Perfection of character is this: to live each day as if it were your last, without frenzy, without apathy, without pretense.

- Marcus Aurelius

‍

If you’re an investor, it’s a good time to be long on longevity. The longevity economy is projected to be worth $27 trillion by 2030. Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are all in, too, investing in anti-aging research, biotechnology, cryogenics, and new drugs. 

World leaders are in too. In September, a hot mic captured Russia’s Vladimir Putin saying to China’s Xi Jinping that, “In a few years, with the development of biotechnology, human organs can be constantly transplanted so that people can live younger and younger, and even become immortal.” To which Xi replied that “the prediction is that in this century humans may live to 150 years old.”

For some in the longevity movement, death is simply a glitch to be solved. Longevity is great — of course we should use all the technology at our disposal to extend our healthspan and our lifespan as long as we can. But spoiler alert: we’re all going to die. And the danger of chasing the false promise of immortality is that we lose access to the very real and tangible lessons of mortality. Death is one of the most powerful tools we have to help us navigate life. ‍

And more and more people are taking steps to grapple with the presence of death in their lives. For instance, there’s the growing “death cafe” movement, where people gather to talk about it. Nearly 9,000 have now been held around the world. “We've found over the years that people are starving for a safe place to share fears, beliefs, stories," said Jim Van Buskirk, who co-hosts death cafes in San Francisco. “It's a wonderful way to simply and straightforwardly normalize the fact that we're all mortal.”

What the end of life can teach us

“Death is always with us, in the marrow of every passing moment,” writes Frank Ostaseski, a Buddhist teacher and the co-founder of Zen Hospice. “She is the secret teacher hiding in plain sight. She helps us to discover what matters most.” 

Joanna Ebenstein, author of Memento Mori: The Art of Contemplating Death to Live a Better Life, sums up what death has to teach us: “The mystery of death has, for millennia, led us to ask the big, existential questions: Why are we here? What is the meaning of life?” And yet, in our modern world, we’ve consigned death to the world of medicine and machines. The reality of death has remained constant, but we’ve lost our connection to its meaning. As we cordoned off death from our lives, we’ve also detached ourselves from the big questions. What is a good life? Who are we? Why are we here?

Death is life’s forcing mechanism. It can drive self-exploration, clarify our values and help us find meaning. So instead of turning away from death, Ostaseski asks, “Could we turn toward death like a master teacher and ask, ‘How, then, shall I live?’”

As mythographer Martin Shaw writes, making death a part of life used to be part of ancient cultures: “more and more, as technology takes over our lives and casts death away from our consciousness, we walk backward into our own graves, so filled with denial because we lived without once thinking that such a thing could one day happen to us.”

Death doula Alua Arthur founded her organization Going with Grace to help those at the end of life. But her work with the dying has transformed how she lives her own life. “When I am thinking about my death, I can see very clearly who I want to be, how I want to spend my time, what I want to leave behind, and what I value,” she says. 

Hospice nurse Hadley Vlahos calls the time in which we’re still alive but death is very present and close the in-between: “between here and whatever comes next, there is something powerful and peaceful.” 

But of course, we’re all in the in-between from the moment we’re born. What’s tragic about our life on earth is not that life ends, but that so many of us wait until the ending is visible to finally start living. The good news, Ostaseski writes, “is we don’t have to wait until the end of our lives to realize the wisdom that death has to offer.” 

He has seen the profound insights people have at the end of their lives that give them newfound meaning and purpose. “The value is not in how long they enjoyed the experience,” he writes, “but the possibility that such transformation exists. If that possibility exists at the time of dying, it exists here and now.”

And there are many lessons we can learn about how to live from those who have been closer to the other side of the in-between. Australian author Bronnie Ware spent years working in palliative care and says that the most common regret she encountered was: “I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.” As she writes, “It is very important to try and honour at least some of your dreams along the way. From the moment that you lose your health, it is too late. Health brings a freedom very few realise, until they no longer have it.”

Research on those at the end of life shows that our values change as death approaches. At the end, we don’t crave more status or more things but more connection. A study on terminally ill patients found that common reflections include concern for loved ones, gratitude and spirituality. Another found that the most commonly discussed topics included accepting one's imperfections, celebrating and appreciating what you have, giving and service to others. And a study of hospice patients found that they showed “the desire to grow and change at this critical time.” If hospice patients can grow and change at the end of life, why not grow and change now

The reflections of those at the end of life aren’t just for themselves. They want others to get the benefits of their insights. A study on hospice patients found “a common exhortation to young people to avoid focusing too much on acquisition and the internet and to prioritize instead social connection and engagement with the natural world.”

Near-death experiences

Lessons can also come from those who go to the other side of the in-between and come back from near death experiences, or NDEs. It’s a way of absorbing what death has to offer while there’s often many years of life to put it to use. Advances in medicine have increased the frequency of NDEs.

