Life in Light of Death (Kindle highlights)

If you want to be happy, you must accept that you will die. And so will your loved ones. Yes, you and those you love will die. You each will end interminably and eventually be forgotten, and happiness in life demands realizing this fact. (loc. 105-107)
Truly knowing that you are going to die teaches what may be life’s most valuable lessons: life is short, some misery is guaranteed, and yet happiness, contentment, and fulfillment are possible. (loc. 110-112)
Existential dread is the anxiety that follows when it occurs to us that our inevitable deaths threaten to erase meaning from our lives. (loc. 141-142)
Religion does that. It keeps death abstract and therefore unreal, and it goes further, fundamentally denying the finality of death. (loc. 148-149)
It isn’t the prospect of dying that will eat away at you in the end, nor is it the fact that you will endure hardship while you live. It’s that everyone you care about, if you live long enough, will die ahead of you. The loss of so many relationships, and thus of the best parts of ourselves, may be the real difficulty of aging. (loc. 225-228)
We are who we are to others, especially those we care most about. (loc. 233-233)
Our own identities are wrapped up in our closest relationships, and as we lose them we also lose parts of ourselves. We are who we are to others, especially those we care most about. We are made of our support systems. We are our communities. (loc. 232-234)
Some measure of the terror of death comes from the discomfort of imagining what cannot be imagined: not existing. (loc. 240-241)
So the fact of mortality isn’t just that you’ll die. You’ll be forgotten too. (loc. 249-250)
The gears of entropy grind in only one direction, and it isn’t the one that supports life interminably. (loc. 337-338)
The material universe isn’t equipped to remember you or to care that you hope to be remembered. It may seem dismal, but you will die; you will be forgotten; and in the long run, nothing of anything you ever do will remain. (loc. 339-340)
Termination and irrelevance are the two great horrors of death and extinction, and for them, the only potential remedies are perspective and pretense. (loc. 350-351)
Our focus in examining death, then, should lie less on death and more on life, love, relationship, and happiness. Death is but a mirror into which we will stare so that we can see those blessings more clearly. (loc. 354-355)
In a house fire, you have two choices: you can stay put, whether dreading or ignoring the flames, and burn, or you can get out. With the terror of death, it seems that the only way out of this fire is through it—by contemplating the reality of your life in light of its certain conclusion. (loc. 370-372)
We live much of our lives, it has been said, merely waiting for the future to arrive with its potential for happiness, and it never does. Eventually, a day is coming after which no future can arrive. (loc. 380-381)
We deny science that conflicts with our views of immortality or that reminds us of our certain doom. We deny the need to look at death honestly, and we even deny that we are denying death. (loc. 393-395)
We defeat death by living while we have the chance. (loc. 406-406)
Dying with humanity requires letting go of any hope of living forever. (loc. 442-443)
Whatever gets loaded into a machine might be a replica of my consciousness, but it’s difficult to make any case that it is my consciousness, especially if I am still alive. The moment it gets uploaded, it would also become different and separate, and while it may “live” on after my death, it doesn’t do anything to deal with the fact that I still die. (loc. 500-503)
Even so, uploading ourselves digitally doesn’t escape death. Nothing does. The server running the simulation, supposing even that it could maintain itself and otherwise avoid failure, needs energy, and there are no unending sources of energy in the universe. (loc. 512-514)
It requires shockingly little, it seems, to trigger our innate uneasiness with mortality—so little that we eagerly engage in denying the most obvious fact about human beings: that we are animals. (loc. 521-523)
In the end, there is little but love, connection, and the remembered echoes of happiness, and few of us, in our last calculation, will want to be remembered by strangers for greatness so much as we will wish to have been great for those we were closest to, including ourselves. (loc. 563-565)
In the end, we’ll regret not having lived in every moment that we wasted hoping never to die. These are regrets, however, that can be avoided. (loc. 572-573)
Religious immortality stories deny the reality of death by insisting on the reality of the soul, and the fate and quality of the soul are understood religiously in almost explicitly moral terms. (loc. 581-582)
The central promise of most religions is that death is either not real or not final, but that salvation from death is not guaranteed. (loc. 587-588)
The denial of death, however, proves a true and enduring obstacle to living fully. Death is hard enough to face as it is, and immortality stories make it far more difficult. (loc. 663-664)
When we talk about “being dead,” we are lying to ourselves, misleading ourselves by our very language to believe that there is some experience of death. (loc. 684-686)
Analogies are tempting but unhelpful for making sense of what it is like to be dead because it isn’t like anything to be dead. Being dead is the precise opposite of being, at all. (loc. 695-696)
A very popular comparison (among those who do not believe in an afterlife) is that “being dead” is qualitatively the same as what it is like before being born. (loc. 696-697)
“We” weren’t before we were born either, so the analogy just compares the unfathomable to the unimaginable. (loc. 699-700)
Sleep can only be likened to death in that for some portions of it we lay still, are oblivious to the world outside our minds, and, in its deepest phases, register no conscious awareness. (loc. 704-705)
Death is not like sleep, and it is only “like” anesthesia if something goes badly enough so that you don’t wake up (and thus actually die, killing the analogy). Death is the beginning of the total, irrevocable, and permanent absence of experience. (loc. 717-718)
It is, of course, possible to imagine the world without us in it, but to imagine being dead is impossible because death isn’t a state of being. (loc. 724-726)
