How to Live So Death Doesn’t Feel Too Soon | (#105) Beyond Success: Psychology & Philosophy for Achievers, with David Tian, Ph.D.

Welcome to the Beyond Success Podcast: Psychology and Philosophy for Achievers on the Bigger Questions behind What You’re Building, and I’m your host, David Tian.

Two people can say exactly the same thing, “I don’t want to die,” but they can mean very different things by it. The first person, let’s say, has lived a life that he feels deeply grateful for. He has loved people. He has been loved. He has built things that mattered to him. He has made difficult commitments and stayed around long enough to see what came from them. He has lost people, too. He has spent ordinary years with people that he cares about and there’s history there, and he wants another 20 years because he likes being alive.

The second person, though, has spent most of adulthood preparing. He still “means to” find the partner. He still means to have the family. He still means to travel more, and more slowly and more widely. He still means to recover old friendships that faded away while he was too busy, and he still means to learn how to enjoy the freedom that his success was supposed to give him, and he wants another 20 years for a different reason—he hasn’t gotten to live the life he wanted yet. [01:10.7]

It’s the same sentence, but very different fears, and that difference is where death anxiety shows up most clearly. Maybe the answer isn’t another argument about death. Maybe the answer is to look at the life that you are living now.

By the end of this episode, you’ll be able to tell the difference between wanting more life and needing more time, because too much of your life still feels unlived. You’ll have a way of looking at mortality that can make you appreciate your life more without pretending that death is harmless or anything. The aim isn’t to care less about living. It’s to love being alive without needing life to become permanent or forever. [01:52.2]

Death anxiety doesn’t only matter when you’re old. It can affect how you spend your life right now and the next 20 years, and the years after that. So, if you’re like the second guy and you’re afraid that you haven’t lived enough, you might respond by trying to secure more future—so, you improve your health. You make more money. You preserve more options. You achieve more. You prepare more carefully before you commit.

Any one of those choices can make sense in isolation. The problem comes when you keep buying more future because you still haven’t started living the life you say you want now. You spend more of the present trying to secure enough future to finally live later.

The last episode dealt with trying to buy immortality. This one is about buying time to begin living, and that brings us to one of the most tempting beliefs about death that people have—the more you love life, the more frightened you should be of losing it, right? There’s some truth in that. If life contains things worth having, then losing future life is, of course, a loss. [03:00.0]

We dealt with that in the last episode through what philosophers call the deprivation argument, but it doesn’t follow that the person most terrified of death has loved life most deeply. In fact, the opposite is much closer to the truth. The person who has lived most fully is also the person most ready emotionally for death. He may still want another 20 years. He may hate the thought of leaving the people he loves. He may still feel fear, but the desperation isn’t there or it’s very different.

Death isn’t threatening to take away the life that he kept meaning to start but has not yet lived. The more fully you’ve lived, the more the feeling at death can become “I wish I could have more of this—and I’m deeply glad I got to have it.” That’s very different from looking at death and thinking, I haven’t had enough of the life I actually wanted, or harder still, I’ve had plenty of years, I just haven’t used enough of them to actually really live. [04:02.6]

That last possibility is the one the renowned psychiatrist Irvin Yalom takes very seriously. In the last episode, I talked about his idea of rippling. You die, but the effects you had on other people continue after your death, and that can be comforting. It also gives us another way of continuing after death—but Yalom has another idea that matters much more here. His rough formula is this: the greater your sense of unlived life, the greater your death anxiety.

Let me repeat that. The greater your sense of unlived life, the greater your death anxiety. Think about what “unlived” means here, because it’s easy to hear that and start making a bucket list or something. This isn’t about whether you made it to Patagonia or tried that restaurant everyone keeps telling you about. A life can remain unlived in much more ordinary ways. [04:57.4]

Maybe you kept postponing something that you mattered to you. Maybe you were too afraid to choose. Maybe you wanted to take a risk on yourself, but you kept waiting until you had more evidence that it would work. Maybe keeping your options open felt safer than committing to one life and giving up all the others, or your career simply absorbed all those years.

