How to Embrace Mortality For Flourishing
What if Christianity’s promise of an afterlife is obstructing our motivation to fully live the one life we know we have? And what if living fully requires navigating obstacles like this and confronting our mortality?
Belief in an afterlife is the most common way I and many others have avoided confronting their mortality. With an afterlife and a loving God on the horizon, death can seem inconsequential, palatable, or even desirable. More recently, the wealthiest among us have been looking toward tech to “solve” death. Entrepreneur and “longevity athlete” Bryan Johnson aims to leverage new technology in order to achieve his mission statement, “Don’t Die.” Technology is hailed as our new savior from death, and this can yield comfort comparable to that of belief in an afterlife.
To be fair, there are certain respects in which technology may eventually be able to achieve immortality in some sense, and these ideas warrant different treatment than the sort of wish fulfillment espoused by Johnson and others. The important thing is that we should take care not to be so worried about death that we forget to live life, but we should also take into full account that acknowledging our mortality doesn’t mean we’ve implemented this knowledge. Believing in an afterlife, wishfully clinging to technology, and similar actions can indicate that we haven’t fully implemented this knowledge. In order to live fully, we must see these and similar obstacles for what they are and embrace our mortality.
Obstacles: Ways We Avoid Our Mortality
I did what most teens did: attended school, played sports, and completed chores. After these responsibilities, I did fun stuff: played video games, hung out with friends, and read interesting books. Most of the time, I didn’t live as if there were an afterlife, although I professed to others (and myself) that I believed that there was. This mismatch between my thoughts and actions created a lot of internal tension for me that permeated almost everything I did (as all contradictions do). When I acted in ways that furthered my life here on Earth, I felt guilty that I wasn’t serving God and thinking of the afterlife. And when I served God, I felt awful because I had to sacrifice my earthly values. I was between a rock and a hard place with guilt on one side and self-sacrifice on the other. This is the basic alternative in Christianity; one can only choose between two forms of misery. There seemed to be no escape.
After I renounced Christianity and embraced rational philosophy, the problem seemed to have disappeared, but it actually continued—just in a new form. Without an afterlife to save me from death, I felt deeply afraid and depressed for a time. During this time, I discovered and embraced Bryan Johnson’s idea that I could achieve immortality by simply leveraging the exponential power of technology. This seemed to provide the mental comfort I desperately sought. But I experienced the same problem. If I wanted to live forever, I had to drain most enjoyment from my life in order to follow very strict health protocols. If I didn’t follow the protocols, I felt guilty and afraid that I would die.
With respect to both heaven and technology, I was thinking in terms of avoiding death when I should have been thinking about how to live life.
Time—The Ultimate Currency
Time is the currency of our lives. The number of decisions we will make in our lives is finite, and every decision we make either makes our lives better—or it doesn’t. We should confront our own mortality not because death is something to be avoided but because living full, rich lives requires careful, thoughtful investment of our most basic resource: time.
What I’ve realized after thinking deeply about death is that actively confronting your mortality requires a great deal of strength in the face of fear. Despite this, it is one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever done because it has led me to be very, very aware of an ever-present fact: I am always spending time, and if I don’t put myself in control of how I spend my time, someone or something else will.
Knowing that we are always spending our time enables us to make better decisions. We all occasionally waste our time on trivial things and lose sight of the long-range, big-picture consequences of our actions. But when we understand that time is the ultimate currency, we can make better mental calculations about what actions best serve our lives. For example, when I was a kid, I used to collect coins; I remember one time I was trying desperately to haggle for the lowest price on a U.S. quarter that I could add to my collection. As a kid with little negotiating experience, this may have been a good way to practice that particular skill, but would it make sense to try to save a few cents by spending many hours haggling? No—because the time I was spending could be spent on more productive ventures. In economics, the concept of opportunity cost captures this idea. This concept helps us consider the potential values we miss out on by taking any course of action. If I had had a fuller grasp of the time I was spending and the return I was getting for it, I probably would not have spent so much time haggling.
Confronting our mortality enables us to mentally “load up” a rough “time account” that is much like a bank account, but rather than money, it holds the most precious currency: the units of our lives.
Steps For Embracing Mortality And Living More Fully
We can all probably benefit from becoming more aware of time by embracing our mortality. So, how do we go from contemplating death to living more fully? This may seem counterintuitive, but it works nonetheless.
Challenge all religious views of death.
Christianity claims that death is the consequence of moral failure. Romans 6:23 reads, “For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
But is death really a consequence of moral failure?
If we observe death not filtered through religious narrative, we can see that it is an inevitable, impersonal, and complete disintegration of one’s body and mind. When a baby unfortunately dies, she doesn’t die due to some “wrongdoing.” She died because she could not fight whatever killed her. No one says a baby died due to her “sin” unless that person is either irrational or unempathetic.
At one time, I seriously believed that everyone died due to sin because that is what the Bible says. However, I deviated from scripture when it came to the idea that a baby dies due to her “sin” because this is absurd, even if it is logically supported by Christian teachings. Many Christians avoid saying babies die due to sin—which not only indicates the rationality and empathy of these Christians in this area, but it says a lot about the incompatibility of this religious view of death with a rational, empathetic, and life-enhancing worldview.
Challenging the religious view of death not only enables empathy but it can also greatly decrease patterns of psychological suffering, enabling serenity. When I believed death is a consequence of moral failing, I spent many lengthy periods worrying that I wasn’t a “real” Christian and that I would be sent to hell when I died. I, and I’m sure many other Christians, have spent countless years going through this familiar pattern:
Guilt. I felt guilty when I had slipped away from doing the “right things” (e.g., serving God, reading my Bible, praying daily, not feeling God’s presence etc.).
