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Most of us assume that improving our lives means acquiring more of the things we already want: more choices, more comfort, more certainty, more connections and fewer reasons to feel afraid. The logic seems straightforward. If something is desirable, surely having more of it will make us better off.
Yet human behaviour is full of contradictions. An unlimited range of options can make choosing miserable. Avoiding an awkward conversation can create years of tension. Having hundreds of people within reach can make it easier to neglect the handful who truly know us. Even the knowledge that our lives will end, which sounds like a recipe for despair, can help us decide how to spend them.
In a conversation about seven paradoxes, author Mark Manson and his collaborator Drew Birnie explore these reversals through research, personal memories and sometimes uncomfortable admissions. Their examples suggest that the things we pursue most urgently can become obstacles when we misunderstand what they are supposed to provide.
None of these paradoxes is an iron law. Choice is often beneficial, discomfort can be dangerous, and fear sometimes protects us. Their value lies in challenging the automatic assumption that the easiest or most immediately reassuring response is always the wisest one.
1. More Choices Can Leave You Less Free
Imagine standing in front of two chocolate bars. You like one more than the other, so you buy it and continue your day. Now imagine twenty varieties, each with its own ingredients, packaging and persuasive claims. You might find something better than either of the original two, but you might also spend ten minutes comparing them and another ten wondering whether you made a mistake.
This is the intuition behind the paradox of choice, a concept popularised by psychologist Barry Schwartz. The problem is not necessarily having options. It is that additional options can raise expectations, increase the mental work involved in comparison and make the alternatives we rejected more conspicuous. We may judge the outcome not against what we needed, but against an imagined perfect choice we could have made.
Psychologists Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper investigated this possibility in experiments involving jam displays, chocolates and academic essay topics. In a frequently discussed jam experiment, shoppers were more likely to approach a display with many flavours, while people offered the smaller selection were more likely to make a purchase. Other experiments examined motivation and satisfaction under different levels of choice. The findings helped popularise the idea that an abundance of attractive alternatives can sometimes undermine the very decisions it is supposed to improve.
But the popular version is often too sweeping. A 2010 meta-analysis of choice-overload research found substantial variation across studies and no reliable average effect when the results were combined. More choice is not automatically worse; its impact depends on factors such as how familiar we are with the options, how difficult they are to compare, whether we know what we want and what is at stake. Someone choosing a favourite snack has a different problem from someone evaluating medical treatment or an unfamiliar retirement plan.
Manson sees the more consequential version outside the shop. Social media offers a continuous view of activities we could be doing, careers we could be pursuing and lifestyles we could be living. A perfectly enjoyable weekend can suddenly seem disappointing after seeing dozens of apparently spectacular alternatives. A graduate entering a world of countless possible careers may feel less liberated than intimidated by the expectation of selecting the single ideal future.
Opportunity expands what is possible, but it also expands what we can regret not doing. If every path is potentially wonderful, taking one path means abandoning the imagined versions of ourselves who took the others. This is especially exhausting when we mistake a decision for a permanent verdict on whether we have made the most of life.
Manson describes a striking change after he married. Earlier in his life, he had spent considerable energy wondering whether a woman found him attractive, how to impress her or what an interaction might lead to. Marriage did not give him unlimited romantic freedom; it deliberately closed a set of possibilities. Yet he remembers feeling unexpectedly liberated because he no longer had to keep evaluating that question. He could enter a room without turning every encounter into a romantic audition.
The lesson is not that everybody should marry or that commitment always works out. A harmful commitment can trap someone, and a person may freely prefer remaining single. Manson’s experience illustrates something more specific: removing an exhausting recurring decision can create room for attention, intimacy and other forms of freedom.
Drew’s experience with dating applications supplies the less comfortable counterpart. He recalls matching with someone, meeting for a date and then feeling drawn back toward the app even when the date was reasonably pleasant. The question was rarely just whether he liked the person in front of him. It was whether somebody even more compatible might be waiting behind the next swipe. Eventually, he stopped using the apps and preferred meeting people through ordinary social situations.
