The most useless observation ever made by an ancient Greek philosopher was that we shouldn't fear death because we won't. He said that no one gets upset about the fact that they didn't exist before they were born.
I have never met someone who found this comforting. It wouldn't have been a thing to have been born. You are invested if you like it or not. Getting older is a matter of getting closer and closer to the certainty that your finite time will run out before you have done more than a few things.
As if it weren’t cruel enough that your time is running out, you’ll also experience your dwindling years as passing more quickly
"Up till now, life has seemed an endless upward slope with nothing but the distant horizon in view," said one patient quoted by the therapist, who went on to coin the term "midlife crisis" One of the reasons that the word "downward" is the correct one is the implication of acceleration. As if it weren't cruel enough that your time is running out, you'll also experience your days getting shorter as you get older. You will have less and less time, and each part of that time will feel shorter.
Carl Jung, the great explorer of the second half of life, said that awareness of finitude eventually grips most of us by the throat. A 10-year-old who is destined to live to 90 is only a little bit further from the end than they will be. It's a testament to our evolved talent for postponing the confrontation with mortality that we manage to do all sorts of worthwhile things, such as launch careers, start families, acquire possessions, produce art, and so on.
There is a lot to be said for abandoning the fight against the truth. The main feature of the modern experience of time is that we focus too much on instrumentalising it, rushing through our lives to some point at the end of the day or the week when we can finally relax. The result is what has been called the "when-I-finally" mindset: the sense that real fulfillment, or even real life itself, hasn't quite arrived yet, so that present experience is merely something to get through. John Maynard Keynes wrote that the person stuck in such a mindset does not love his cat, but his cat's kittens; nor, in truth, the kittens, but only the kittens' kittens, and so on to the end of cat-dom.
It is difficult to change the outlook completely. It's easier to live for the future when you're older because you know that time is running out. It is easy to imagine that real life has not yet begun, but at 40 it is a bit of a stretch and at 60 it is absurd. It's easy to see that this is real life. The only viable moment in which to do it is right now, and there is no impending moment of truth when you will finally feel in a better position to do it.
You grasp the truth that life isn’t a dress rehearsal for something better, but you wish you’d figured that out sooner
You grasp the truth that life isn't a dress rehearsal for something better, but you desperately wish you'd figured that out a long time ago. Don't try to deny or eradicate the regret, but don't let it stop you from seizing the moment, because refusing to live fully on the grounds that you should have lived more fully in the past is as silly as refusing to live fully on the grounds that you didn't
It's not that you should try to meditate into a mystical state of total presence or concentration, but just that to recognise the fact that the past is past, and that's what the advice is about. It's not terrible. It's wonderful often. There isn't anything else to be.
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