Why You Need to Think About Death to Live Better
Recently, I was reading “The Antidote” by Oliver Burkeman, and in this book I read about the concept of “mortality awareness”, particularly around how you spend your time.
And I really resonated with this concept because it ties in so nicely with the concept of prioritizing your future self.
Now, you may not want to think about your own mortality.
Death is scary.
Thinking about death is generally unpleasant.
And I think most of us would prefer to believe it won’t happen to us, or at least not anytime soon.
But I’m also a BIG believer in facing reality. And, one day, you’re gonna die. And so am I.
And because life is not infinite, we’re not gonna do all the things.
This is, in fact, why time management is important. Because we have to make tradeoffs with our time.
And you want to be intentional about those trade-off decisions, because left to chance, or outside forces, it’s not likely that you’ll spend your time in a way that aligns with your highest values and goals.
If you are intentional about how you’re spending your time, you’re “in control” of your time, to the extent that it’s possible to be.
But back to death, life, and mortality awareness.
The central goal of mortality awareness is to remind yourself that your time is limited.
Because if you’re aware, viscerally, that your time is limited, you’re more likely to make better choices about how you use your time.
Each moment matters more, knowing that moments are not unlimited.
So, as Oliver Burkeman suggests, we can bring our awareness to our own mortality by simply asking ourselves some grounding questions. Here’s how:
Imagine you’re talking to a future version of yourself, and ask yourself:
What do you wish I’d spent more time on?
What do I wish I’d spent less time on?
And if your current actions, your current time allocation, has you doing a lot of the stuff your future self would wish you’d spent less time on, and not very much of the stuff your future self would want you to have spent more time on, well, it might be time, right now, to make some adjustments.
Because no additional time is guaranteed.
A couple of years back I had my own brush with my own mortality when I was diagnosed with breast cancer.
And I have to admit that until that point in my life, I was feeling pretty invincible.
Sure, I was aging, but I was in good health. And I thought, abstractly, that death wasn’t something I’d need to consider for many more decades.
And while I’m currently cancer-free, I take daily medication that reduces the risk of cancer recurrence.
And so, I’m reminded of my mortality every single morning when I take my meds.
And, after my brush with cancer, I have made a couple of pretty significant changes to how I spend my time, and to the decisions I make about my time, because I know that tomorrow isn’t guaranteed.
Most significantly:
I took up pottery, a hobby that I’d wanted to dive deeply into for years, but hadn’t prioritized because I knew it would take a lot of time, and I think I felt a little selfish about taking a lot of time to do something just for me, away from the house and my family.
I changed the way I make decisions about my workday and following my plan.
In the before times, when awareness of my mortality was much lower, if my husband was working from home, and asked me if I wanted to go to lunch, I’d usually default to sticking with my plan. But now, I prioritize the connection and time with him.
In the before times, when I saw that a call was coming in from my sister, or a friend, and it was during the workday, I would let it go to voicemail and call them later, because I wanted to execute my plan. Now, I answer the call. I may not talk for hours, but I prioritize the connection.
In short, heightened awareness of my mortality has caused me to make decisions with my time that prioritize being present with people I love, and engaged in activities that bring me pleasure.
And if that means I need to adjust my plan, to reprioritize something I intended to do, or to simply plan to do less, so be it.
Because when I die, hopefully a long, long time from now, I want to look back without regret about how I spent my time.
So let me ask you:
If you imagine yourself in the future, what’s one thing that your future self would want you to be spending LESS time on today?
And, what’s one thing that your future self would want you to be spending MORE time on today?
And what’s the smallest next step that you can take to shift your time allocation in those directions?
