Death Meditation - How Thinking About Dying Can Help With Living
Musings on death and it's implications for how to live
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I know I used death twice in the title, which is a bit intense but I think it has powerful implications for how we live. Below are scattered musing on how thinking about dying helps me live.
Thinking About Dying Freaks Me Out
I'll be honest it has always been a bit scary to think about dying. I still get kinda freaked out when I do think about it. I mean it’s sort of frightening to spend time reflecting on the idea of no longer existing. I typically imagine darkness, emptiness, nothingness....you get the picture. As someone that is not necessarily sold on an afterlife, it all feels a bit final which is both daunting and stressful to contemplate so I often find myself pushing thoughts of death aside.
I’m Going To Die, I Might As Well Figure Out How It Can Serve Me
Over time I have forced myself to reflect on it more often. I have done so with the intention of trying to figure out how that idea - the fact that I'm going to die - can serve me in life because it is going to happen whether I like it or not.
You may leave this life at any moment: have this possibility in your mind in all that you do or say or think - Marcus Aurelius
There have been a ton of fascinating realizations that have come out of these reflections for me and below are some scattered musings on the topic.
How I Think About Death & Playing With Death Timelines
Before diving into the stuff death has helped me think through, one of the things I want to share is how I use death in my thinking. When contemplating different questions I tend to ask myself:
How would I think about this if I was going to die tomorrow? In 2 years? In 5 years? In 10 years? In 20 years?
Death Is A Forcing Function For Decision Making
The reason I do this is because the finality of death is a pretty brutal forcing function and it helps simplify the complex and cut to what's important.
The reason I vary the timelines a bunch is because my answer changes depending on when I would die. What I would do if I was going to die tomorrow is not always the same as if I was going to die 5 years and 20 years from now.
What I have found interesting is when I think about it in varying timelines it usually creates a hierarchy of importance in my mind. For example, it'll flow something like this:
Tomorrow: Go spend time with Isa, family, be in the sun, eat ice cream.
Five years: Travel the world non-stop with Isa, talk to interesting people about living well, visit family sporadically
Twenty Years: Regular date nights + morning walks with Isa, lots of traveling, meet lots of fascinating people, have experiences that push me to learn and grow, have a large impact on helping people live well, see my family a ton, and take care of my mind & body.
Reflecting on these questions moment to moment and reflecting on them generally has helped me think through a lot of different things in my life.
Death Helps Clarify What Is Important To Me
It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested - Seneca
One of the things I have noticed is as I get older there has been more stuff that has found its way into my life. Someone I met recently called it "accumulating" - a process by which over time we get more responsibilities, relationships, interests, things, and basically more stuff.
That can be noisy and there is only so much time in the day. Reflecting on death is an oftentimes intense but incredibly effective way for me to simplify my life and cut through the noise to get to the heart of what is important to me. It has helped me clarify my values over time, which I've laid out below as an example (there is more detail to each of those but have kept it out of here for the sake of brevity).
My List of Values
Health & Vitality
Family
Love & Warmth
Gratefulness
Adventure
Truth
Passion & Fulfillment
Learning & Growing
Honesty
Wisdom
Fun & Happiness
Contribution & Impact
Experimentation
Achievement
Creativity
Intelligence
Excellence
How Does Dying Help With Architecting My Values
This list has been organized intentionally and is my map for how I orient myself when making short and long-term decisions. Thinking about dying has helped me be brutally clear about the order of this map and what goes on it.
It has certainly not been a linear process to get to this list and I expect it to continue evolving over time, but death made me realize I should probably figure out what is important to me. When I put pen to paper what is important to me becomes a little more clear, like my health for example.
How Health Became My Number One Value
The reason health became my number one value is by thinking about death. It became painfully obvious that I'm in this body for some amount of time - all the way until the end. Additionally, this body affects how I feel all the freaking time. As a result, I need to take care of it, protect it, and honor it. If I don't all the rest of the stuff that is important to me will suffer either because I have low energy, I'll die sooner, or I won't feel good enough to fully show up.
How Family Became My Second Value
Family is number two because as I thought about dying and what would be most important to me - spending time with Isa, my family, and my friends always came to mind first. They bring me so much joy and fulfillment so they were clearly a close #2.
Anyway, this is not a newsletter about values, but thinking about death has forced me to get very clear on what is important to me.
Saying health and family are #1 and #2 might sound obvious, but some of the other values farther down the list were less clear at times, which is why writing them down helped a ton. Another big thing was which one is more important? Thinking about dying made it clear that there are times where I’ll need to choose between them and creating a hierarchy helps with that.
