Coping with mortality in a world scared of dying

What to do about the knowledge that you won't be here forever

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Somehow, it all comes down to this one inevitable truth: our little window of light and transformation on earth will come to a close, and what comes after is a question with many different answers.

I recently read Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals and loved his take on our brief human life spans. He starts off by calling the average four thousand week human life span “insultingly short” and then goes on to share ways that we can make the most of it (in practical, everyday terms — not daily skydiving).

The book isn’t revolutionary in its insight, but it’s a needed reminder. Much of our life is spent shying away from our mortality, doing everything we can to forget that we’re fragile beings attached to ticking clocks that are running out of time the minute we’re born. And for good reason — constant awareness of our mortality is grounds for a daily existential crisis. We’d never get anything done.

But isn’t there room for an honest evaluation of our precarious situation every now and then? How do we take this little pocket of time and make it meaningful? How do we stay grateful for what time we’ve been given, without always begging for more?

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Life in assisted living: A long goodbye

For several years, I visited a nursing home every week and got to know the residents. It was a small community so I knew nearly all of them by name — and a few became close friends. We would play games, chat, enjoy one of the community events together. We made space for each other at opposite ends of life.

I learned a great deal from my time in the nursing home; whenever you spend time with seniors, you’re bound to learn something. But these were specifically seniors who knew very well that their time was dwindling.

Their conditional existence didn’t seem to scare them anymore. They had lived a long time, and soon they would die. They knew that this was the last stop.

And yet, amid such raw awareness, they carried on. They shared a lifetime’s worth of stories and listened to music and laughed at my jokes and devoured their meals and sat in the sun and played silly games. They were alive in the face of death. Even on their lowest days, they were there, part of the fabric of human experience. They took death and said I know you’re on your way — but right now, I’m still here.

My time there was one of the most revelatory meditations on death my young self could have had. Surrounded by people who had led long, full lives, I saw that the end does come and that it comes for everybody.

The end isn’t pretty or glamorous — many had debilitating illnesses that left them paralyzed or confused or in pain — but it was the twinkle of life I saw right before the eclipse that convinced me of its value. We don’t need to be here forever for things to matter.

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Words to live by: Memento mori

There’s a long-lived custom in both philosophy and religion of using death as a source of inspiration, a catalyst for forward-thinking action. Ironically, it’s the absurdity of death — the fact that we don’t exist, then exist for a little while, and then don’t exist thereafter — that can spur us on.

In the great scheme of things, you have so little time for worry and spite that you might as well get on with the important things; we might as well make this little place we share as good as we can for each other.

The Stoics are known for their saying memento mori, which translates loosely as “remember that you will die.” It’s a grim saying, but it’s designed to clear out the clutter, to make way for your true path, to let you soak in the melting pot of moments you get on earth. This shrewd awareness of death has historically kept us grounded in a way nothing else quite has.

It’s this appreciation for the impermanence of things that I absorbed during my time in the nursing home — but it’s impossible not to absorb when the friends you make one week might slip away before the next.

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Might we keep on keeping on … forever?

But could these ways of thinking all be behind us? It’s been the human goal for ages now to transcend death, to find a way to leave behind our fragile, decaying shell and persist somehow. For a long time, religion has given us that gift with the promise of an afterlife. But now, other avenues might be opening up.

With the rise of artificial intelligence, might we be able to upload someone’s consciousness to a computer — or at least scrape together something resembling a digital version of your consciousness?

A fascinating episode of the show Black Mirror deals with this question when a young woman’s husband dies suddenly, and she opts to have his digital presence uploaded into a lookalike robot’s silicon body. (More recently, one of my favorite Substack authors

Paul Bloom

wrote about this same episode and a host of other hypothetical but similar future cases of using artificial intelligence to capture an individual’s unique presence — including your own.)

Or, more humbly, maybe we can keep extending our natural life span on earth with the usual suspects: medicine, technology, lifestyle tweaks. One contemporary scientist goes so far as to call aging a disease and encourages these sorts of interventions as essential remedies or preventive measures. The philosopher Simone de Beauvoir shares the same critique of our gradual decline, comparing aging to becoming “a parody of oneself” if we aren’t careful.

And it’s true, there’s an inherent indignity to aging and death. We grow old, slow down, weaken — if we’re among the lucky ones who make it that far. And if we’re not, then we’re interrupted in the middle of whatever else we were doing, abruptly cut off without our consent. In light of this existential injustice, aren’t we entitled to an extension?

The trend is a big one: to live the kind of life that will keep us around the longest. The recent Netflix show Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones is a product of a modern culture obsessed with longevity, which is the next best thing to immortality.

Resistance training, a Mediterranean diet, crossword puzzles, social interaction — all good and healthy things to do, but they’re recommended with an undercurrent. Do these things and you’ll be healthy and vibrant and youthful-feeling. Do these things and you’ll age slowly. Do these things and you won’t die.

I don’t deny that a long and healthy life is a beautiful goal. But I worry that an obsession with longevity looks a lot like a fear of mortality and a game of staving off the inevitable. When we view aging as a disease to cure, what do we lose? Is there something essential about mortality (and our traditional arc of growth and decline) to the human experience? What would we become if we had no death to expect?

Perhaps we’d become beacons of transcendence — or perhaps, faded husks of ourselves who have played out every scenario on a nightmarishly infinite loop.

The characters in the show The Good Place illustrate where these questions may lead when they realize after endless iterations that eternal life might simply go on too long.

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So, where does that leave us in the universe’s grand cosmic plan?

Well, for now, we’re left to live and die as fragile beings, living on borrowed time in borrowed bodies, dedicated to big and bold plans that might outlive us and might not.

We’re left with the biggest of human woes — uncertainty and precarity — which, I believe, will still find a way to snake through us even if we manage to cheat death itself.

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A little reminder: I’d love for you to tap the heart at the top or bottom of this email/post if you enjoyed it. Still means the world.