Doubt. I doubted my salvation status due to not exhibiting the “right” behaviors and feeling the “right” things that a saved person would exhibit and feel.
Fear, Repentance, Rededication, Repeat. I finally repented when my fear of dying and being damned to hell became too strong. I then doubled down on doing the “right things,” only to eventually slip away again and repeat this process all over.
Some Christians may claim that we shouldn’t be motivated by fear of death and hell but by love and life. But just because we demand that we shouldn’t do something doesn’t mean we can. If you accept the religious view of death on any level, it’s impossible to go any lengthy period of time without eventually being motivated by a fear of death and hell, which are core parts of the Christian belief system. The only way to not be driven by these ideas is to challenge and eventually stop believing in them.
Not only should we challenge traditional religious views of death, we should also challenge any religious-like view of death—such as the one implied in Bryan Johnson “Don’t Die” philosophy. Of course, it’s entirely possible we may be able to significantly lengthen our lifespans with technology but we should not kid ourselves into believing that we can somehow escape death once and for all. This only leads to a paranoid life of wondering if every of our smallest behaviors is impacting our longevity in some way. Paranoia is not life-serving.
If we want to live a more empathetic and serene life, we must begin by challenging all religious views of death. And, when we’re ready, we can renounce these views and start moving towards a more grounded view of death.
Replace the religious view of death with a more grounded one.
Challenging the religious view of death isn’t entirely enough. Disassembling this view without a grounded alternative view can leave us disoriented, confused, or even depressed. I experienced this first handedly. Shortly after renouncing Christianity and my belief in an afterlife, I felt ecstatic but once I fully realized that I would die and that would be it, it felt like the ground beneath my feet disappeared. I experienced nihilism for the first time.
I deeply feared death and felt as if life had no meaning, but not because I was afraid of the possibility of going to hell. I imagined death as a literal vacuum—a blank void in which I’d miss out on everything good in life. This seemed worse than hell. Without an afterlife, this life appeared meaningless. I avoided thinking about this because it was too painful to confront or challenge. But that was a mistake.
Eventually, I decided to get curious about death because avoiding it only deepened my despair. I thought deeply about death and came across a few ideas that put death in a different light—and helped me see that I was in error about life being meaningless without an afterlife.
One idea came in the form of a quote from the Ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus:
Why should I fear death? If I am, death is not. If death is, I am not. Why should I fear that which can only exist when I do not?
This question, “Why should I fear death?” cut straight to the core of the problem I was facing. I really hadn’t thought to question my fear. When I began to try to answer this question, I kept coming to the same conclusion Epicurus was reaching: “Death is not when I am.” I could fear the moments leading to death, but fearing the absence of experience itself? Impossible. Death is just like not being born.
Another realization came paired with this. I wasn’t actually afraid of death—I was afraid of missing out on life and all of the values it brought with it. Death represented an ending of those values. My fear was actually a desire in disguise.
Another important idea from economics that reframed death as life-affirming was this one: Scarcity gives rise to value. For example, air is free because it’s ubiquitous, but if you travel to a thin-air place like Denver, Colorado, you’ll see vendors selling canned air from lower altitudes for exorbitant prices. Scarcity drives higher evaluations. Life is no different. Life is only valuable because it is scarce. If it came in infinite supplies, it’d be effectively worthless. So, death, the absence of life, is what drives life’s scarcity and makes it valuable.
Seeing that death isn’t something to avoid but a fact to take in account can enable us to value the one life we have even more. This view of death can give you the grounding you need to live more fully.
Tie your emotions to your new view of death.
It is entirely possible to understand steps one and two on an intellectual level, but if you don’t integrate these steps into your emotions, you may find yourself falling into old patterns and failing to adopt new ones. To adopt the new ones, we need to habituate these lessons.
One way we can habituate our grounded view of death is to feel how much of a waste of time certain activities are. On an intellectual level, we know that watching too much Netflix is a waste of our limited lives and that reading challenging books isn’t. But understanding this doesn’t change the fact that Netflix or whatever other time-wasting activities we enjoy are tempting. One way to eventually rid yourself of the desire to do time-wasting things is to practice visualization. To do this, imagine all the things you are missing out on by partaking in any time-wasting activity and—this is the most important step—feel the upcoming negative consequences of that time-wasting activity. With practice, this visualization practice can eventually lead us to fear missing out on the things that actually make the most of our lives.
Doing what’s good for us out of fear of doing what is not is not sustainable or enjoyable in the long term. I’m reminded of a poignant line from Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged: “Your fear of death is not a love for life. . ..” Ideally, our aim is to love what is life-serving and life itself. The best way I’ve discovered to do this is to reverse the aforementioned practice. Visualize yourself doing an activity that you rationally know matters and feel how productive, life-serving, and exalting that activity is.
Simply telling yourself to feel good won’t make you feel good all of the time, and you can’t force yourself to enjoy things that are obviously bad for you. But in the long term, an evidence-based visualization practice that incorporates a full acknowledgement of your mortality can and eventually will enable you to absolutely fall in love with living life.
Accepting my own mortality and integrating that realization into my day-to-day emotions has enabled me to make better decisions with the one, limited life I have—and I’ve been living better because of it. I’ve taken my health even more seriously by picking up yoga and cycling, and I’ve adopted a time-auditing practice that involves assessing whether each thing I spend time on is adding or subtracting from my life. If you want to enable fuller living, recognize your mortality and act accordingly.
Your life will be well spent.
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