There was always another reason why this wasn’t quite the right time. You’d make the relationship a priority after “this” stage, where you’d spend more time with old friends once the travel slowed down. Or you’d have children once life felt more stable, or you’d do the thing that you actually wanted once you felt certain enough that it was the right choice.

Sometimes, the problem is harder to see because you already have the thing. You have people that you love or money, or freedom, but your attention is somewhere else, thinking about what comes next or whether there’s a better option somewhere. So, the life is present. You’re just not participating in much of it. [06:03.0]

You can have plenty of years and still leave a surprising amount of life unlived, and once death becomes harder to ignore, all of those postponed things change. They’re no longer plans. They become things that you may never get.

Now, compare those two people again. The first person loves being alive and doesn’t want to lose it. He might want another year or 20 years very badly. He may think about the people he loves and feel, “Please don’t take this from me. I love it and I’ll miss it.” The second person feels something much closer to “Please don’t let this end yet. I need more time. I never got there.” Death isn’t only taking away future years. It’s actually threatening the end of the possibility of a life he still feels he hasn’t lived. [06:53.1]

Now, there’s quite a bit of research that points in that direction. Studies of older adults have linked life review, life satisfaction, and ego integrity with lower death anxiety or greater death acceptance, depending on how you put it. So, how you feel about the life you’ve lived has something to do with how you feel about its ending, and if that’s right, trying to become less afraid of death without looking at how you’re living misses the point.

If a substantial part of you is still saying, “Wait, I haven’t actually lived the life I wanted yet,” then that objection isn’t going to go away just because you found some clever argument, which leaves us with a much more uncomfortable question—what would it mean to have lived enough of life? [07:39.8]

One easy answer is to make a list. See the places. Try all the foods. Have the experiences. Spend the money. Quit the company. Stop delaying pleasure. Live every day like it’s your last. That sounds exciting for about 10 days. Then you notice that if you actually lived every day as though there were no tomorrow, you’d wreck a lot of the things that make life worth having. You wouldn’t raise a child properly. You wouldn’t build a marriage. You wouldn’t learn anything difficult. You wouldn’t tolerate much short-term pain for long-term gain, and you’d have a hard time keeping promises that only pay off years from now. [08:19.1]

A lot of good things require you to believe that there will be a tomorrow, and then to act accordingly. So, a full life can’t mean maximum pleasure or maximum novelty. You can spend the rest of your life collecting experiences and still avoid the things that you care about the most.

You can travel constantly and still postpone the relationship. You can quit the company and discover that freedom by itself doesn’t tell you how to live, and “Live every day like it’s your last” sounds wise until you try applying it to a normal day. Most of the things we value actually need time, like marriage, parenting, friendship, learning, contribution. [09:02.6]

So, yes, a good life has to include the future. You make plans. You keep promises. You endure things today because you care about what they make possible later. The problem starts when everything that you say matters is always later. If you say marriage or children matter, have you made room for them? If friendship matters, are your friends actually in your life? If curiosity or delight matter, do they appear in your actual days?

A fuller life is one in which the things that you judge important are not permanently waiting for you in the future. You’re actually living some substantial part of them now. That doesn’t mean you get all of them. You won’t, and this is where Oliver Burkeman’s argument from Episode 101 comes back. A finite life means choosing, and choosing one path means giving up potentially hundreds of others. [09:54.8]

You can marry one person and therefore not marry all the others that you might have married. You can spend 10 years building one company and not spend those same 10 years doing five other things that might have also been worth doing. There’s no version of a human life in which you can include every good possibility.

So, if your standard for a full life is that nothing worthwhile was missed, then, actually, logically speaking, every life fails. Full does not mean exhaustive. A person can have lived fully and still wonder about the career that he never tried or miss people that he lost too soon. The question is whether the life that he would actually choose is one he was present for, whether the things he said mattered became part of his ordinary life. A full life is not one in which you did everything. It’s a life in which you are actually present for enough of what mattered to you. [10:52.0]

Once you put it that way, another problem appears. Even if you’ve lived much of what matters to you, you may still want the whole thing explained, like it’s got to have some greater purpose or meaning, or to make sense in a deeper way. The great philosopher Albert Camus thought that demand was part of the human condition. We want the world to make sense. We want to know why we’re here, what our lives add up to, and whether there is some final answer that makes it all fit together.

