The Backdoor to Immortality: What Makes Life Worth Living in the Face of Death

The moment something becomes precious to us, we quarantine the prospect of its loss in some chamber of the mind we choose not to enter. On some deep level beyond the reach of reason, we come to believe that the people we love are — must be, for the alternative is a fathomless terror — immortal.

And so, when a loved one dies, this deepest part of us grows wild with rage at the universe — a rage skinned of sensemaking, irrational and raw, unsalved by our knowledge that the entropic destiny of everything alive is to die and of everything that exists to eventually not, even the universe itself; unsalved by remembering that, we and the people we love and the people we lose came to exist at all.

by P.P