It Helps Me Figure Out What I Don’t Value
Finally, it made it very clear what is not on my list of values.- For example, because honesty is important to me I won’t lie or violate something that’s important to me because I’m worried other people might feel bad because I don’t want to be uncomfortable later.
For example, I was at a farmers market and this older lady kept asking me to try her lemon cakes. I’m currently experimenting with fasting and said no thank you. She kept insisting I try her lemon cakes and I continued to politely decline.
It was surprising to some that I didn’t just eat this lady’s cake but it’s become more important to me to not contort my way of being to make others happy and just be honest. This has been enormously helpful to me as I feel like myself and authentic more often.
Death Helps Me Figure Out How To Spend My Time
You will find no one willing to share out his money; but to how many does each of us divide up his life! People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy - Seneca
This is a follow-on to the first one but the more I've thought about death the only obligation I feel is to live my life in a way that reflects what I value. The reality is there are infinite things I can spend time on but my time is finite.
As a result, I need to be precise with where I spend it because I only have so much. You can always get other things - plants, money, food, etc, but the one thing you can't get more of is time.
As a result, death has helped me, architect, how I invest my energy and has helped me figure out how to think about these life buckets:
Health & Well-being
Relationships
Work & Hobbies
Meaning & Fulfillment
Achievement
Here are some examples of how my values show up in my different buckets
Health & Wellbeing - This newsletter, my morning routine, my daily eating, exercise, and mindfulness habits are all dedicated to this bucket. Keeping me feeling good, my energy high, and staying comfortable in my body.
Work, Relationships, and Hobbies - All of these are organized in a way that somehow intersects with what's important to me. One example is the relationships I've cultivated in my life. I'm fortunate that the people I have in my life push me to learn & grow, are places where I can receive/offer love & warmth, often help me cultivate wisdom, and are spaces where I can be honest or adventure through life with.
Thinking about dying pushes me to ask myself - is how I'm spending time in these different buckets lining up with the stuff that is important to me? If not, let's cut it out, or let's change it! There is no time to waste.
Death Helps Me Figure Out How I Want To Act Moment To Moment
What is the point of having countless books and libraries whose titles the owner could scarcely read through in his whole lifetime? The mass of books burdens the student without instructing him, and it is far better to devote yourself to a few authors than to get lost among many - Seneca
This one is amazing for me because it's where life happens - in the present - not in some future planning state. When I find myself in a situation that I'm not sure what to do, how to speak, or how to act thinking about death brings tremendous clarity.
Death Helps You Figure Out What To Do Immediately
For example, just this morning I had a million things I wanted to do and "should have been doing" but when I thought about death, it instantly became clear that I could write this newsletter later in the day and that I wanted to take my mother in law to the airport and have breakfast with Isa.
Death Also Helps With Short Term Prioritization
On another note, thinking about death made me realize that I did not want to commit to a bunch of plans with friends this weekend and there are some really interesting things I want to spend time figuring out/courses I want to dive into and need some time alone to do that.
Death Forces Me To Be Present
Everyone hustles his life along, and is troubled by a longing for the future and weariness of the present. But the man who spends all his time on his own needs, who organizes every day as though it were his last, neither longs for nor fears the next day - Seneca
I think the moment-to-moment stuff becomes a lot easier when you think about death because death has this way of forcing you to be present. There is no more planning, putting off, or living for some future state when you think about dying, at least not for me. The fact that it all might end really brings me to the present moment and begs the question of what do I want to do right now.
It's incredibly liberating in a way and it helps you realize that most of the complexity we live with tends to be in the mind, whereas the present moment is often a lot simpler.
What am I doing now? What do I want to be doing? And how do I want to do it?
Death Helps Me Find Delight In Everything
Think your way through difficulties: harsh conditions can be softened, restricted ones can be widened, and heavy ones can weigh less on those who know how to bear them. - Seneca
This is a function of being present, but everything takes on a sort of majesty or dreamlike quality when faced with the possibility that you might never see that thing again.
Whether it’s having the warmth of the sun on your skin, seeing a kid giggle, or listening to Isa explain to me how feminism's agenda has largely been written by one demographic of women to the exclusion of others and how those agendas vary quite a bit. All of it becomes interesting, becomes wonderful, when faced with the possibility that you might never see or hear that thing again.
It's strangely liberating and wonderful to think about dying, to be honest. It forces me to think about what I'm taking for granted and helps me savor each and every moment as it comes.
Death Connects Us
When the longest- and shortest-lived of us dies, their loss is precisely equal. For the sole thing of which any of us can be deprived is the present, since this is all we own, and nobody can lose what is not theirs. - Seneca
Death is something we all have in common, which is also wonderfully humanizing. Thinking about it makes me less angry at people when they do stuff I don't like because we're sort of all in this boat together, steadily sailing to some final place.
