Your heart beat about 100,000 times today.
It has a budget. Nobody knows the exact figure, the estimates hover around two and a half to three billion, but the important part is that the number is fixed, counting down, and you spent a hundred thousand of them today on traffic and emails and pretending to read terms and conditions.
You are going to die. And this series is about what to do with that information.
First, let’s name the enemy, because it’s not death. It’s the denial industry.
Everything in the culture is built to hide the one fact. Hospitals move the dying out of sight. Funerals are handled by professionals so the family never touches the process. The beauty industry is, at bottom, a multi-billion dollar insurgency against the concept of aging. Even our language is a fortress: people don’t die anymore, they “pass,” they “transition,” they “are no longer with us,” as if death were a train they happened to miss.
The result is a population that knows, abstractly, that everyone dies, and does not know, viscerally, that “everyone” is a set that includes them. Freud said it flatly: nobody believes in their own death. In the unconscious, everyone is immortal. You can hold the fact for years without ever letting it touch you.
(me too. I’m not outside this. I wrote this whole series and I still jaywalk like I have a spare.)
Let me be clear about what this series is not, because “a blog series about death” sounds unbearable in a specific way.
This is not morbidity. Morbidity is thinking about death to feel bad: the doom-spiral, the 3 AM Wikipedia descent, the aesthetic of the void. That stuff is just entertainment dressed as depth.
This is the opposite. This is thinking about death to feel specific. To get the actual dimensions of your life on the table, so you can stop furnishing a house you’re going to pretend is permanent.
(will anyone bother to read this after I am dead? will anyone bother to read this even when I was alive?)
Here’s the thesis of the whole series, stated once, up front: the denial of death, not death itself, is what makes lives small. Every wasted year I’ve ever had was wasted in the confidence that there would be more. Every good day I’ve ever had was good partly because I remembered, briefly, that there won’t.
The roadmap, so you know what you’re in for:
We’ll talk about the deadline effect and how to borrow death’s motivational authority without becoming a goth about it. Your digital ghost: the accounts, the passwords, the cloud full of you that outlives you. The Ethiopian way of death, the idir and the mourning calendar, what my culture gets right that the West outsourced. How to sit with someone who is dying, the hardest one. The bucket list scam. Legacy, and why it’s a Ponzi scheme. And finally, dying well, the ars moriendi, the whole point.
Eight parts. One fact. Everything else is commentary.
(might be longer or shorter depending on how I am feeling about it)
One instruction before part two, and it’s the only homework in the series that matters:
Sometime this week, when you catch yourself saying “I’ll do it someday,” finish the sentence honestly. Someday is not a day on the calendar. The calendar only has the fixed budget of heartbeats, and it’s already spent today.
See you in part two. Bring your week count.
Coming soon: The Mortality Files #2: The Deadline Effect, or why immortal people would never finish anything, and how to install a healthy sense of urgency without becoming insufferable at parties.