Chapter 29: The Mortality Dividend

There's a conversation that most people avoid. It goes like this: you are going to die, and you don't know when.

I'm not raising this to be morbid. I'm raising it because the research suggests that how you hold this fact determines, in large part, how you experience time.

Terror Management Theory, developed by Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski, has spent decades studying what happens when people are reminded of their mortality. The classic finding is defensive: people reminded of death cling harder to their worldview, become more tribal, more rigid, more anxious. Mortality awareness, in this framing, is a threat to be managed.

But more recent research offers a nuanced picture. When death is processed at a psychological distance, not as an imminent threat but as a known fact held with clarity, it produces something different: adaptive temporal recalibration. Conscious acknowledgment of finite time doesn't produce panic. It produces focus.

Martin Heidegger, the German philosopher, made this the centrepiece of his work. He called it "being-toward-death." Not a morbid fixation. A clear-eyed recognition that your time is bounded. And from that recognition, Heidegger argued, comes authentic temporality. The person who lives in denial of death, who operates as if time is infinite, drifts into what Heidegger called "the they": an anonymous, depersonalised existence governed by what everyone does, what one is supposed to want, what seems normal.

The person who faces finitude directly is freed from that drift. Because when you know time is limited, the question of how to spend it stops being abstract. It becomes the most concrete and urgent question you can ask. And the answer clarifies things that were previously muddled.

Seneca made a similar argument two thousand years earlier, and his version is more practical. "It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a great deal of it." Life, Seneca argued, is long enough for the person who manages it properly. The problem isn't duration. It's allocation.

He catalogued the ways we give time away. To ambition that serves someone else's agenda. To busyness without purpose. To distraction and vice. To the perpetual postponement of living. "You are arranging what lies in Fortune's control, and abandoning what lies in yours."

Two thousand years later, the list is almost unchanged. The screens are different. The distractions are more sophisticated. But the pattern is identical. We defer aliveness to a future date. After this project. After this promotion. After the kids are older. After I've saved enough. The future stretches ahead, seemingly infinite, and the present gets sacrificed to it.

The mortality dividend is what happens when you stop doing this. Not through a dramatic epiphany or a near-death experience. Through a quiet, sustained recognition that the years ahead are not infinite, that each one is valuable, and that the way you experience them is, to a remarkable degree, within your control.

This recognition doesn't produce urgency in the panicked sense. It produces clarity. It makes certain choices obvious that were previously ambiguous. Should I keep the commitment that drains me? Should I continue the pattern I've been repeating for a decade? Should I defer the thing I actually want to do?

When time feels infinite, the answer to all of these can be "I'll deal with it later." When time feels finite, "later" stops being a safe harbour.

I don't think about death often. But I do think about time more than I used to, which might be the same thing at a lower intensity. Every chapter of this book has been, in some sense, about the recognition that time is passing whether or not I notice it, and that noticing it is a choice I've been failing to make.

The mortality dividend isn't about living as if each day is your last. That's exhausting advice that nobody follows. It's about living as if each year counts. As if a decade is a significant portion of what you have. As if deferring presence to a future date is a gamble with unfavourable odds.

The Aymara face the past because it's the only thing that's real. The future is behind them, unseen and unknowable. There's something useful in that orientation, even for those of us embedded in forward-leaning Western culture. The past is where your life lives, in memory. The richer that memory, the more life you've actually had.

The mortality dividend is the clarity that comes from knowing this. Not as philosophy. As arithmetic.

You have a finite number of years. Each one can be thick or thin. And the choice between those two options is being made, right now, by how you're living this week.