That experience is not merely an anecdotal complaint about modern dating. Research by Tila Pronk and Jaap Denissen on choice overload in online dating found that participants became more inclined to reject prospective partners as they proceeded through successive options. The experiments do not prove that dating apps inevitably damage relationships, but they suggest one mechanism through which a seemingly endless supply of alternatives can change how people evaluate those they actually encounter.
Dating also involves friction. Someone forgets a detail, has an irritating habit or says something awkward. These moments are not necessarily proof of incompatibility; they are often how we learn whether two people can communicate, adapt and make room for each other. The assumption that another match is always available can make ordinary imperfections feel like reasons to start again before a relationship has had a chance to develop.
Commitment does not eliminate uncertainty. You can choose a career and later change it, build a friendship that eventually ends, or discover that a once-good relationship no longer works. But treating every commitment as a mistake because it closes alternatives can leave you perpetually preparing to live, rather than living. Sometimes freedom is not the ability to choose anything at any moment. It is the ability to stop choosing long enough to devote yourself to something worthwhile.
2. Choosing Discomfort Can Make Life Easier
A difficult choice usually feels difficult because of what it asks us to endure immediately. Exercising requires effort. Eating differently can mean resisting a familiar pleasure. Speaking honestly with a colleague might produce embarrassment or disagreement. Avoiding any of these things provides instant relief, which can make avoidance seem like the sensible option.
The trouble is that the bill often arrives later. Neglecting our health may gradually reduce strength and mobility. Postponed conversations can accumulate resentment. Refusing to face a practical problem can allow it to grow until solving it becomes far more painful than confronting it at the beginning.
Polish-born weightlifter Jerzy Gregorek captured this distinction in a line associated with his story: “Hard choices, easy life. Easy choices, hard life.” Gregorek and his wife emigrated from Poland to the United States as political refugees in 1986, and he later won four world weightlifting championships. His conversation with Tim Ferriss offers a concrete context for the maxim: deliberate discipline in pursuit of a valued goal can expand what a person is capable of doing.
Manson proposes redefining what we mean by hard. We usually associate difficulty with discomfort, but another kind of difficulty is living amid problems we feel powerless to influence. When we exercise, we choose a manageable form of physical strain. When declining health narrows our options, the resulting discomfort is not so neatly chosen. An hour of purposeful effort is not equivalent to years of frustration that might have been partly preventable.
Of course, not every illness can be avoided through discipline, and health is never entirely under individual control. Injury, disability, genetics, work conditions and access to care matter. The useful distinction is between suffering we can thoughtfully accept in service of something important and suffering that expands when manageable issues are repeatedly ignored.
The same logic applies to relationships. A frank conversation with a friend can be unpleasant, especially when the friendship matters. But developing the ability to tolerate such conversations can make later disagreements less frightening. People who consistently avoid awkward subjects may preserve surface-level harmony while allowing the deeper relationship to deteriorate. Learning to handle discomfort and commitment does not make every relationship easy; it helps us face problems before they become defining crises.
Drew gives the paradox a more personal shape. He describes changing his diet, reducing processed food and sugar, and hearing people react as though he had eliminated enjoyment from life. The assumption behind their reaction was revealing: if certain foods were their primary symbol of pleasure, refusing them looked like a life sentence of deprivation. Drew found that he often felt better as a result of his changes, so the sacrifice did not feel the way outsiders imagined.
That leads to musician and writer Derek Sivers’s distinction between shallow happy and deep happy. In his reflection on pleasure and fulfilment, Sivers contrasts what we want right now with what we most want for ourselves over time. Eating a doughnut may provide immediate enjoyment; developing a healthy body may produce a longer-lasting kind of satisfaction. The distinction is about differing timescales and values, not about declaring cake morally suspect or requiring permanent self-denial.
