I think about death a lot. I don’t know if I’ve always thought about death this much. Maybe conceptually, I knew it was a thing that would happen to me, to my family, to my friends, but it was so far in the future as to be completely outside of my realm of immediate experience. It’s not a thing young people think about, and I think most people try to avoid the topic altogether. It’s a good ice breaker when you’re looking to spice up a dinner with friends, or as an interview question, as I’ve done before. A topic that likely requires a chemical buffer to make palatable for many.
I don’t remember anybody close to me dying for the first two decades of my life. It was always something that happened to other people or in other people’s families. Nothing that affected me directly. I had lived in a closed-off environment and never witnessed any “real” death. Video games and television kill endlessly, but they were always divorced from any of my personal context. I only started empathizing with characters in stories much later in life.
I take it now as a privilege that I’ve had time to grow into death. For some, it happens early, often, and quickly becomes a fact of life. I’ve lived long enough now to come into contact with it more often than I want to. I imagine this continues to grow as we age.
Maybe my time with Sartre as a young adult set me up for a lifetime of existentialism, but I don’t think that was it. Maybe it was Marcus Aurelius. I could easily blame modern society, but that feels wrong, too. I don’t want to be the old man waving my cane at the world. Maybe it’s too easy to point the finger when the work has to be done inside your own head. Once it enters your mind, this worm digs deep and is hard to escape. In a sense, I’ve always thought about it as the human experience. Something we should all reconcile eventually, some sooner than others.
I think about death now in a constant overarching theme in my life that continues to pop up, often when I least want it to, and typically late at night after big days of meaningless drudge work. Sometimes after an especially meaningless week where I did none of the things I like to do and many that I loathe. I imagine it’s consistently a response to my environment, combined gently with my worldly anxieties.
Death for me has also morphed slowly during waking hours. It’s now also become an early morning thought, no longer attached to the anxious response I felt at first. It’s slowly become a great motivator for me. Many have written about it, and I’ve always found myself aligned with the idea that there is only one way to fight the endless tide. It is to live meaningfully and intentionally within the boundaries you have been given. You make the decision to live every morning. To use your time wisely. There’s likely a trite quote somewhere I could pull, but I’ll save you the aphorisms here.
I tried to trace back my ideas about death. When it started feeling real for me. When I started understanding that I had an expiration date. I looked through my documents and continue to go back to the writings of Tim Urban. There are endless articles to choose from; many are quoted around the internet, but I’ll post the two that had the biggest effect on me.
Your Life In Weeks – Tim Urban – May 7, 2014
The Tail End – Tim Urban – December 11, 2015
These likely set in motion what would become my worldview around death, and eventually the seed for Flatline. About it being a motivator moreso than a complete anxious response. There is a certain freedom about knowing you will die. There is a choice to be made. Choices to be made every day.
Thinking about death often has released me from the thoughts of fear. These are the same that are often faced by people with a terminal illness. If I had one week to live, what would I do? If I had one month, what would I do? Keep expanding that timeline until you’ve reached your lifespan, and the same math applies. This has stayed with me for over a decade now. It continuously informs my decisions.
My first entry about death arrived in my journal on November 8, 2018. A full entry dedicated to the topic. I was 28, maybe somewhat ripe for the topic. Getting close to 30 is a milestone many fear, and I would put myself in that category. The transition from the first phase of life into “adult”. I would be “old” very soon. It was a confused entry overall. My lifestyle choices, my aspirations, my dreams, and my thoughts all blended into an amalgamation of fear.
November 2, 2018
These all likely reflect my anxiety of death. My fear of death. It seems like the only thing I cannot control in my life. The only thing I am powerless against. No matter the choices I make, I will die. Those who I love around me will die. My parents will die long before I die. I will get to experience all the people who I look up to dying. Everyone will one day be dead around me if I get to grow old.
None of these options seem appealing to me. They all seem like terrible options. Do other people think of this? Are we all living in a state of madness where we can somehow ignore our imminent doom? Somehow we can all continue on living without noticing our expiration date?
Reading that back, it does feel like I thought I had more control over my life than I do. Even with intentional choices day in and day out, a more mature and philosophical version might say that I might be in bigger waters than I let on here. Even then, the premise still stands. The realities of death are hard to live with every day.
Curiosity got the best of me, and I had to do a search through my journal to get some general statistics. I only started journaling digitally in late 2017, so my data skews slightly, but I was impressed with my consistency. I mention death on average once a month in the past eight years.
- Time Span: November 2017 to January 11, 2026
- Total Entries: 2,672 total entries
- Total Word Count: Just under 3 million
- Total Entries Mentioning Death: 114
- Most Frequent Year: 2025, with 40 entries
- Average Mentions Per Year: 14
It wouldn’t be right to think so much about this topic without an academic deep dive, which is where my thoughts slowly lead me. I went digging for the feeling to try and understand my own perspective about it. I think due to the very nature of the topic, it was a long road ahead. It’s not easy to reflect on your own mortality, and it did take many years for the integration to take place. Journaling was foundational to this exercise. Without tracking those feelings over time, I would have little to reflect back on. I’m thankful I spent the time to write in those moments of fear and confusion. Thankful I gave myself permission to feel.
My first foray into the topic was a very thoughtful book. It’s maybe the first recommendation people typically get when this anxiety forms. That’s The Denial of Death, by Ernest Becker, written on his deathbed and posthumously given a Pulitzer prize.
