Death Hack

The other day on X I joked about the “muted words” I set to improve my experience on the app. One of them is life hack, which is thrown around so loosely now by optimization guru types that I couldn’t listen anymore. But it hit me riding my bike to breakfast this morning that the entire framing people often use around the concept is wrong. You can’t really “hack” life because life is tangible. It’s not abstract code. Life is lived. But you can hack death… because death is an abstraction.

You never actually experience death. By definition, death is the absence of any experience at all. You can observe it in others, but you can’t grasp it directly. You don’t know if anyone truly “dies” in the way you think they do. Death is a complete mystery. And mysteries can be reframed. Fears about death are mental constructs… and mental constructs can be changed.

So instead of talking about life hacks, what if we talked about death hacks?

Here’s the framework as I see it:

1. Memento Mori
Accept that you will die. Not abstractly, but actually. There is nothing you can do to stop the reaper.

2. Uncertainty of Timing
Acknowledge that you don’t know when. Could be tomorrow. Could be 100 years from now. That uncertainty itself is part of the condition.

3. Acceptance of Others Moving On
Understand that when you die, while people will mourn, they will also move forward. They have to. That’s the nature of being human. Pain is metabolized into memory. People adapt, they survive. They carry part of you with them but ultimately continue on their paths building and managing their own lives. Your ego may resist this truth, but there is liberation in accepting it.

4. The Hedge
This is the practical application. You have to live in the tension between these two extreme truths: You could die tomorrow OR you could live 100 more years. Since you don’t know which, you hedge.

• If death is imminent, then you shouldn’t waste your finite days in fear… fear of embarrassment, fear of judgment, fear of failure. What is there to fear when death itself is inevitable? Stop letting small anxieties dictate your choices. Don’t let uncertainties about what’s around the corner keep you from actually looking around the corner.

• However, this doesn’t mean going full YOLO since you just don’t know the timing. You don’t suddenly quit everything to skydive every weekend, swim with sharks, or go on a 24-hour epicurean bender as if the world will end tomorrow.

• On the other hand, if your life stretches very long, you’ll need a foundation. You’ll need health, wealth, relationships, work, art, and philosophy. You’ll need your “castle” and your “moat”… structures and defenses that sustain you and your family and gives your days purpose and behavior some coherence.

The point is not to pick one route, but to weave them together and build the hedge. You live with a sense of urgency where fear would hold most people back from decisions. Yet you also live with patience where permanence matters in the event you life long. Build slowly in a sense, but don’t postpone key (or fun) decisions. Be daring in ways, but don’t accept death’s inevitability and then descend into nihilistic recklessness as a result.

So… you “hack death” by accepting what it is and what it means. You contort the common perception and fear of it into the reminder that you do, in fact, only live once.

This gives you power, boosting your personal agency if not executive function.

It’s like hacking death into a more useable tool, so that you can build an awesome, enjoyable, and fulfilling life now, today.

VEO out.