There is a genuine difference between pursuing happiness directly through every available pleasure and constructing a life in which happiness has room to emerge. A treat shared with friends can belong in that life. So can rest, celebration and activities done simply because they are fun. The point is that immediate enjoyment is an incomplete measure of whether a decision serves us.
Manson relates this to his former drinking habits. When a friend said they were taking a break from alcohol, he used to find the announcement irritating. He assumed the person would spoil the atmosphere and wondered how anybody could enjoy themselves without drinking. After he stopped drinking, his interpretation changed. He realised that he had depended on alcohol to make social situations feel interesting and that, without it, some of the activities occupying his time simply were not engaging enough on their own.
Giving up drinking did not just remove a beverage. It forced him to confront an uncomfortable question about how he was spending his evenings and whether he actually liked what he was doing. He could no longer blame the absence of alcohol for boredom; he had to reconsider the activities themselves. The apparent loss of an easy pleasure created a chance to seek a more durable source of satisfaction.
This paradox is easily abused if taken to mean that the harder a thing feels, the more virtuous it must be. Not all hardship has a payoff, and some difficult choices make life worse. The essential questions are whether the discomfort serves a goal we genuinely value, whether the costs are reasonable and whether we have a meaningful opportunity to influence the outcome. Choosing worthwhile difficulties is different from worshipping difficulty itself.
3. What Irritates You in Others May Reveal Something About You
Few experiences are more satisfying than identifying somebody else’s obvious flaw. The lazy colleague never does their share of the work. The arrogant acquaintance behaves as though everyone should admire them. The person who constantly seeks attention somehow fails to notice how exhausting their behaviour is. From our perspective, the problem seems entirely theirs.
Yet the intensity of our reaction can sometimes reveal an uncomfortable connection with ourselves. In psychology, projection describes a defence mechanism through which someone attributes unwanted feelings, impulses or qualities of their own to another person. Freud wrote about projection, while Carl Jung’s idea of the shadow refers more broadly to aspects of ourselves that we disown or refuse to acknowledge. These traditions are related but not identical, and neither establishes that every strong judgment conceals a matching personal flaw.
Manson suggests using recurring irritation as a clue. If the same behaviour in other people provokes an unusually strong response again and again, it may be worth investigating why. Perhaps we fear being thought of that way. Perhaps we have worked so hard to suppress the trait in ourselves that seeing it openly expressed feels intolerable. Or perhaps the other person’s behaviour genuinely violates an important value. The point is to examine the reaction, not to assume its meaning in advance.
Drew confesses that incompetence and laziness can make him disproportionately angry. He sees himself as a perfectionist and admits that these are also qualities he dislikes finding in himself. Once he recognises that connection, the irritation becomes more complicated than the simple claim that everyone else needs to improve. His anger may reflect a standard he applies to himself so harshly that watching others fail to meet it feels almost personally threatening.
His colleagues have noticed another manifestation of this temperament. In the discussion, Manson teases Drew about becoming the team’s designated representative when a service fails or a purchase goes wrong. Drew is the one ready to contact customer support, demand a refund, challenge an unsatisfactory response or ask to speak to a manager. His persistence sometimes benefits the team, but it also fits the portrait of someone who struggles to let perceived incompetence pass without a fight.
Drew initially approached the problem by trying to feel more compassionate toward the people who annoyed him. More recently, he says, he has found it useful to begin earlier: recognise the hated quality in himself and respond to that recognition with some compassion. If he can acknowledge that he, too, occasionally falls short, other people’s mistakes may become easier to assess without turning every one into a moral emergency.
Manson describes a different insecurity from his younger years. He used to imagine an invisible hierarchy wherever he went, constantly trying to determine who was cooler, more important or more admired. Because he was preoccupied with his own position, he assumed everybody else must be performing similar calculations. A friendly gesture could become, in his interpretation, a calculated attempt to impress someone, manipulate a relationship or gain status over another person.
He remembers inventing elaborate explanations of other people’s motives, as though ordinary interactions were pieces in a secret social chess match. Looking back, he realises that much of this machinery existed inside his own head. He was assigning his private anxieties to people who might simply have been talking, flirting or enjoying themselves without thinking about rank at all.
