No One Is Getting Out of Here Alive: On death, impermanence, and learning how to live

I recently watched a documentary chronicling the rising rates of cancer among people in their forties. It followed four individuals, each navigating a different diagnosis, alongside the families whose lives had been irrevocably altered by the news. What lingered with me long after the credits rolled wasn't the stark reality of the disease itself, but rather the profound ordinariness of their lives. These were people who had done everything we are told to do to stave off mortality: they exercised, ate reasonably well, avoided smoking, and lived without glaring recklessness. Yet, there they were—parents in the prime of their lives, confronting an illness they never expected to face so soon.

The programme probed potential environmental culprits from the past few decades, exploring the impacts of microplastics, agricultural chemicals, and everyday household products. Whatever the precise catalyst, the overarching takeaway was impossible to ignore: there are vast, invisible forces shaping our lives that remain entirely beyond our control.

At almost exactly the same time, it was my father’s birthday. He died of cancer two years ago. And then, as if prompted by the universe, I started experiencing chest pain. It turned out to be a mere muscle strain—nothing serious—but for a few days, it was enough to force a quiet reckoning. It made me think deeply about death not as a distant abstraction, but as an immediate, looming presence.

In the modern Western world, we have cultivated a strangely sanitized relationship with death. We acknowledge its existence, of course, but we rarely speak of it with any real candor. There is an unspoken anxiety surrounding the topic: What is the appropriate thing to say? Will bringing up the deceased invite unnecessary sadness? Is it better to let the past lie dormant so people can simply move on?

I contrast this with a conversation I once had with a friend in San Francisco, whose partner was Japanese. He told me that her family maintained a dedicated room in their home filled with photographs of loved ones who had passed. These people were not hidden away in dusty albums to spare anyone’s feelings; they were woven directly into the daily fabric of the household. They were remembered, spoken to, and actively included in the family's ongoing narrative. The dead were not treated as though they had ceased to exist simply because they were no longer physically present.

I found that deeply beautiful. It also made me realize that our cultural reluctance to talk about the dead has a secondary, perhaps more damaging consequence: because we cannot comfortably discuss those who have died, we become incapable of discussing death itself. When relegated to the shadows, mortality becomes a mere abstraction. It transforms into something that happens to other people, something reserved for old age, something that will eventually arrive—but certainly not today. Cancer won't happen to me. I'll probably live into my nineties. There is plenty of time. This quiet assumption, even when we don't consciously articulate it, shapes the architecture of our lives. It dictates what we value, how we spend our time, what we tolerate, and what we endlessly postpone. It governs our ethics and our relationships, usually without our noticing.

This is why I have come to believe that actively contemplating our mortality is such a vital practice. Occasionally, I make time for what might be called a "death meditation"—deliberately imagining illness, the end of my own life, or the sudden loss of someone I love. I sit with the memories of those who are already gone, allowing myself to fully absorb the reality that none of us knows how much time we have left. To the modern ear, this sounds excessively morbid. Yet, I have found the exact opposite to be true.

Confronting mortality does not darken my life; it illuminates it. The heavy burdens become slightly lighter, and the trivial grievances become easier to laugh away. Ordinary moments suddenly take on a vivid, vibrating resonance. I become acutely aware of the people sitting around my dinner table, the texture of the food I am eating, the rhythm of a morning walk, and the fleeting reality that my daughter will only ever be this exact age once. Strangely enough, death brings life into sharp focus.

When my chest ached last week, I found myself writing down a series of questions: If I were dying, what would I do? What would I finally try? What would I genuinely care about, and what would I instantly cease to care about? They are profoundly uncomfortable questions, but they are incredibly clarifying ones. It made me wonder what might happen if we asked ourselves these things when nothing was wrong at all—not just when a chest tightens, not in a stark clinic waiting room, and not while standing at the graveside of a loved one, but on an ordinary Tuesday. What would we worry about less? Who would we make more time for? What would we finally stop postponing? Ultimately, what would we decide this life is actually for?

Perhaps this is why so much of what I have been writing and contemplating lately has felt particularly urgent to my own life. Exploring the seasons we find ourselves in, softening around our hard edges, finding playfulness in the midst of uncertainty, and learning to savor the ordinary—death belongs at the very center of all these conversations. It is not a morbid interruption to the human experience, but rather the defining boundary that gives life its shape.

