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Dangerous Suspicion That We May Be Immortal
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Dangerous Suspicion That We May Be Immortal

Philosophy

Almost every human lives the vast majority of his life subconsciously assuming immortality.

We live on autopilot, fulfilling tasks that have a deadline at the moment. However, we lack clarity about whether these tasks are truly important for achieving our vision. Worse still, we have no vision.

As a result, we spend our time working a “job,” writing emails, shopping, cleaning, complaining, arguing, and accepting shallow relationships with our partners, parents, friends, children, and ourselves.

Important things are almost never psychologically urgent. We prioritize urgent over important.

This is a beautifully worded quote of Alain de Botton:

Almost every human lives the vast majority of his life subconsciously assuming immortality.

We live on autopilot, fulfilling tasks that have a deadline at the moment. However, we lack clarity about whether these tasks are truly important for achieving our vision. Worse still, we have no vision.

As a result, we spend our time working a “job,” writing emails, shopping, cleaning, complaining, arguing, and accepting shallow relationships with our partners, parents, friends, children, and ourselves.

Important things are almost never psychologically urgent. We prioritize urgent over important.

This is a beautifully worded quote of Alain de Botton:

One of the big obstacles to meaning is the feeling that we have time to get around to the important things. We recognise where the sources of meaning lie, but lack urgency in focusing on them, because we will address them tomorrow, at the end of the month, or next year. We have a hazy supposition that time is unlimited. 

The horrific but inevitable fact of our own mortality is kept at bay for the most sympathetic of reasons: we can’t bear the brevity of our own existence. But in so doing, we fail to give our lives the meaningful direction they deserve. We give in to localised, small-scale obstructions: the worry that something is a touch dull; the fear of looking a bit of a fool; the pain of being rejected; the awkwardness of not fitting in; the annoyance of having to make yet another effort in the same old direction. We don’t persist with worthwhile things through the suffering they involve and, in the process, end up slowly ruining the time we have left. 

A decisive barrier to the more meaningful lives we seek is the half-formed, secret and deeply dangerous suspicion that we may be immortal.

Botton, Alain de. “Immortality.” In The Meaning of Life, The School of Life, 2019.

Action to Do Now

Think about what is important and what just urgent (or f*cking irrelevant) in your day, week, month, year, and life.

Remove irrelevant, schedule urgent, execute important first.

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