I Have Some Bad News

I have some bad news; you're gonna die soon¹. Soon as in ten years, give or take. Die as in not in Minecraft. To be clear, it's nothing personal. I think you and I and everyone else are in the same boat.

So what? It's a bummer I guess, but what should we do? I mean we should probably try to avoid dying. I'm doing - not my best exactly - but doing something on that front². I still have some free time though. What should I do with that?

One reaction is just falling into despair, but that doesn't sound very fun. Besides, I was probably going to die anyways, and I wasn't in despair over that. It just turns out we might have less time than we hoped.

So, supposing we really do only have ten years left, what should we do?

1. Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die. Any pleasure you can fully enjoy in the moment will be just as good. I don't think the chance of dying soon actually makes beer taste better, but hopefully it reminds you to actually taste the beer. You can also pick up smoking - it probably won't be what kills you.

2. Come to terms with death. I don't mean roll over and accept your fate. That's lame. I mean get to a point where you can look death in the eye and not be paralysed. Without this, you'll either live in denial of death (and make a bunch of mistakes as a result), or you'll find the 'be merry' part of 'eat, drink, and be merry' pretty challenging.

3. Stop putting things off. Sure, make a bucket list and stuff, but also avoid anything that only pays off far into the future. That probably means avoiding careers or education that suck until you're at the top of a greasy pole (e.g. some PhDs, launching startups, consulting, parts of politics). I won't tell you whether or not to have kids.

These are all reasonable, as far as they go, but they're kinda oversimplified. For one thing, they just presume we'll die, which is nonsense. We might die, or we might live in a crazy post-AGI world, or AGI might not arrive and we'll get a normal future. Plenty of things that look like a great idea if you're definitely about to die (e.g. cashing out your 401k) are highly not-great ideas if you're only maybe about to die.⁴

The second point is more interesting. Namely, it's not just you who might die, it's everyone. This is worse, obviously, not just because more people will die, but because there will be no more humans after we're gone. No-one to read your novel. No-one for your miracle drug to cure. No-one to sit in the shade of the tree you plant. As Samuel Scheffler puts it, there will be no afterlife.⁵

Without this afterlife, we are forced to confront the question of what the whole, big, messy, human thing means. We can no longer punt the problem to our descendants and hope they make some sense of it. If we are the last generation, there will be no more twists in the story. Any promise we have but do not meet will be unmet forever. Any question left unanswered now will never have its answer. Our errors will echo unredeemed through empty time. If this is the end, then all the hopes and disappointments of history are piled on us and us alone. The dead expect so much of us.