Impermanence is woven into everything. You recover from a cold only to injure your foot. You win a new client just as another departs. You move into an idyllic neighborhood, and a difficult neighbor moves in next door. The sandbanks align perfectly for a weekend of surfing, only to be washed away by a storm days later. A brilliant night of sleep is followed by a terrible one. The gas runs out, a friend goes in for surgery, a bill arrives, a birthday passes. There are good conversations, difficult ones, and a hundred mundane tasks in between. This is the texture of living. Something is always happening; something is always changing. Because there is perpetually another fire to put out or a task demanding our attention, it is incredibly easy to become overwhelmed by the sheer accumulation of it all.

That accumulation of chaos is likely why I was so alarmed by a simple muscle strain. It wasn’t a belief that I was necessarily dying, but a visceral reminder of how little control we ultimately possess. You can eat well, exercise, manage your stress, and meticulously construct a good life, and yet, there will always be variables you cannot anticipate. No one receives a guarantee. No one is immune to uncertainty. No one is getting out of here alive.

Intellectually, we all know this. But knowing it in the abstract and feeling it in your bones on a random weekday are two entirely different things. We know we are going to die, yet we rarely live as though we believe it. We allow ourselves to be consumed by a single frustrating email. We lose sleep over a solvable business problem, rage at traffic, and agonize over other people's opinions. We rush through dinner and postpone the trip, trading the present for an endlessly deferred future. Then, a disruption occurs—a diagnosis, a funeral, a sudden health scare—and the hierarchy of our values undergoes a violent realignment. The massive problems shrink, and the neglected priorities become glaringly obvious.

Because death possesses this strange, clarifying power, it should be a regular practice to contemplate it—not to breed anxiety, but to anchor us to what actually matters. But there is a trap here, too. When we realize how brief life is, the pendulum often swings to the opposite extreme. We decide we must maximize every second: travel everywhere, say yes to everything, quit the job, and chase every fleeting pleasure because "life is short."

As I have written before, that hyper-active maximization is just another form of restlessness. Accepting that life is finite does not mean every moment must be aggressively optimized. A well-lived life still requires sacrifice, discipline, and patience. It involves boring work, long-term projects, the weight of responsibility, and the quiet dedication of raising children or building something that takes years to materialize. The awareness of death doesn’t demand we abandon these endeavors; it simply asks us to understand why we are pursuing them. It asks us to ensure we aren’t postponing our actual lives in the misguided hope that one day, after we’ve achieved enough, we will finally be allowed to live.

Herein lies the paradox of the "good life." Life can be tragically short, but it can also be remarkably long, and we have no way of knowing which hand we will be dealt. If we assume we will live forever, we endlessly postpone meaning. If we assume we will die tomorrow, we forfeit the ability to build anything of lasting substance. The solution, then, is not a single definitive answer, but the cultivation of range. We need enough discipline to endure the hard things, and enough playfulness to enjoy them. We need enough ambition to build, coupled with enough presence to appreciate what we have already built. We must possess the courage to change course, the patience to stay planted, and the sober awareness of our own mortality to remember that none of it is guaranteed.

Over the past few weeks, my thoughts have circled around uncertainty, restlessness, and the quiet beauty of the ordinary. Ultimately, they are all variations of the exact same question: How do we stay awake to our lives while we are living them? Not just when crisis strikes or when we are starkly reminded of our mortality, but on an ordinary morning. While pouring coffee, walking to the beach, or answering emails. While doing the dishes, waiting for the seasons to shift, or sitting quietly beside someone we love.

Perhaps this is the true gift of contemplating death. It does not leave us with an obsession with the end, but rather a profound appreciation for the middle. It honors the full catastrophe of living—the joy and the frustration, the exquisite and the mundane, the people who arrive and the people who leave.

I do not claim to possess the definitive formula for a good life. But recognizing our mortality has a way of making the inquiry itself feel essential. And perhaps that is enough: to keep asking, to keep paying close attention, and to consciously choose what matters. We have no way of knowing how much time is left on the clock. All we know for certain is that we have this exact moment. And then this one.

And then, eventually, we don't.

— Evan