by Jason Stotts
I am going to die and I’m glad of it.
I have never understood those who live their lives constantly dreading their mortality, as though the fact that they were going to die meant that they should never actually live.
While clearly death is the end of life, death is not antithetical to life. Quite the contrary, death is a necessary condition of life – something that cannot die is not alive.
Yet life is more than mere physical existence. Someone who is merely biologically alive is not living; human life is more than just a succession of breaths.
It is because we are mortal that life can have meaning. Without death, values would be impossible; without values, life would be meaningless.
A meaningless life is no human life.
If we want our lives to be meaningful we must create meaning in our lives by choosing appropriate values and purposefully pursuing them. However, we can only do this because we are mortal.
So let us embrace our mortality; for without death we can have no life.