Camus calls the clash between that demand and the silence of the universe “the absurd.” The absurd is not simply that life is hard or that life ends. It appears because we ask existence for an explanation, but existence doesn’t give us one, and that creates a temptation. If the universe won’t provide the answer, we may supply one because living without it feels too unbearable. [11:51.8]

Camus refuses to do that. Camus thinks that we have to stay with what we actually know. We are here. We want life to make sense. We know we will die, and we do not possess an answer that settles the matter for everyone. For Camus, that does not lead to suicide. It also does not lead to the conclusion that nothing is worth doing.

His question in the great classic, The Myth of Sisyphus, is practical. If life has no final explanation available to us, does that mean we should just stop living? His answer is no, but he doesn’t rescue life by giving it some hidden purpose at the end. He argues that we can live while remaining fully conscious that the final explanation has not arrived. He asks, “What happens if you stop requiring a final answer before you consent to being alive?” [12:48.9]

His earlier essays, especially Nuptials, return to ordinary physical life—the sun, the sea, the body, friendship. None of them needs to last forever before the experience can be good. This is especially important if you’re an achiever. If you’ve spent years asking what things lead to, if you invest because of the return, if you sacrifice now because of what the sacrifice may produce later, or if you build because you want something to exist that doesn’t exist yet, that way of thinking is often exactly right. But then you apply that same rule to your whole life, and then what happens? You start asking, “What does my life produce, or what remains after I’m gone? What’s the final result?” Now existence itself has become yet another project that has to justify the time that you put into it. [13:45.0]

Camus gives us a reason to question that demand. Maybe some parts of life do not need to justify themselves by producing some later result. Friendship is an obvious example. A friendship may give you support, advice and help, but if the only reason you spent time with your friend was what the friendship would eventually produce for you, you would have misunderstood the core of what friendship is. Spending time with the person can already be worth doing in itself. The same can be true of being alive. [14:19.4]

Camus does not give us a complete account of what makes a life good, but he removes one important demand. Life does not first need some eternal explanation before you can live it fully. You can remain conscious that you will die. You can remain conscious that you do not know what, if anything, comes after, and you can still participate fully in the life that you’ve got in the present that’s here.

Maybe existence is one of those things that can be worth having before it produces anything beyond itself, and if that’s true, then we can try looking at our lives from a very different distance. The Stoics did this long before anyone had a telescope. [15:05.4]

Marcus Aurelius repeatedly reminds himself to step back and look at human affairs from above. Imagine the city from the air. People are arguing, making deals, falling in love, chasing reputations, trying to become important. Now go higher. The people become smaller, and then the city becomes just a patch on the ground.

In meditations, Marcus Aurelius widens the view across generations through time. People are born. They live together. They struggle with one another. They die. Other people take their place. Eventually, even the people who remembered them are gone. He isn’t saying none of it matters. He’s trying to get the scale right.

Oliver Burkeman, I mentioned him earlier, the author of Four Thousand Weeks, has a modern version of the same exercise. I think he jokingly calls it “cosmic insignificance therapy.” It’s actually not a bad term. I try to do this myself almost daily. I have a photo of the universe from the James Webb Telescope as a wallpaper on my phone. [16:08.1]

So, try it. Picture where you are right now. Imagine yourself from outside the building, then above the city, the country, the Earth, the planet. At that distance, you and I disappear.

Now pull back farther. Earth is just one planet orbiting just one minor star. Our sun is one among roughly 100 to 400 billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy, and our Milky Way galaxy is just one galaxy among an estimated 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe. At this point, the numbers stop helping. The human mind was not made to picture that much. Somewhere inside all of that is you and me. [17:08.0]

Sometimes, the real problem isn’t more effort or more motivation. It’s knowing the right direction. A lot of people listening to this podcast are capable and driven. Things still look fine on paper, but life still feels strangely flat. When that happens, more advice usually isn’t the answer. Clarity is.

