So the twelve rules of my upcoming book relate to life *and* death. We’re not trying to cheat death or wriggle our way out of it. The aim of the mediocre life is to truly live our lives, and then to truly die.

But, of course, it’s a delusion of the mind. And even if you end up being Michael Jackson, the larger-than-life status heaped upon you by admirers is still a delusion. All of this is just a long-winded way of saying: death is real.

So the thing is: we’re going to die. Some cancer is going to metastasize in our body, or we’ll get a heart attack, or a stroke, or we’ll get smashed by a car, or trip and fall on a staircase, or drown in the bathtub, or choke on the dessert. Or some colorful combination of

Again, it’s okay for us not to be entirely comfortable with that fact.

Not just the death of “me”, but the death of my entire world. It arises, it passes away, as Buddhist teachers like to remind us.

If we look at the longer stretches of time, with astronomical, geological, or even historical scales, death is perfectly normal.

Death and collapse are the rule, not the exception.

99.9% of all species that have existed on Earth have gone extinct (not least through six periods of mass extinction). Ancient civilizations have survived for 336 years on average, of course with a lot of variance (classical Greece, for instance, lasted 265 years).

Facing that inconvenient truth, we’re all tempted to create some kind of immortality project: We all want fame and glory, or something along those lines. It’s just socially impossible to quite admit it to one another. We all think we’re a bit chosen. The Chosen One™.

And the same goes for everyone we love and care about. Even if some scientific progress is made to dramatically lengthen our lifespans we’re still going to die, sooner or later. And the same goes for “humanity”, however we define that category.