#105: How to Live So Death Doesn't Feel Too Soon

There's a difference between wanting more time to live your life and needing more time to live your life.

You can want another twenty years because you love being alive. Or you can need them because you still haven't built the relationship, started the family, or spent enough time with the friends you kept meaning to see.

The reasons for postponing those things may have been sensible. But the same reasons can keep you postponing them for another decade or more.

You'd think the people who love life most would be the most terrified of death. In fact, the opposite is true: the more of your life you've left unlived, the more terrifying death becomes.

You'll hear why a full life isn't a completed bucket list and why cosmic insignificance can bring relief. We also explore the experience of loving someone without asking that person to make you complete.

The aim is to stop treating life as preparation and start appreciating what you get to experience while you're still alive.

You can still want more years. But if you keep postponing the life you actually care about, no number of extra years will ever feel like enough.

Listen now.

Show Highlights Include:

The strange way "Death Anxiety" creeps up on you when you're young and distorts the rest of your life afterwards (and how to notice when you're acting on its behalf instead of your own) (1:52)

Why mortgaging your present in exchange for some future return seems logical and even astute (even as it dismantles the one and only life you get to live) (2:03)

The cold, hard truth about why some of the most successful people are the ones with the greatest degree of "Death Anxiety" (4:22)