He also argues that the standards we use to measure our own worth often shape how we judge others. Someone who prizes honesty may be particularly sensitive to dishonesty; someone insecure about their sexual experience may become unusually preoccupied with other people’s private lives. But this is not enough to conclude that anyone who criticises dishonesty is secretly dishonest, or that someone distressed by a manipulative person shares that person’s motives.
This caution matters especially with labels such as narcissist. The podcast considers how people sometimes interpret every interpersonal conflict as evidence that someone around them is narcissistic. Manson speculates that self-centred people may themselves be especially likely to see everyone else as self-centred. Neither observation permits a diagnosis from a disagreement, and it would be harmful to use the idea of projection to dismiss a credible complaint about abuse or mistreatment.
The paradox becomes useful when it makes judgment more curious and less automatic. We can still hold others accountable for bad conduct while asking why that conduct affects us so deeply. Sometimes the answer will be a neglected part of ourselves. Sometimes the answer will be an experience that makes a particular behaviour painful. And sometimes the other person is, quite simply, behaving badly. Understanding our reaction helps us distinguish among those possibilities.
4. The Fear of Failure Can Make Failure More Likely
Suppose you are invited to interview for a job you desperately want. It fits your interests, pays well and seems to offer a future you have dreamed about for years. Instead of regarding it as one promising opportunity, you begin telling yourself that your entire life depends on getting it. By the time you enter the interview, each question feels like a threat, each silence like a disaster and every imperfect answer like evidence that you have ruined everything.
The pressure may make it difficult to listen, think clearly or respond naturally. You might rehearse so rigidly that you seem distracted, become defensive when challenged or rush to fill gaps that never needed filling. The behaviour intended to prevent failure begins increasing the likelihood of an unimpressive interview.
Manson uses this hypothetical to illustrate a self-fulfilling expectation. When the stakes of a situation become inflated in our minds, fear can influence the choices and reactions that determine the outcome. A person who thinks rejection would be unbearable may avoid applying altogether; someone afraid of making a mistake may never complete the work they intend to submit. Fear is no guarantee of failure, but it can create extra obstacles beyond those the task already contains.
Now imagine approaching the same interview with a different understanding. You still want the job, prepare carefully and take the opportunity seriously, but you do not treat it as the only possible route to a worthwhile life. If it does not work out, there will be disappointment, perhaps serious disappointment, and there will also be other things to pursue. That mindset may make it easier to engage with the interviewer rather than conducting a frantic internal debate about your worth.
The distinction is between wanting an outcome and requiring that outcome to validate your identity. Caring helps us prepare; believing we cannot survive disappointment can interfere with performance. Some anxiety is useful because it focuses attention on consequential tasks. The question is whether it remains proportionate or begins consuming the resources required to do the task well.
Manson connects the same problem to perfectionism in business. He admires a decision-making principle explained by Jeff Bezos in Amazon’s 2016 shareholder letter. Bezos argued that many decisions should be made with roughly 70% of the information one wishes to have, rather than waiting for 90% or more. His concern was that the cost of waiting could exceed the cost of making a decision, learning from it and correcting course.
This is a rule about information, not a claim that every project should be released when only 70% complete or that a leader should act whenever success appears 70% probable. Bezos also distinguished decisions that can be reversed from those whose consequences are harder to undo. An experiment with a product feature and an irreversible decision involving safety or major resources should not be treated as the same kind of gamble.
For Manson and Drew, the practical attraction is the opportunity to learn sooner. Drew admits that perfectionism can make him want to refine something long after further refinement is likely to produce meaningful returns. Manson pushes him to put work into the world, see how people respond and then decide what deserves another attempt. The point is not that standards are unimportant. It is that real-world feedback can reveal weaknesses or possibilities that private deliberation never uncovers.
