Why memento mori is the ultimate life hack

The plane lurched violently upward.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we’re making an emergency climb due to traffic in our flight path.” In other words: There’s a plane where it’s not supposed to be, so we’re getting the hell out of here.

The captain’s voice was steady, but the g-forces pressing me into my seat and the fast climb told a different story. It was the kind of airplane experience where your mind races to conclusions you’d rather not reach.

As turbulence shook the cabin, I noticed something strange happening in my body. While others gripped armrests and exchanged terrified glances, I found myself focusing on my breath to see how low I could bring my heart rate. Like a psychopath.

In for four. Hold for four. Out for four. Hold for four.

Facing the possibility of death, I needed to know: Am I ready?

My grandfather used to say, “Make sure to have your bags packed.” Not to literally have your luggage by the door, but to be ready to leave life without regrets, unfinished business, and words left unsaid.

As Flight 447 to Orlando climbed through that storm, I did my check: Am I good with all my people?

The answer surprised me. Despite all my achievement-chasing and productivity-hacking, despite the endless striving I’ve documented in these pages…I was good. I’d added warmth, humor, and joy to the lives I’d touched. My relationships were in a good spot. The world was, perhaps, a slightly brighter place for my existence.

It honestly wasn’t the answer I was expecting, but it was a grounding one. A few minutes later, the plane leveled off. Thirty minutes later, we were safely on the ground in Orlando.

But something had shifted. The rest of that trip felt clearer, less anxious, and more grounded. The obnoxious emails waiting in my inbox had lost their sting. The “urgent” meeting that wasn’t really urgent revealed itself to be something not worth spending any additional energy on.

Death, it turns out, is an excellent BS detector, and we could be thinking about it way more often in our daily lives.

The ancient practice modern high-achievers need most

Memento mori, which literally means “remember you will die,” sounds like the kind of thing that would send modern optimizers running for longevity protocols (such as infrared light, collagen, and definitely some kind of algae) and the promise of immortality. But as Tim Ferriss observed:

“I think about death all the time and it’s not a morbid, sullen exercise for me … I find it to be, and this might sound strange, but greatly encouraging because it drives a sense of urgency, or at least time sensitivity, to a lot of my decisions.”

He goes on to describe looking at stars and contemplating that the light hitting your eye might be from a star that no longer exists. That realization isn’t an excuse for nihilism; it instead provides perspective, clarifies, and empowers. Suddenly, that workplace drama or Twitter beef reveals itself as the cosmic irrelevance it always was. “It’s all dust,” Ferriss said. “Nobody gives a fuck.”

Ryan Holiday put it even more directly in his exploration of Stoic practices: “Meditating on your mortality is only depressing if you miss the point. It is in fact a tool to create priority and meaning.”

The ancients knew this. Emperor Marcus Aurelius reminded himself, “You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.”

But here’s what Ferriss, Holiday, and the Stoics are really pointing to, and what that moment on Flight 447 made visceral for me: Death isn’t the enemy. It’s the life coach you desperately need but never, ever, ever wanted to hire.

Befriending your mortality

Ernst Becker won a Pulitzer for The Denial of Death by arguing that human civilization is essentially an elaborate defense mechanism against our awareness of our own mortality. We build monuments, chase achievements, create legacies to somehow convince ourselves we’ll find a way to overcome the one thing guaranteed by our biology.

This denial drives what Becker calls our “immortality projects,” the ways we try to ensure that our existence will echo beyond our inevitable end.

For me, it was the 4.0 GPA, the PhD, the six-figure consulting gig. For you, it might be the IPO, the bestseller, the perfect family photo that gets 500 likes. We’re all running toward some imagined future, achievement, or trophy that grants us immunity from dying. We’re scrambling to find the thing, and we’re scrambling to get the thing, and we’re scrambling to hold onto it forever.

We don’t have to do that. This shift from seeing death as the enemy to recognizing it as a clarifying force has been gradual for me: years of Stoic practice, meditation, and simply observing life unfold around me. People in my life dying, some way too soon. People diagnosed with long-term illnesses. These are consistent, regular reminders that life is a finite, non-renewable resource.

The irony is that befriending death doesn’t make life feel shorter or scarier. It makes it feel more vivid, more precious, more worth living authentically rather than performatively.

When you truly internalize that you could leave life right now — not as some abstract philosophy but as lived reality — several things happen:

1. Your real values emerge from the noise. Suddenly, being seen as successful matters less than actually connecting with people you love.
2. Fake urgencies reveal themselves. That ASAP email? Unless someone’s actually dying, it can wait.
3. Your tolerance for BS approaches zero. Life’s too short for meetings that should have been emails or relationships that drain more than they give.
4. What actually matters becomes blindingly clear. Hint: It’s usually much simpler than your brain wants to believe.

