A great many people seem to drift through life in a haze and then die just as unclearly.
I have been wrestling with this subject for years, repeatedly and stubbornly, even though it always feels futile. Futile or not, I still want to say these things out loud and set them down.
To talk about how one ought to live, it helps to begin with death, because the idea of being alive only takes shape in relation to dying.
The first time I truly understood that people do not live forever came when I was very young, from a fairy tale: spring arrived, the snow child melted, and what had been alive became a puddle of water and disappeared.
I asked: why do people die? What happens after they die?
I was told that everyone dies, and that being remembered is another way of continuing to live.
But even then, my response was immediate: if I myself no longer know any of it, what good is that? And I cried.
Twenty years later, the core of that fear has not really changed. What frightens me is not so much whether the process of dying will be painful. Suffering seems woven into life anyway. What I fear is the permanent disappearance of existence—and more precisely, the disappearance of me as the subject of that existence.
If I vanish, then I can no longer perceive, no longer think, no longer be needed. For millions upon millions of years afterward, the world will have nothing to do with me. Further still, billions of years from now, the world itself will end. Humanity may disappear long before that.
This fear does not feel social to me. If the whole world were ending and all humanity were to die together, I would still be afraid. If I were somehow the last surviving person, as long as my life remained finite, death would still terrify me.
So if death cannot be avoided, is there any way to blunt that fear?
Over the years I have run many thought experiments. One possibility that does not seem entirely bad is Alzheimer's disease: perhaps I would slowly lose the knowledge that I am going to die, gradually becoming like an unknowing child again, and then falling into a very long sleep.
But if I must die while fully conscious, then I have often wondered what the last stretch of life should look like. Among all the things I have tried to create, what could accompany me to the end?
By a process of elimination, what remains is music.
I cannot fully explain why music has such a powerful ability to calm people. Sometimes I fall asleep with music playing. In a novel I once wrote, near the ending, in the kind of imagined scene that suggests “they lived happily ever after,” I also let the speakers play music composed by the characters themselves. Music moves through time. It is quiet and condensed, like a silhouette of life. And hearing, people say, is among the last senses to fade at death.
The other thing I think about is touch. At times I have had this fantasy: if death must come, then let it come during sex, or while I am naked and being held by someone I love. In any case, I would rather not open my eyes, and I would rather not speak.
Would I fear cremation? Not especially. My instincts are fairly materialist. If I somehow die, then what happens to my body afterward no longer concerns me.
Still, stories about burial and cremation can be painful. I once read accounts of elderly people who killed themselves before cremation policies were formally implemented, because they wanted to be buried in the earth. That made me sad. Yet if a pet I had raised were to die, I would probably want to bury it somewhere, so that I would know where to go visit it later.
Do I believe in another life? Not really. And even if I did, I would still think memory is inseparable from who I am. I dislike restarting a saved game from scratch for the same reason: what does that new character have to do with me? Sometimes I even feel that if someone erased ten or twenty years of my memory and sent me back into my childhood body to live those years over again, that too would be terrifying. The person I am now is the sum of all my experiences. If I were sent back and forced to walk those years again by chance, that “me” might feel deeply unfamiliar to the one writing this now.
My sense of identity is grounded in continuity. It belongs to this specific path, this lived accumulation.
I have not made a formal will yet, but I do have a rough idea of what I would want to leave behind. I think of what I can give the world in three parts: property, knowledge, and creation.
Property includes material assets in the ordinary sense, but also objects with personal or commemorative meaning. The former I would mostly want to leave to my partners and to especially close friends. The latter should go either to the people connected to them or to those who would genuinely want to keep them.
Knowledge matters just as much—especially tacit knowledge. I need to work harder to convert it into writing or digital archives, and in particular to preserve private-domain knowledge and my own understanding: not just information, but new knowledge and meta-knowledge. Sometimes I think I have a strong impulse to teach. Since I chose not to have children, I perhaps feel an even stronger urge to pass on my views wherever I can.
Creation, in my mind, divides into static and dynamic forms. Static creation includes literature, poems, songs, and other works that can be collected and preserved. Dynamic creation includes projects under active operation, the kind that may require continued maintenance.
And that leads back to the question of how to live.
My answer would be something like this: to use my own existence, together with the existence of others, to stage a tiny, stubborn resistance against eternal nothingness; to leave behind some trace that is mine within the long history of humanity's survival and extinction; to build moments of temporary meaning inside a fate that is, in the end, destined toward meaninglessness.
This is close to existentialism. I began encountering existentialist thought in 2021, and it felt natural to me, as though I had arrived there simply by following my own questions about life. Before 2024, I was more immersed in a private inner world. After that, this existentialist stance began to intersect with a certain meritocratic impulse. In order to construct meaning, I am willing to spend a great deal of time and energy. I am willing to seek a place and resources within mainstream society—but those things are means, not ends.
The same goes for wanting a high-paying job. The salary is not the purpose. The purpose is to save enough money to retire earlier, and then devote more of the remaining time to creation and to building things that outlast the immediate demands of survival.
In the end, though, there is one dark thread running through my life from beginning to end: love.
I was thrown into this world. I had no choice in that. So the only thing to do is to love it—to love the world, to love every lovable person and everyone who loves me, and to love myself as well.
Life is short. Only love feels enduring.