Manson illustrates the uncertainty with his experience publishing online. After roughly fifteen years of creating work, he says, his expectations still regularly fail him. Projects in which he invests extraordinary effort sometimes receive only a modest response. Other pieces he regards as less promising unexpectedly reach large audiences. The supposed certainty he could have waited for was never genuinely available, because the audience’s reaction was not something he could perfectly forecast.
There is an uncomfortable kind of freedom in that admission. The job of a writer, entrepreneur or applicant is to prepare responsibly and make the strongest attempt possible, not to possess supernatural confidence about the result. Failure may still hurt, and it does not automatically make somebody wiser. Learning requires examining what happened, identifying what is changeable and deciding what to do differently next time.
Being less terrified of failure does not mean becoming indifferent to consequences. It means refusing to make the possibility of being wrong so frightening that experimentation, improvement and even ordinary performance become impossible. The people best positioned to succeed are not necessarily those who never feel fear, but those who can act thoughtfully without demanding a promise of success first.
5. The Things You Avoid May Be the Ones Worth Doing
Sometimes the most revealing response to an idea is the urge to stop thinking about it. An ambition appears in your mind and is followed almost immediately by objections. It would be embarrassing. People would laugh. You are too old to start. You might discover that you are not particularly good at it. Within seconds, the idea is buried beneath a dozen practical-sounding reasons to leave things as they are.
Manson says he has learned to notice this reaction in himself. When a thought makes him recoil, he tries to consider whether it might be something important that he has been avoiding. He does not claim to have been born with this habit. It took years of experience before he became willing to look more closely at the things his mind reflexively wanted to push away.
He also acknowledges having been unusually attracted to novelty and exciting experiences from an early age. Sometimes that tendency led him into trouble. At other times, trying something others were unwilling to attempt created unusual opportunities. His argument is not that every unpopular or frightening activity is valuable. Rather, there can be considerable rewards for doing a valuable thing that many people avoid because it is uncomfortable or uncertain.
Writer Steven Pressfield calls the internal force that interferes with demanding creative work Resistance. In The War of Art, it takes forms such as procrastination, self-doubt, distraction and perfectionism. Pressfield’s account of the struggle against Resistance concerns the work that matters to us but that we keep avoiding, sometimes precisely because we care so much about its outcome.
This is a recognisable experience beyond the arts. Someone may spend years thinking about changing careers while never speaking to a person in the field. A difficult apology may occupy the mind for months even though the words would take only a minute to say. A writer can reorganise a desk, research writing software and revise the opening sentence indefinitely while avoiding the chapter whose failure would feel personal. These are illustrative possibilities, not proof that every delay is fear-driven.
Manson connects Resistance to something many people lose during adolescence: their unusual interests. He remembers writing little fictional stories and essays for pleasure when he was a child, around the age of ten. As he grew older, writing came to seem uncool. It was already something he had to do at school, and it did not obviously make him more popular. Gradually, he stopped treating it as a pleasure worth pursuing.
He believes the pressure to fit in helps explain that change. At thirteen or fourteen, an unconventional interest can feel socially dangerous. If friends do not admire it, or if it does not improve your chances of belonging to the group, pretending not to care can seem safer than becoming the person everyone laughs at. A young person may suppress something meaningful without ever deciding explicitly to abandon it.
The consequences can emerge much later. Adults sometimes struggle to identify what they actually enjoy because they have spent years rewarding only activities that attract approval. A neglected interest may hold clues to their curiosity, distinctiveness and capacities, even if it will never become a profitable career. Manson eventually returned to writing, but the broader point does not require every childhood hobby to reveal a hidden vocation.
Fear can be helpful as a question: What exactly am I protecting myself from? If the answer is merely that a sincere attempt might expose us to embarrassment or disappointment, it may be worthwhile to proceed. If the answer involves serious danger, coercion, financial ruin or a situation beyond our current capacity, the sensible response may be to stop, seek help or design a safer approach.