Sebastian Junger, war correspondent and author of The Perfect Storm, experienced an NDE due to an abdominal hemorrhage, which he details in his most recent book In My Time of Dying. “When you appreciate the reality of death, one of the things that happens is that it illuminates the truth about existence, which is that it happens moment by moment,” he writes. For Junger, being forced to grapple with death (with or without a near death experience), can make us ask ourselves the question of who we want to be when we finally cross that threshold. “I'm guessing you won't be on your phone that much,” he writes. “I'm guessing you will not harbor grudges. I'm guessing you'll be kind and loving to people and appreciative of everything. Weirdly, those are all pro-social behaviors that, if we all did them all the time, would save our society and our planet.” 

And, yet, strangely, we spend so much of our limited time on earth “killing time,” escaping from the moment with screens and scrolling. As Junger puts it, “It's like we're throwing away food, knowing that eventually you're going to be starving.” 

While the conditions that drive people to the edge of death, or over the line, vary, there’s a remarkable consistency to how they describe the experience when they come back. A central theme is a heightened sense of spirituality. 

Bruce Greyson is a psychiatrist who has studied NDEs for decades. As he writes, those who have come back experience a “cosmic unity or oneness, transcendence of time and space, deeply felt positive mood,” and a “sense of sacredness.” While he notes that there is no connection between religious belief and NDEs before the experience, there’s a strong association between NDEs and a “deepened spiritual consciousness” afterwards. 

Likewise, in a study summarizing lessons he’s learned from analyzing research on NDEs, Craig Lundahl, professor of sociology at Western New Mexico University, writes that for most people who survive NDEs, “the idea of life after death became not merely highly probable, but a veritable certainty.”

One of the common elements to the experience that drives this conviction is seeing loved ones and relatives who have crossed the threshold. Some might say it’s just the result of neurochemical glitches of a dying brain, but those who have seen the process up close disagree. The hospice nurse Hadley Vlahos says that in the many patients she’s cared for, those who aren’t religious and don’t believe in the afterlife are as likely to have “end-of-life visitations” from loved ones as those who do believe. As she points out, hallucinations can be about anything, from insects to talking walls. The visitations, on the other hand, are lucid and matter-of-fact. “While hallucinations can incite anxiety or fear,” writes Vlahos, “visitations bring with them a sense of calm and peace.” 

The person who visited Junger was his father: “My father exuded reassurance and seemed to be inviting me to go with him. ‘It’s okay, there’s nothing to be scared of,’ he seemed to be saying. ‘Don’t fight it. I’ll take care of you.’” 

After his experience, an ICU nurse suggested Junger think of it not as something scary but something sacred. When he tried to find this nurse later, no one at the hospital knew who he was talking about. “It crossed my mind that she did not exist,” he writes. “My experience was sacred, I finally decided, because I couldn’t really know life until I knew death.” As he notes, the word “apocalypse” comes from the Greek, apokalupsis, to uncover, “because all knowledge is said to be revealed in the final collapse.” 

Even though Junger had spent his life as an atheist, he says his experience opened him up to the idea that everything can’t be explained by science, “that possibly on a subatomic or quantum level, we don't really understand existence, life, death, reality, consciousness, or the universe and that there's some sort of post-death reality to the individual that we can't — and maybe never will be able to — make sense of and then that's what people keep bumping into around experiences like this.” 

For those who don’t believe there’s anything after death (and I very much do) seeing death as the end — of everything — can make it harder to accept death and learn from it. As Medicare Director Chris Klomp told me, 25% of his $1.1 trillion budget is spent during the last 12 months of life. If you think life ends with death, it’s no wonder people cling to the last few weeks no matter how horrible their quality of life is.

In a recent New York Times interview, Chloe Zhao, the Oscar-nominated director of “Hamnet,” explained why she’s becoming a death doula, having recently completed her first stage of training. “Because I have been terrified of death my whole life,” she said. “And because I’ve been so afraid I haven’t been able to live fully… And because I’m so scared of it, I have no choice but to start to develop a healthier relationship with it.” 

She goes on to note the line in “Hamlet” that all living things die, “passing through nature to eternity.” But if you don’t believe in the eternity part, “all you have left is ‘all living things must die,’” she says. “Then it’s like, What’s the point? You’re separating from the oneness.”

It’s a surprising, but important, lesson: bringing death into our lives is what paradoxically allows us to live more fully. BJ Miller, a palliative care specialist and co-founder of Mettle Health, calls it “cosmic right-sizing,” bringing proportionality into our lives. 

“We will never know who we are and why we are here,” writes Frank Ostaseski, “if we do not ask the uncomfortable questions.” And nothing will force us to ask the big, uncomfortable, hard questions more than getting comfortable with our limited time on earth.

We don’t need to defeat death to live well. Death is not a glitch, but a clarifier. Remembering that we’re all in the in-between and that our time is limited, can fill that time with meaning, purpose and connection. The wisdom we seek at the end of life is available to us now.