I’ve put together a short assessment that takes about two minutes. It’s simply a way to see which area deserves your attention most right now, whether that’s relationships, decision-making, or how pressure is being handled day to day. Based on your responses, you’ll be sent a short set of master classes related to that area.

If that sounds useful, you can find it at DTPhD.com/quiz. That’s “dtphd.com/quiz.”

Okay, now you should normally take many minutes to do that. I kind of rushed you through it because it’s a podcast. Now we would add time. [18:04.5]

The universe existed for billions of years before you and I were born. Our entire life occupies a tiny interval in that history, and then you die and time keeps going. Your company barely registers at that scale. Your reputation registers even less, and you might expect this exercise to end in some kind of nihilism, like, “If I’m that small, then nothing I do matters.” But Burkeman’s point is almost the opposite, and by the way, the Buddhist philosophers have another very powerful version of this exercise.

So, the universe is not keeping score. There’s no cosmic leaderboard where some bigger company somehow improves your ranking. It, instead, asks a different question: What actually disappeared when you made yourself this small? Did you stop loving your child? Did your intimate partner stop mattering? Did music or friendship become worthless? [19:11.1]

If somebody you cared about is suffering and you can help, did that stop mattering because there are 2 trillion galaxies? Of course not. Cosmic insignificance removes your importance to the cosmos, but it does not remove value from your life.

Your child doesn’t have to matter to the Andromeda galaxy before loving your child makes sense and has meaning. A dinner with an old friend doesn’t need cosmic significance before you can enjoy it. You can be almost nothing on a cosmic scale, as we all are really, and still have a life full of things that matter enormously at the scale where we human beings actually live. [19:58.4]

Your life doesn’t have to impress the universe. Your business, your company doesn’t have to justify your existence. Your reputation doesn’t have to survive for thousands of years. You get to become very small, and what you actually care about can still be there. In fact, it can even increase in subjective value to you.

To some people, that smallness can feel depressing at first, like, “If my entire life is barely a flicker in all that space and time, why bother?” but, again, like I said, turn the thought around. The universe has existed for billions of years. There are more stars than any of us can properly imagine. Most of what we can see is matter with no consciousness that we know of—and yet, for this very, very brief interval, you and I are here. [20:55.7]

We became conscious. Other people appeared in our lives. Some of them became important to you. You could know them and enjoy being with them. You could hear music. You could laugh at something stupid. You can love a particular person in a way that you don’t love billions of others—and none of that makes your life important to the cosmos. Why should it have to?

So, maybe the response to seeing how small we are doesn’t have to be “Therefore, my life must somehow become cosmically important.” Maybe it’s much simpler. “How extraordinary that I got to have any of this.” This is where the word “gift” becomes useful, or the concept of a gift, as long as we’re careful about what we mean by it.

Calling life a gift doesn’t mean that we have to believe there’s a giver. It means instead that we weren’t owed this. You weren’t owed consciousness or friendship, or another person to love or an ordinary afternoon with someone who matters to you. You certainly weren’t promised that any of it would last forever. [22:09.3]

Once we’re alive, another year starts to feel like something we should get. Now, another year with those that you love may be wonderful, but wanting it doesn’t mean you are owed it. If I believe existence owes me continuation, then death looks like existence breaking its agreement with me. But, of course, there was no such agreement. I got a slice of time. I don’t know how long it will be, and during that period, I get access to experiences I could just as easily never have had.

Seen from that angle, insignificance doesn’t have to feel humiliating or anything. In fact, it can make appreciation easier, right? You don’t have to become large enough to deserve having existed. You already exist. For this little stretch of time, you get to know some people, care about them, enjoy things, and suffer when something precious is lost. [23:08.8]

The ending doesn’t make the interval less astonishing. It’s not “How do I make myself important enough to justify being here?” but instead “I wasn’t owed any of this, and somehow I got to have it.” So, if you weren’t owed any of this, then that changes how you can relate to the people you already have in your life. You don’t have to ask them to justify your existence or to make your life meaningful later, or to give you some kind of return that proves your life was worth having—but that’s how many people often imagine a good life.

