skill, is perspective.
“For almost 15 years I’ve spent my days—and many nights—with people at the most fragile moments of their lives,” Brunswick, 45, told Newsweek. “Being in the operating room and caring for patients who may not survive the day, or the week has fundamentally shaped the way I see time, attention, and what actually matters.”
Brunswick has quietly built an online audience under the Instagram handle @itsbrainsurgery, where his reflections on mortality and meaning have begun to resonate far beyond the surgical suite.
On November 6, he shared a post titled “a brain surgeon’s checklist for not wasting your life,” a stark, minimalist carousel that has since gone viral, amassing more than 48,000 likes and drawing the attention of celebrities including Paris Hilton, who responded with emojis in the comments.
The post, made up of a sequence of slides with text, opens with a single line: “Most people don’t live their lives—they postpone them.” From there, Brunswick outlined seven lessons distilled from years spent at the edge of life and death.
Among them: “Pay ruthless attention,” “subtract, don’t add,” and “invest in people, not performances.”
The post’s message is as clear as it is urgent: may people are sleepwalking through their lives.
Brunswick told Newsweek the checklist is rooted in what he sees weekly in his practice.
“People who thought they had more time; people who postponed the moments that mattered; people who were living on autopilot; people who were chasing things that weren’t ultimately important, until something catastrophic forced them awake,” he said. “I wrote it as a reminder that most of what we worry about doesn’t matter, and most of what matters is so easy to miss.”
Another slide in the post read: “Your mind tells you ‘You have forever’ but you don’t…Not because time speeds up but because you stop paying attention. Autopilot erases your life.”
Brunswick’s reflections, which blend stoic philosophy with real-world trauma, are not typical social media fare—but that may be why they have resonated.
“I’m also into stoicism and Buddhism,” he said. “I started sharing little reflections on social media almost by accident. I never planned to ‘grow a platform.’”
His perspective is grounded in high-stakes medicine and sharpened by hundreds of conversations with families at the hospital during the worst days of their lives.
“I’m not here to tell people how to live, rather to show what happens when you don’t live, based on what I’ve seen,” he said.
It is not the grand milestones or social media highlights people cling to in their final moments, he explained, but the small, quiet pieces of daily life.
“People don’t long for the highlights and the achievements,” he said. “They long for more ordinary days with the people they love.”
The surgeon’s seven-point checklist echoes that ethos:
- Pay ruthless attention.
- Subtract, don’t add. “If you want to feel rich, practice wanting less,” he wrote.
- Break the pattern with hard quests.
- Invest in people. Not performances.
- Plan like time is finite.
- Live a life that’s actually yours.
- Give your life away. As he put it: “Meaning grows where your life intersects someone else’s.”
For Brunswick, these are not theoretical principles. They are what remain when the artificial constructs of work, distraction and performance fall away.
He has launched a weekly newsletter, The Mind Gym, to continue reminding people of what matters most.
“I think the post went viral because people recognized themselves in it—the distraction, the rushing, the illusion of ‘later,’” he said. “I think it struck a nerve because it’s not advice.
“It’s a report from the front lines of human fragility.”