Psychological treatment offers a related but carefully limited example. In exposure therapy, people can work with a trained professional to approach certain feared memories or situations in a planned, supported way rather than repeatedly escaping them. That does not mean the more frightening an experience is, the more beneficial it must be, or that someone should force themselves into unsafe circumstances. Deliberate, proportionate confrontation is different from reckless exposure.
This paradox ultimately asks us to reconsider the meaning of resistance. Sometimes reluctance accurately warns that a course of action is unwise. Sometimes it reflects the possibility of loss, humiliation or change attached to something we deeply value. We learn more by examining the fear than by obeying it automatically—or by assuming that every fear must be defeated.
6. More Connection Can Leave Us Feeling Alone
A person can have hundreds of online contacts, participate in several group chats and receive notifications throughout the day without having anyone they feel comfortable calling during a crisis. We can now reach people with extraordinary ease, but making contact and feeling connected are not interchangeable achievements.
Drew describes much modern communication as a form of low-effort social nourishment. A message takes seconds to send. A reaction to a photograph requires even less. These conveniences are useful, particularly when friends or relatives live far away, yet they can also create the impression that a relationship is being maintained simply because a thin stream of interactions continues to pass between two phones.
Manson suspects something important gets lost when we remove every inconvenience from connection. Meaningful relationships require some investment of attention, time and vulnerability. Friends occasionally need us to alter our plans, listen to something difficult or respond when we would rather be doing something else. Couples must negotiate their incompatible needs instead of merely enjoying the moments when everything happens to fit.
He uses the word friction to describe these demands. If a relationship involves no effort whatsoever, it can be difficult to know how much either person is prepared to give when the situation becomes inconvenient. Choosing to spend an afternoon helping a friend, having an uncomfortable conversation or travelling to see a relative communicates something that a quick symbol on a screen may not. The effort becomes evidence that another person’s well-being matters enough to affect our choices.
That does not make conflict inherently healthy. Chronic hostility, disrespect and mistreatment do not demonstrate affection, and healthy partners should not manufacture disputes to prove their devotion. The distinction is between unnecessary pain and the ordinary difficulties that accompany real involvement with another imperfect human being. An absence of friction can mean wonderful compatibility, but it can also mean that neither person has risked saying anything difficult.
Dating applications return to the discussion here for another reason. They make introductions easier, yet the same low barriers that allow people to meet can make withdrawing from an awkward interaction effortless. Instead of discovering whether a disagreement is manageable, it may seem simpler to reopen the app. Digital convenience changes not only how relationships begin, but also how readily we can avoid the moments in which they might deepen.
Research provides some evidence for concern, though not a universal verdict against technology. In a 2018 experiment on limiting social-media use, Melissa Hunt and colleagues found that university students asked to reduce their time on three social platforms reported lower loneliness and depression than a comparison group over the study period. The sample and duration limit what can be concluded. Other forms of online interaction can sustain friendships, create communities and support people who would otherwise be isolated.
The key is the difference between chosen solitude and unwanted loneliness. Someone may spend an enjoyable evening alone after a deeply connecting afternoon with friends. Another person may scroll through messages all night while feeling that nobody knows what they are going through. Counting contacts or hours spent communicating tells us little about which experience is taking place.
Manson also notices that technology expands the communities with which we identify. People can follow distant wars, political disputes and humanitarian emergencies almost continuously, responding emotionally to events they cannot directly influence. He worries that some online arguments resemble allegiance to sports teams: people monitor developments, cheer apparent victories and spend hours attacking the opposing side.
This is a provocative observation, not an argument that people should ignore suffering beyond their neighbourhood. Global solidarity, informed political participation and genuine material support can matter enormously. The question is whether our attention results in understanding, help or constructive involvement, or whether repeated argument replaces the local commitments through which we could also contribute to the world around us.
A useful measure of connection, then, is not how easy somebody is to reach. It is whether the relationship has room for honesty, reciprocity and showing up when convenience disappears. Technology can help people do all of those things. It cannot guarantee that they will.