The nothingness of death is the kind of nothing that simply isn’t. To attempt to describe it would fail because merely attempting to imagine it makes it into something—and something it isn’t. (loc. 767-769)
Our fear of dying, then, is primarily composed of a fear of dying badly. (loc. 791-791)
The peak-end effect is believed to be caused by certain biases in how we store and consider memories that relate to how we conceive of ourselves. In some ways, we possess something like two distinct mental selves. One self experiences, and the other remembers. (loc. 812-814)
Wisdom, in at least one regard, is learning to listen to the lessons kept by the remembering self. (loc. 823-824)
It cannot be overstated that dying necessarily differs from every other experience we will ever have because we will not remember it. (loc. 850-851)
A portion of our fear of dying, then, is revealed: a fear of dying unexpectedly. (loc. 861-862)
Most of the rest of our fear of dying, however, is actually a fear of dying badly. (loc. 865-866)
That is, the fear of dying badly obscures the mirror of death and interferes with the view we might otherwise have of living. When we see it for what it is and set it aside, we have an opportunity to learn a lot about how to live better lives. (loc. 897-899)
A suicide kills one and injures many. (loc. 953-953)
To kill yourself does more than just ending your own life; it takes away something deeply personal from those who love you and burdens them with a curse. (loc. 962-963)
As lab-grown meat becomes widely available and affordable, the ethical discussion about the consumption of animal products will change significantly. (loc. 1065-1066)
Accepting death requires some determination and the bravery to endure discomfort. To accept death you must, for as long as it takes, fixate dispassionately on the plain, unadorned truth—that you will die. (loc. 1101-1103)
You must contemplate your own death and what it means, and you have to do it over and over and over again. (loc. 1111-1111)
The most common remorse people feel as death creeps toward the door is that we cared about the wrong things and thereby misused the time we had while we had it. (loc. 1122-1123)
That is, we can face death by choice or we can wait until we have no choice. (loc. 1152-1153)
We can make better use of our limited time, and we can learn how to see the moments of our lives fundamentally differently. (loc. 1179-1180)
One of the most enduring mistakes in living is believing our lives are what we do when we’re done with everything else. (loc. 1180-1181)
Everything we do is life. Everything. Even the boring stuff. Especially the boring stuff. Every moment of our lives are moments in which we live, or, to follow the poets, in which we have a chance to live, if only we will see it and seize it. (loc. 1185-1187)
Such a thought experiment, a deathbed contemplation, is a chance to remember what matters. That perspective can inform how you can live more fully in the time that you have left. (loc. 1200-1201)
The clear lesson is that attending to the practical adds value to life that shouldn’t be ignored. (loc. 1240-1241)
At once we can see that we must balance the fun with the boring, the practical with the enjoyable, work with play, and solitude with companionship, and the longer we have ahead of us, the more each side of each of these balances must be attended to. (loc. 1244-1246)
Accepting death means living prepared for the end to come upon us soon without succumbing to the indulgences that would come with knowing that it will. (loc. 1259-1260)
When we feel like we are working on something that interests us, that we possess the skills to do well with, that requires our concentration, and yet that challenges us—that is, when engaging with our passions—we experience flow. (loc. 1270-1272)
We are born alone, we live alone, and in the end we die alone, and there’s nothing to be done for it except to make our isolation irrelevant. (loc. 1286-1287)
Of course, the purpose of life is to live it, but the heart of the question concerns how to live it well. (loc. 1306-1307)
The mistake most of us make when thinking about purpose in life is getting too big. We want to find a universal answer fitting everyone but specific enough to feel like it conveys deep meaning. That’s impossible, and we have a bad habit of confusing impossibility for profundity. (loc. 1324-1326)
Meaning in life is not diminished on the profoundly silly grounds that most of what gives life purpose is small enough to be well within your reach. Our task if we want happiness, then, is to retreat from the exaggerated and to realize that local purpose is most of the purpose in life. (loc. 1339-1341)
Most of us will not be remembered for more than a couple of generations after our deaths. Some, in fact, are tragically forgotten while they still live. (loc. 1356-1357)
Thus we can free ourselves from struggles that are ultimately misguided or trivial. And we can let go of desperation about the grand scheme, freeing ourselves from the weight of guilt and unrealistic expectations. (loc. 1370-1372)
If we ask the dying, they tell us that they often wish they had lived a life more true to themselves, fulfilling their passions, and they also regret not having connected more with their families and friends. (loc. 1375-1376)
Living life in light of death, then, carries with it a demand to live fully and yet with kindness, even a generosity of spirit in sharing what care we have to share. (loc. 1389-1390)
Imagined remorse urges us to live better, and imagined regret instructs us to live fully. (loc. 1408-1409)
Get the most out of our lives, much easy-going levity, some meaningless indulgence, and plenty of unstructured, unpressured time is necessary. Not every moment should be poignant or heavy. (loc. 1431-1433)
Our opportunity for happiness has to be financed in order to be experienced, (loc. 1476-1477)
The desire for more always goes unsatisfied, so the pursuit is as vain as it is tiring. When we get this wrong we remain unsatisfied, and then we die. (loc. 1496-1497)
There needs to be no limit on how far we can extend the feeling of wanting the best for people—even our enemies, even people we hate. (loc. 1538-1539)
The most direct way to realize the importance of being generous in love and kindness now, in this moment, is to realize we each will die and so the chance cannot last forever. (loc. 1559-1561)
Choose to live bravely. Face your death and accept it. Love. Happiness awaits. (loc. 1574-1575)