The way we think about death is broken.

Actually, the way we think about life is broken. How many of us think about death and life anyway? Why should we after all? Isn’t death inevitable? Why spend time thinking about something that is going to happen any way? Besides, we aren’t wired to think about death. We push it away. We are wired to think about life. About survival. Which is why we may be missing the bus on an incredibly important thing.

Once you get out of your teens, and arrive at reasonably stable identity for yourself, your mad rush, in the next four or five decades or so (for the majority anyway) is to fighting the fear of running out. You work very hard to provide for your family and yourself for a time period that is damn near infinite in your mind. If there are children in your family, you are almost certain to feel the responsibility of providing for them and their children. To put it bluntly, you are feeling the pressure of creating wealth for an infinite period. Which means you will push the daily and final boundary of your productive life.

It is possibly natural to think that way. It’s possibly also very foolish.

Is there another way to think about this? Yes, and its been around since mankind itself. At least the theory exists. Practiced by a rare few.

Choose your time to die. At a certain age.At a certain level of physical health.There are a million ways to think about it. But choose.

And once you are past that age, why wait for an illness or a truck or a fall down the stairs. why not choose a day? Spend it with friends and family. Have a glass of wine. Go to sleep. Go away laughing. I know I have decided. I know I need to let everyone important know. But I need this to be my choice. I need to be in control if I can.

I have been spending some time with seniors of late — and it shocks me how much rationality can erode with age. People I have known all my life seem to change with age. Some literally fall off a cliff after a certain age. A lot of fear seems to set in. A lot of “irrationality”. These are of course qualitative judgments and there is so much to correct for. But one thing is blindingly obvious — I cannot take my mind for granted.

I think I was prepared for physical frailty. But seeing myself thirty years on, I am shocked at how much I am going to degenerate even in relatively good health. It is like all the inconsistencies and eccentricities, which I smooth over and manage today to present a reasonably consistent personality, are going to be magnified and find explosive expression. I am not going to be able to trust myself to stay on as a being of relative reason.

It’s a shattering realization.

And I know now I need to plan for it. And the more I think about it, the happier I find myself. In fact, I find oddly clarifying. Like someone with a terminal illness, it makes suddenly every day quite valuable. It makes me think about my self-inflicted cages. It makes me think about breaking them.

The cage of money

For long, I seem to have thought of money as a surrogate for how smart I am. And like most people, I want to be very smart. Of course I have rationalized it a thousand different ways. But at the end of the day I know there’s a thrill about earning money and power. It’s like beating other people to win a video game. And what’s funny is how much I am going to give up for it.

Now, If I choose to live a certain number of years, I need to have X(money I want to spend every year) x Y(Number of years I plan to live). It’s a simple equation. Like fuel left in a racing car at the end of a race, anything left is pointless. For people with healthy children, I don’t know if I am simplifying but it seems to me that it isn’t our job to provide for their whole lives. The first couple of decades ought to be enough.

For many of you who haven’t ever done a financial planning exercise, every planner worth his salt will ask you to put down your life goals on a piece of paper. And he will strive very hard to get you to a finite number for wealth, however ridiculous it may be.

It’s a healthy exercise for every one. It also asks you to assume a certain age. I think everyone says eighty in the sheet. Like thinking about anything more may come across as greedy and anything less may be just too morbid for polite conversation. It’s a daft thing to do and not a little worrying that these are the only transactional conversations we actually have about death.

I now find that if I shave a decade off the assumption of eighty years as my life time, my present life gets dramatically easier. How about five? Or what If I stay at eighty? Even if I stay with eighty years, I find that I now need no “buffer” for those awkward I-am-now-past-eighty years. And what it does is lift the pressure. Like exhaling a breath I have held in for too long.

The Cage of Time

This cage is much more closer than money. It probably afflicts fewer but it binds you tighter; till you can’t breathe — the need to be productive and doing something. Or die of guilt. It’s a legacy of the scarcity economy we grew up in, drilling into our minds from a very early age the virtue of being purposeful, preferably economically purposeful. It’s scarier to give up for we don’t really know what to do with time if not work and clean and rearrange.

It’s as if it would reveal us for who we really are –lazy, somnolent asses who are happy to consume packaged art and packaged food in perpetuity. I think we do ourselves an injustice but my point is that we have an incredible opportunity to find out what we really love and could create or experience.

I fantasize all of us at a small cozy pub at the end of our lives, sitting by the fireside sipping ale and raucously telling each other our most fantastic experiences on this planet. I think that’s the metric for time I would like to use. Of course that’s just me.

These are just two cages but there are many, many more.

So that’s it? The secret to life is planning your death? Of course there are unanswered hows, what-ifs and why-nots. My point is that thinking about death will make you think about life itself. And it’s a long deep delicious thought. We have the time for it.