I feel connected to that person through death because it makes it abundantly clear to me how valuable that person's life is to them and whatever they're concerned about probably is really important to them for some reason.
In a world where we often don't understand each other death is something we share and can help bring us together by creating more empathy. Death makes it clear that our lives belong to each of us and helps me want to support people in more fully owning theirs.
Death Helps Me Build My Own World
But putting things off is the biggest waste of life: it snatches away each day as it comes, and denies us the present by promising the future. - Seneca
Death can help you architect your own reality. When faced with the finality of death, living how we want is more important, and the structures with which we live are more easily broken because the alternative is an unfulfilled end.
Death Makes It Clear That There Are Too Many Rules, And They Are Made Up
For example, we live in a world where there are a bunch of rules, which are just made up ideas:
You have to get married
You have to go to college
You have to love everyone you're related to
You can't not know stuff (you’re a double negative)
You have to be "successful"
You have to be nice and you probably should not tell people how you feel or be direct
And a million other "should's", "cant's", and "need to's" exist out there. When I think about dying it highlights how all of that stuff is made up and gets me thinking more in terms of what do I want, what do I feel, and how do I go about it.
Death Helps Me Operate From The Inside Out
It helps me operate from the inside out vs. the outside in, which is extremely freeing in a sense because you start to realize how much freedom and creativity we do have.
I Really Want Restaurants To Up Their Salad Game For My Sake - For example, something that my loved ones will laugh at when they read this is that a perennial frustration of mine is that most restaurants only serve salads that have 3 ingredients in them.
“Sir, we have this wonderful salad that is spinach, tomatoes, and balsamic” - said literally no one ever, but that's what most of these menus offer sadly.
Doing My Own Salad Thing - Since I want to eat healthily, but I also want to not hate what I eat, I scan the menu for different ingredients to find other ones I want to add to my salad. So if I see “Chicken Picatta with caramelized onions” I’m asking for caramelized onions to be added to my salad because that sounds awesome. The worst thing that can happen is the people at the restaurant say “no, man” or “that’ll cost extra”, which is ok.
The people I know and love are used to this by now but the first few times I did this people balked at it because "it's weird".
We're All Weird, We Might As Well Act The Part - Thinking about death has helped me realize that the only thing that's weird is doing stuff because that's how you're supposed to do it. We're all incredibly unique as individuals and so naturally a lot of things that we'll want to do is specific to us aka “weird”.
Rules were not built for individuals they were built for groups so it’s natural that stuff we want to do is often unconventional. Thinking about dying has helped make that more clear and less hard to step outside of social structures.
Death Helps Me Be More Authentic
How much happier is the man who owes nothing to anybody except the one he can most easily refuse, himself! - Seneca
Death is a forcing function for authenticity. When you think about dying you want the stuff happening inside you - what you think and feel - to be what happens outside - what you say and how you act. When faced with death I usually find myself more aligned with what's going on inside and as a result far more authentic. I try to bring death into my interactions so I can show up as me more often.
As a result, death can bring out the best we have to offer, by bringing up what we want to offer in the first place. When we don't know how we want to show up, death can lead us to be more ourselves in the world.
Minimizing Regret
The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately - Seneca
I love this one and a friend of mine phrased it this way recently "I try to think about things by minimizing the number of regrets I will have". That's awesome and thinking about death helps me with that because it makes it painfully clear what I won't regret doing.
For example, when going to the Modern Elder Academy three weeks ago, I thought about dying in order to make that decision.
My first thought was I don't want to go alone, it’s for older people, blah, blah, blah. Then I thought, you're going to die, is going something you'd regret? No. Would you regret not going, maybe?
Ok cool - I should book my tickets.
Death Can Show Us That Life Is Too Serious, To Take Seriously
So we should make light of all things and endure them with tolerance: it is more civilized to make fun of life than to bewail it - Seneca
The thing I guess I've realized throughout all of this is death comes for us all at different times and moments. That means that time is our most precious resource because it is the only one we have that is finite. Spending it is serious business.
As a result, the stuff that happens - problems that come up, challenges we face, relationships that fall short of our expectations, all of that general consternation-causing type of stuff is pretty silly at the end of the day.
Thinking about dying makes me realize that the only thing that matters is how I'm going to spend my time next based on what is important to me. All of that is a function of my lived experience to date, what I've learned from it, and what is bringing me energy today.
It's such an important decision and so heavy that I find myself wanting to walk lightly, with humility, with wide eyes, full of awe and wonder because I can't possibly know what will happen.
It's too serious a subject to not enjoy it.
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To Living Well,
Alvaro