The emotional payoff is still supposed to arrive from outside. “Somebody finally loves me enough,” or “I find the right relationship,” or “My children give my life meaning.” “People admire what I built,” or “The future finally looks safe,” and of course, all of those things can matter. [24:06.8]

Being loved matters. A good relationship matters. Children can matter enormously. So can being respected for something you built. But if your sense that life was worth having depends entirely on what other people eventually give back to you, then you’re just still waiting around.

There is another good available to you right now. Being loved is one experience, yes. Loving is actually another different experience. Think of someone that you love—maybe it’s your partner or your child, or a parent or an old friend—and for a few seconds forget what that person thinks of you. Forget whether they appreciate you enough. Just put your attention on that person. [24:56.4]

Picture his or her face. Remember something unmistakably theirs—the way they laugh, the way your child says some word incorrectly—and notice how much you care about this person. That experience is coming from you. You are loving them, so actually, you don’t have to wait for the universe to hand you that feeling back to you before it counts.

We often ask other people to do far more for us than any human being could possibly do. Your child can become a way of imagining that some part of you will continue after death. They remember you. Maybe they’ll make all the sacrifices feel worth it. But your child does not have to defeat death for you. You’ve got to love your child. Your relationship partner doesn’t have to solve your loneliness forever. You’ve got to love this person, and that happened, too. [26:03.2]

Now, when I say love here, I don’t mean that you stay physically connected to someone no matter what they do. I don’t mean you have no standards or no boundaries, or that you tolerate cruelty. Unconditional love here does not require an unconditional relationship. What it means here is actually simpler and deeper. Your capacity to experience love doesn’t have to be payment for somebody behaving correctly.

You can care about a person because you care about them. You can love a person because you love them. Why does your child have to carry you into the future? Why does anyone you love have to make you permanent or forever? You are alive now. They are here now, and while you’re here, you can love them. Why does love have to survive your death if loving the person while you are alive is enough, or actually more than enough? [26:59.0]

This gives us a good way to return to a story from the last episode. If you haven’t heard the last episode, the story comes from the award-winning episode from Star Trek: The Next Generation, and it was called The Inner Light.

Captain Jean-Luc Picard, played by Patrick Stewart, is struck by a beam from an alien probe. To everyone else around him, only a short time passes, but Picard, in his mind, experiences decades of another life. He becomes this guy Kamin, a man living on the planet Kataan. He has a wife, Eline. He has a family. He grows old. He has a grandson, and over the course of that life, Kamin learns that Kataan is dying. The planet cannot be saved because their sun is changing, so the people of Kataan send out a probe. The hope is that somebody somewhere in the universe will encounter it and know or learn that they existed. [27:53.3]

In the last episode, I spent much more time with the story, and there I asked one question. Suppose that probe fails, suppose nobody ever finds it, suppose it doesn’t make it to Captain Picard or to anyone, was Kamin’s life still worth living?

Okay, now I want to ask a different question. Okay, so Kamin is old. Eline, his wife, is dead. His grandson is there with him. He knows Kataan, the planet, will die, and, again, assume the probe will fail. What should Kamin do with that afternoon that he still has? Should he spend it furious that existence hasn’t given him enough? Should he stop loving his grandson because the boy’s life is just going to be short? That would be absurd, right?

He can be with his grandson. He can remember his wife Eline. He can play the flute he loves. He can eat. He can laugh if something he finds is funny, and he can grieve because there is something—there are many things—for him to grieve. [28:58.2]

He can experience the life that remains. He can wish his wife Eline were still there. He can wish his grandson had another 60 years, and he can wish his planet Kataan were not going to die—and at the same time, he can be glad for the life that he did get.

There is no contradiction. Kamin can want more life. He can wish desperately that the people he loves had more life, too, and he can still say, “I wish my wife Eline were here. I wish my grandson had 60 more years. I don’t want my planet to die—and I am glad I got this life.” The last episode established that a good thing doesn’t become worthless just because it ends. Irvin Yalom adds the psychological point: the more un-lived your life feels, the more terrifying death can become. [29:56.1]

A full life doesn’t mean doing everything. It means that enough of what matters is already part of the life you are presently living now. Camus lets us stop demanding a final answer. Marcus Aurelius and Oliver Burkeman put us back in proportion, and love gives you one of life’s deepest experiences without waiting for anything to become permanent or forever.