7. Remembering Death Can Help Us Live More Fully
Of all the things people prefer not to think about, death may be the most difficult to avoid indefinitely. We know that our lives are limited, yet everyday routines encourage us to behave as though there will always be another opportunity to repair a friendship, take a journey or begin the work that matters to us. Remembering mortality sounds grim, but forgetting it can make time feel almost worthless.
The Stoic tradition offers the practice of memento mori: remember that you will die. Its purpose is not to produce constant dread. It is to place ordinary ambitions, irritations and priorities against the fact that life cannot be extended indefinitely. If our time were unlimited, almost any meaningful choice could be postponed without consequence. Its scarcity is one reason our choices matter.
For Manson, this is not merely an ancient philosophical exercise. He recalls losing three of his four grandparents during childhood. In ninth grade, a classmate developed cancer, and Manson and his peers witnessed the classmate’s decline and death. Later, when he was a high-school senior, another student died in a car accident. During his first year at college, his close friend Josh drowned at a party.
As a young person, he did not recognise the accumulation of losses as unusual. Children tend to assume that whatever surrounds them is simply what life is like. Only in his twenties, while listening to friends describe their own experiences, did he realise that some people his age had never personally known anyone who died. His repeated encounters with death had given him a very different starting point for thinking about time and what could be lost.
Drew mentions financial writer Morgan Housel, who has spoken about a serious youthful encounter with danger and the death of friends. Drew wonders whether people exposed early to mortality sometimes become unusually determined to use their time. It is understandable to search for meaning in such stories, but bereavement is not a reliable route to accomplishment. Loss can also produce prolonged grief, anxiety and trauma, and no one needs tragedy as a prerequisite for living purposefully.
The significance of Manson’s recollection lies in the questions death made difficult for him to postpone. What am I doing with my time? Does it matter to me? Am I using my opportunities simply because they are available, or because they are worthwhile? When someone disappears from our lives permanently, the possibility of indefinite postponement becomes much harder to sustain.
Steve Jobs expressed a related idea in his 2005 Stanford commencement address. He described looking in the mirror each morning and asking whether, if this were the last day of his life, he would want to do what he was about to do. When his answer was no for too many days in succession, he took it as a sign that something needed to change. Jobs also reflected on receiving a cancer diagnosis, making mortality more immediate than a philosophical thought experiment.
The exercise is not a demand to enjoy every ordinary day. Most people have obligations that cannot be abandoned whenever they feel uninspired, and an unpleasant afternoon does not mean a life has gone wrong. Jobs’s question works better as a longer-term check: if our days repeatedly move in a direction we do not value, what realistically can we change before another year passes?
Psychologists have also studied the less reassuring side of mortality awareness. Terror management theory examines how awareness of death can motivate people to defend their worldviews, identities and sources of self-worth. Being reminded that life ends does not always make us kinder, clearer or more generous. It can provoke defensiveness, hostility or a desperate search for reassurance, depending on the person and circumstances.
That is why contemplating mortality requires sensitivity. Someone struggling with acute grief or death anxiety may need support, not an instruction to think about dying more often. For others, occasional reflection can make familiar experiences more vivid. A visit with a parent, a conversation with an old friend or a quiet afternoon spent on work we love may seem different when we acknowledge that none of these moments is guaranteed to recur.
Memento mori points toward impermanence and the value of what we love, rather than denying the pain of losing it. A friendship matters partly because both people have a limited number of days in which to enjoy it. A meaningful project deserves attention because the chance to finish it will not remain available forever. Mortality does not tell us exactly which choice is right, but it challenges the comforting assumption that we can leave every important question for later.
These paradoxes ultimately share a demanding insight about how we use freedom. We cannot keep every option open, avoid every discomfort, guarantee every success, preserve every relationship effortlessly or make our lives endless. Trying to do so can prevent us from making the commitments that give those limited lives shape. Recognising what we cannot have forever may be the beginning of taking what we do have seriously.
Last Updated on November 13, 2026 by Aseem Gupta