The 90-year-old test

Here’s an exercise I give to every coaching client as we start our work together. It never fails to cut through the complexity we create around our lives:

Close your eyes. Fast-forward to age 90. It’s a Tuesday, and you’re sitting on a porch (because apparently all 90-year-olds have moved south and have porches in our imagination). What’s true about the best version of this moment?

When I do this exercise, the picture that emerges is remarkably simple:

• I’m healthy enough to move around and be active.
• I’m surrounded by people and family I love.
• I’m still sharp enough to write, teach, and serve others.

That’s it. That’s the whole list.

Notice what’s not there? The size of my bank account. The prestige of my job title, the number of LinkedIn followers, whether I ever gave a TED talk. None of it makes the cut when you’re staring down the barrel of your own mortality.

This isn’t about having low ambitions — it’s about having accurate ambitions. When you know how your story ends, you can work backward to figure out what actually matters now.

The 90-year-old test is where I start my values work because it’s the only perspective that can’t be fooled by short-term thinking or social pressure. Your 90-year-old self doesn’t care about inbox zero or Q3 targets. They care about whether you were present for the people who mattered. They care about doing work you find meaningful. And they care about not dying with a life unlived.

Practical memento mori

Here are a few more concrete practices that bring death’s clarity into daily life:

• Write your own eulogy. Many people have heard of this, but I recommend writing two versions: Write the eulogy for if you died today, and then write the one for if you lived a life aligned with what truly matters to you. The gap between them is the work for you to do and the places for you to focus.
• The deathbed story filter. Before any major decision, ask: “On my deathbed, will I regret not doing this, or will I regret the things I sacrificed to do it? What’s the story I wish to be able to tell about this when I’m dying?” This question has helped me see through superficial achievement traps and, on the other side, has helped me choose the short-term painful thing that benefits me in the long term.
• Study the stars and get outside. Adapting Ferriss’s advice, go outside at night and look up. Find a star. Consider that its light traveled years to reach you, meaning the star itself might already be gone. Find ways to be in grand scenes in nature. Find places that bring you awe. Let that cosmic perspective shrink your problems to their actual size.

Here’s what nobody tells you about memento mori: It’s the ultimate productivity system. Not productivity in the mercenary sense of cramming more into less time. But productivity in the truest sense: producing what matters, eliminating what doesn’t.

When you truly grasp your mortality:

• You stop procrastinating essential conversations.
• You quit optimizing systems that optimize nothing meaningful.
• You delegate or delete those many trivial tasks to focus on the vital few.
• You stop trading time for money once you have “enough.”
• You start creating things that might outlive you in valuable ways.

After that flight to Orlando, I noticed immediate changes. Emails that would have sent me into an hour-long response spiral got two sentences or silence. Arguments that would have escalated got met with a, “You might be right” or “This isn’t worth our energy.”

I began to understand what Becker was really saying: We’re all going to die, and no amount of achievement can change that. Instead of this being depressing, I found it liberating.

But the biggest shift? I started prioritizing shared meals with loved ones as if they were board meetings with God because, from the perspective of mortality, they basically are.

When you stop trying to outrun death through achievement, you can start using your limited time to contribute something meaningful. The question shifts from “How can I matter forever?” (an absurd exercise likely to lead to shallow, inauthentic answers) to “How can I matter right now?” (a powerful question for finding compassionate action to make the world a little bit better around you, in this moment).

Your mortality, your mentor

As I write this, I’m thinking of my uncle Ward. A kind, lovable, and humble man, he was an example to all who met him. He passed, far too soon, in August 2023, after a horrific battle with throat cancer and Crohn’s disease that meant he could not eat and barely speak for months. He was far too gentle, too kind, too good to have deserved a fight I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.

And yet, even as he lost weight and even when words became too painful to form, my uncle still showed up for his family, managed to communicate love through presence alone, and found ways to express care even as his body betrayed him.

I remember how he’d text me about the latest Cubs game or to share the latest news on my one friend who made it to the MLB. For anyone he knew driving to or from Chicago, he would be checking the weather for them, letting them know the forecast and the ideal driving windows to avoid the worst of it. And there was nothing any of his many nieces or nephews could accomplish without my uncle Ward being one of the first to congratulate them for it.

By remembering him, I remember to live. I remember how he loved his family and his friends. I remember the generosity of his spirit, being the first to serve charity, to leave behind a bigger tip, to congratulate someone on their latest accomplishment.

My uncle can no longer do those things on this earthly plane. But I can. This is the paradox of memento mori: The more we remember death, the more fully we live. The more we befriend mortality (our own or the people in our lives), the less it controls us.

Admittedly, this embrace feels weird. But death is the feature of our existence that makes life meaningful. Without scarcity, there’s no value. Without endings, there’s no urgency to begin. And without mortality, there’s no reason to choose what matters over what’s merely urgent.

So I’ll ask you what I asked myself on that turbulent flight: Are you ready? Are you good with your people? Have you said what needs saying, done what needs doing, loved who needs loving?

If not, what are you waiting for?

Death is waiting to help you figure out what actually matters. All you have to do is listen.