Now I want to end this with someone that I knew. More than a decade ago, I was a private coach to a senior in-house lawyer at a Fortune 100 company. His career was going extremely well. His social life, though, was basically non-existent, and so was his dating life. So, we worked together for many months and that part of his life changed quite dramatically.

Before long, he had a full social calendar. He was meeting women, a lot of them. He was going out, making friends. He was having fun. At one point, he sent me a photo of himself driving his convertible with four attractive women somehow crammed into this convertible with him, all laughing and clearly having a great time—but the bigger change was in how Rick related to other people. [31:02.1]

A big part of what I taught him was to be as honest and genuine as possible with others. “Stop filtering yourself so heavily. Say what you actually think. Say what you actually feel. Don’t constantly edit yourself according to how you imagine the other person will react, or what you think you need to say to impress them or to get you to like them. This will then surprise you. It’ll point out to you things about yourself that you maybe have repressed or suppressed, and you’ve got to get good on those, and that’s your integrity. So, you actually work on your integrity so that the outside matches your inside, and when that happens, then you can continue to just be genuine and honest with others, without censoring yourself, and it gets easier and easier, because you’re just speaking your mind and acting naturally. In this way, you’re actually being more truly yourself, and when this happens, you should expect a kind of polarizing response from other people. Some people may like you less, and that’s fine. In fact, it might actually be good. The people who do like you are now responding to you strongly, more strongly than if you had presented just some carefully curated pretend version of you.” [32:14.4]

Rick, he was a very intelligent, smart guy, took all of that very seriously, so over the next several years, he lived much more openly. He had more fun. He let people know the real him, and he got to know himself at a deeper, more authentic level, and eventually, he fell in love. He built a relationship with a woman who would later live with him, stay with him through his cancer treatments, and hold him while he grieved what was coming.

What I didn’t know when we first met was why he had contacted me in the first place. He had had a big cancer scare. Fortunately, they caught it early enough to treat it, and by the time we met, the cancer was in remission, so I couldn’t tell. That first diagnosis had terrified him, so his reaction was basically, “I need more time,” and he suddenly saw how much of his personal life he had given up for his career. [33:05.6]

He had not fallen in love yet. He had barely allowed himself to have fun. He had spent years holding back what he really thought and felt around other people, and so it was hard for him to generate or create authentic connection. When death appeared as a possibility, he saw how much of the life he actually wanted was still unlived, and then he got several more years and he used them differently.

Several years after our coaching ended, the cancer came back, and this time the prognosis was less than a year, and we met again at his favorite whiskey bar. He kept some rare bottles there, and, yes, he was drinking, and he poured himself a glass and me a glass, and he told me the story that he had never told me before and he thanked me, and that was when I understood what those years had actually meant to him. [33:53.6]

The first diagnosis had confronted him with a life that he felt he had barely begun to live outside his career. By the second diagnosis, he could look back at several years in which he had actually lived much more of it. He had fallen in love. He had been loved. He had let people know him. He had enjoyed himself. He had built the personal life he’d been frightened he might never have. He still didn’t want to die, of course, but he told me he could face death now with courage and a kind of equanimity, and there was peace and there was gratitude for those extra years, because he had actually lived them.

Rick died not long after that. Rest in peace, Rick. I’ll be having a drink in your memory tonight.

Had to hit pause on the recording. [34:46.5]

The worst avoidable outcome here isn’t death. Death is outside your control. The avoidable outcome is that you succeed at extending your healthy lifespan, make more money, preserve more options, take excellent care of your body, and postpone the family yet another five years, postpone enjoyment until the next stage and arrive at 90 saying the same thing, “I need more time,” because the problem was never only the number of years. [35:17.0]

So, come all the way back from the galaxies, the stars, the billions of years, and the civilizations that rise and disappear. Tomorrow morning, the room, coffee, your child says something ridiculous. Your partner is there. A friend sends you something silly. You can look at these people and experience loving them. None of this becomes cosmically important, and it doesn’t need to. I would like more, but I don’t need more before I can be grateful for what I’ve got. [35:58.1]