Why Mortality is Good for Us

The only certainty in life is that living things must die. And yet, the concept of death is one that we are so uncertain about. Furthermore, though dying is the only thing we may be assured of happening in our lives, death is not really a part of life at all. Perhaps, then, nothing really is certain in life. All the same, all that lives must cease to do so; death is inevitable. 

We fear it no less than we ever have, though it is nothing new under the sun; billions of people have died over hundreds of thousands of years, making it perhaps the one experience all humanity can relate to besides being born.Yet, death makes cowards of many at the end; it enfeebles the strong and dulls the sharpest intellects. As surely as we grow in stature from infancy to adulthood, do we decline into the helplessness of old age. Stripped of our autonomy, we are stripped of our dignity, so that in dying, it feels as though we cede more than merely our lives. 

Thus does it seem that death mars the latter years of life, insisting that we cower and quake in old age, undergoing a gradual descent until defeat. But would our lives be better if death did not await us; if there were no end? Would we be happier if the knowledge of dying did not plague us and increasingly weigh on our minds over the span of perhaps even a century? How would our lives be measured if it were not for death? 

If we did not die, we would have unlimited time to accomplish all our goals. We rarely set deadlines for ourselves in terms of years before we expect to die. That is, we generally say to ourselves that this task must be completed by the end of the week, and that task in two months’ time, for example. Yet whether we consciously recognize it or not, the knowledge of dying  ultimately prompts us to complete many of our goals by certain times throughout our life, since if it were not for death, aging would not be a factor in determining our timelines. For example, we have general notions about what age we should do things like graduate, become established in a career, get married, etc, so that we can retire at some later age. We are also motivated to complete personal, more novel goals – perhaps skydiving or traveling the world – before too much of our lives have gone by, as these activities become less feasible with age. In the absence of death, it would be in our best interest to accomplish some of these things in a timely fashion: we would still need to support ourselves, and if we were to live forever, I imagine we would like to find a nice job sooner rather than later, so as to live a comfortable eternity. 

However, if we did not die, it might be much more difficult to find the motivation to accomplish all that we should like. If we lived forever, how easy it would be to postpone personal goals, perhaps indefinitely. Suppose you wished to read the complete works of Charles Dickens, or earn a black belt in karate. It would certainly be nice to have all the time in the world to do so. And yet, with all the time in the world, who would not, from time to time (or possibly quite frequently), put off working towards the realization of these dreams, saying to themselves “this can wait – I have all the time in the world”? We already make for excellent procrastinators, though we have only our lifetime – a mere flicker in time – to achieve the myriad of aspirations we set before ourselves to achieve. Ideally, we could be quite productive if we were immortal. But without death’s shadow looming at the end of life’s tether, we would lack the motivation to accomplish all that which makes our lives feel fulfilling and worth living. 

What purpose is there in reading a book without an end? One reads a book, first of all to enjoy it, to learn from it, and think in the process of reading, but ultimately one reads to finish it. It is not until one has read the end that one can fully appreciate the book and understand its ultimate message. The same is true of our lives. The inevitability of death, the briefness of our existence: these are what make our lives so valuable. Our lives without termination would be aimless, like an arrow fired which flew forever and never reached its destination. Joy, meaning, and growth: all these things can be gleaned in the process of living, but a consummation of life is quite necessary, so that we can say confidently what course our lives have taken from beginning to end, whether or not we are proud of the direction.