I know the people you know. You know the people I know. And one day, every single one of us will be gone. It's not something we like to think about. We go about our days as if time stretches on forever, as if tomorrow is guaranteed, as if the people sitting across the table from us will always be there. But they won't. And neither will we. This isn't meant to be depressing. If anything, it's the most freeing thought I keep coming back to.

We pretend infinity exists

Humans are wired to avoid thinking about death. Ernest Becker, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Denial of Death, argued that most of what we do in life is an elaborate strategy to avoid confronting our mortality. We build careers, chase status, accumulate things, and construct belief systems, all partly to distract ourselves from the uncomfortable truth that our time here is finite. Psychologists later formalized this into Terror Management Theory (TMT), which proposes that the awareness of our own inevitable death creates a deep existential anxiety. To manage that anxiety, we cling to cultural worldviews and self-esteem projects that make us feel significant, that make us feel like we matter beyond our biological expiration date. And it works, mostly. We stay busy. We plan five years ahead. We argue about things that won't matter in a decade. We scroll through our phones on a Tuesday evening as if we have an unlimited supply of Tuesday evenings. But we don't.

The stoics kept a skull on their desk

The ancient Stoics had a practice called memento mori, Latin for "remember you will die." It wasn't morbid. It was medicine. Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher, wrote in his Meditations: "You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think." Seneca, another Stoic, put it more bluntly: "Begin at once to live, and count each separate day as a separate life." The idea wasn't to walk around in a state of dread. It was to use the awareness of death as a lens for clarity. When you remember that your time is limited, the petty grievances shrink. The things you've been putting off suddenly feel urgent. The people you love become more precious. In early Buddhist texts, a similar concept exists: maraṇasati, which translates to "mindfulness of death." The Buddha taught that recognizing impermanence isn't a path to despair but a path to freedom. "All conditioned things are impermanent," the Dhammapada says. "When one sees this with wisdom, one turns away from suffering." These traditions, separated by thousands of miles and centuries of history, arrived at the same insight: confronting the reality of death is not the enemy of a good life. It's the foundation of one.

The paradox of a life fully lived

Here's what's counterintuitive: research in psychology suggests that people who live with a sense of meaning and fulfillment are actually less afraid of dying. You'd think it would be the opposite, that having a wonderful life would make you cling to it harder. But studies on Terror Management Theory have found that individuals with higher self-esteem, stronger relationships, and a deeper sense of purpose experience significantly less death anxiety. Psychotherapist Julie Hannan argues that we don't truly fear death itself. We fear dying without having lived. The anxiety isn't about the end, it's about all the unlived life we carry. The conversations we never had. The risks we never took. The version of ourselves we never became. If that's true, then the antidote to the fear of disappearing isn't to avoid thinking about it. It's to live in a way that, when the thought does surface, you can meet it without regret.

Eat what you want to eat

I don't mean this in a reckless, hedonistic way. I mean it in the most grounded way possible: stop deferring the life you actually want. We spend so much time optimizing for a future that may never arrive. We eat foods we don't enjoy because they're "supposed to be good for us." We stay in situations that drain us because leaving feels risky. We postpone joy as if it's something we need to earn first. But the present moment is the only thing any of us actually have. As Thich Nhat Hanh said, "Don't get caught in the past, because the past is gone. Don't get upset about the future, because the future is not yet here. There is only one moment for you to be alive, and that is the present moment." This doesn't mean abandoning responsibility. It means questioning whether the things you're responsible to are actually the things that matter. It means asking yourself, honestly, whether the way you spent today is the way you'd want to spend one of your finite number of days.

The people at the table

The hardest part of impermanence isn't our own mortality. It's everyone else's. The friends you grab dinner with. The family member who calls you on the weekend. The colleague who makes you laugh in the middle of a stressful day. Every one of those interactions has a last occurrence. You won't know which one it is when it happens. This isn't a reason to be sad. It's a reason to pay attention. To actually listen when someone is talking to you. To say the thing you've been meaning to say. To not assume there will always be a next time. Seneca wrote about this with striking clarity: "Let us prepare our minds as if we'd come to the very end of life. Let us postpone nothing." He wasn't being dramatic. He was being precise.

Living with the door open

I think about disappearing more than most people would consider healthy. Not in a dark way, but in a way that keeps me honest. When I remember that none of this is permanent, I make different choices. I'm more likely to reach out to someone I've been thinking about. I'm less likely to waste time on arguments that don't matter. I'm more present in the small, ordinary moments that are, in the end, what a life is actually made of. We'd like to think we have infinite time. We don't. And that's not a tragedy. It's what makes every meal, every conversation, every quiet morning worth something. One day we will all disappear. Between now and then, the only question that matters is: are you actually here?

References

but most of our time is spent working do things you love