“A premise of The Denial of Death is that human civilization is a defense mechanism against the knowledge of our mortality. In turn, an individual’s character is essentially formed around the process of denying one’s own mortality, that this denial is a necessary component of functioning in the world, and that this character-armor masks and obscures genuine self-knowledge.”
Wikipedia, The Denial of Death
This book sent me on a journey to find out exactly what my greater purpose is. It showed me that I was not alone. There were many thinking about this feeling and this idea. What I would go on to learn was the basis of “Terror management theory,” an ominous name for an ominous feeling. This was a ripe topic with a lot of work around it being done in the 2000s. I had a lot of fresh material.
I thought about what my hero’s journey would look like. What I could be and what the best version of me would be. I didn’t find it. I think I’m still looking. Still, I was alive with thoughts about finding meaning and my life’s project. About how to live a life when you know that it is short-lived. It was all-consuming. I continued to read and write until I first made my peace with it.
This academic deep dive helped, but inevitably, my thoughts led to the same place. I might not have control over my eventual annihilation, but I have control over my daily experience. I get to make decisions that allow me to make the best use of that time. I get to document my lived experience and make sure every moment matters. It goes back to the wonderful drawings Tim Urban made. We are all gifted a fixed amount of time; how we make the best use of that time is up to us. This is not a short-term play. It’s maximizing the game for a whole life. It’s not YOLO. It includes delayed gratification.
In a sense, it’s worthwhile to compare and contrast all these ideas. YOLO is typically a simple way of announcing a poor decision with only short-term upside. In a way, it frames all outcomes in terms of short wins regardless of the future. It’s our version of Carpe Diem. What I learned from my own denial of death is that while each moment should be enjoyed and savoured, they should not take from other days. To go back to our terminally ill patient, if they do in fact live longer than their prescribed time, they might look back on those first few rash decisions with questionable outcomes in a different context.
Any decision that has a pleasurable outcome should also consider it in the grand scheme of a life. The context being your whole life, in the case you are blessed with getting to grow old. It includes every decision that ultimately leads you to where you will flower while considering future outcomes and future days. One day well lived in thousands is not necessarily the best outcome.
Half a decade later, I continued the journey and chose another book in the series: The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life by Jeff Greenberg, Sheldon Solomon, and Tom Pyszczynski. Another journey into the depths. Another gruelling read that inflicts boundless nightmares on the reader, or at least did for me.
The feeling remained, even half a decade later. How would I find meaning? How could I understand myself and my values? How could I live the best version of my life? Could I weave a story while understanding that I knew the end already? I found that in those boundaries, in knowing the end, I was finally free to create my life intentionally. The findings from my first foray into death lead me back to the same place of intention.
“If you dare to look, you might find the end is nearer than you think. What you choose to do with that information is your intention alone.”
When You Will Die, FlowingData
This conversation ultimately leads to Flatline. In all this uncertainty, there surely is a way to connect our purpose to daily actions. There surely is a way to understand this deadline we all have in a meaningful way. It doesn’t have to be anxiety-ridden. I had this idea of death when thinking about journaling. I was thinking that journaling in this context would create the same painful clarity for others as it did for me.
Why would we name an application after the concept of death? Well, I think the story above tells a compelling angle of why this reflection matters. It’s my opinion that deep reflection leads to better choices. It leads to more authentic conversations and ultimately leads to your own values and a better sense of self. It’s a different perspective on lived experience and social connection. Can we combine all these things into a meaningful digital experience? That’s what we’re doing with the Flatline app.
Tying that back up to the Denial of Death, we have a lot of work in unmasking the character-armour that obscures genuine self-knowledge. We can do much more than simply live with our heads buried in the sand. We can find a way to live with intention. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but it starts with having hard conversations with ourselves about what matters and what doesn’t. Without going into the podcast echo chamber, without coming up with a crazy morning routine, I think there’s much room for intentionality with this time we are given.
You don’t have to change everything at once. You can simply have the big conversation with yourself. Bring in your loved ones for the moments where they can meaningfully contribute to that conversation. Share the parts of you when it is right, when it creates depth, and when it creates understanding. Human lives are all unique, and sharing them with others creates a reinforcing loop of authenticity.
I’ll leave some thoughts from one of my entries about death. It took a lot of time and reading to come to terms with my conception of death. This entry manages to collect a decade of anxieties together in a way that I think has remained true since I wrote it. It goes to the core of what I think the future of authentic connection means. To what it means to find joy, meaning, and connection in everyday experience. To blend all these in a digital experience that helps us find ourselves and what our journey can be in the context of seeing our deadline. Without hype, without only showing the best parts of your life. Combining everything to show how the true story of you unfolds.
September 13, 2019
Time flies. I haven’t had the chance to do much with my life yet. I’ve wasted many hours of my life. I’ve also used many of those same hours. I continue to think about how fleeting every single moment of this life is. How hard it is to capture and really enjoy every moment. Without any mindfulness training it would likely fly by. I can thank meditation for that. Without documentation, journaling, or photos, you can easily wake up at 50 with no idea of where the time went. Without knowing what you did or where you went. Without knowing what your life was really for. What you lived for. How can you be sure any of it happened at all? I try to keep death at bay with journaling and photography. I try to capture every moment. I try to enjoy everything I can to it’s full extent. I try to capture the essence of everyday. Still, entire days go by where I don’t know what I did. Entire weeks go by where I’ve only stood still and watch the world turn around me. Without finding the moment that made that entire day worth it.
