How often do you consider our own mortality?

Pretty much every day.

I don’t mean that I dwell on it in a morbid sort of way. However, our mortality is one of the things that defines the human condition and in light of that one should strive to live each day in such a way that you would not consider it to be a waste if you suddenly expire.

Usually only when I’m doing something that is threatening my longevity (those “oh, crap!” moments).

All the time. Since we know we’re going to die and the universe will essentially go on without us (as if we weren’t even here), it makes me not take a lot too seriously.

I think it probably crosses my mind in a vague sort of way almost every day. I don’t devote any time to it.

I think it crosses my mind the more I feel I have to lose… so the better life is, the more it crosses my mind… that’s wierd, right?

All the time.

Every day! Not in a morbid way but because life, health, precious experiences, grace all of that are ever before us.

A lot less since I had to seriously consider it and prepare. Now I just figure that I hope the paperwork is in order. There are, of course, those times when a close call has happened that I’m aware of the startling nature of sudden death, otherwise, not so much.

My own? Infrequently.

I could give you a list of people (a list that grows longer every day) of the people whose mortality I dream of and look forward to. A guy can dream, can’t he?

Most days. Less so now. I used to be able to say I was in the first half of my life, and comfort myself that I had at least as long as I had lived left to live. Now it’s kind of hard to say that, although I am hoping to live for more than 100 years. With medical care these days, it’s not outside the realm of possibility.

Almost every day, since I take insulin and a handful of pills for both the cancer and the diabetes.

Thanks to denial, I’m immortal!

I’m 64 and never really considered it until I had to research parts b, c, and d of Medicare. Now I hope to die before I need any of them.

Every day.

When I hit about 31–32 I started thinking about it regularly, and now at 38 I think about it multiple times each day. It blows my mind that it’s not uncommon for people to die even in their 50’s from natural causes. Shit! I’m almost 40! My 50’s are just a little over a decade away! Where did all the time go?

I give permission for the really old people to now slap me around for being so ridiculous :)

More times than I read Hamlet every year, to be quasi-zen kōan-esque in my answer.
Hamlet < my mortality thoughts

Yeah, every day here too, almost a has been… Lol…

Being suicidally inclined, I suppose I have been doing so for the past now roughly 15 years.

I have a couple of types of bucket lists not all of which I can disclose…..

I have also made the decision that I’m going to go out with a style somehow. I’ve been toying with the idea of wrestling sharks, but my mind is made up :P

@Scooby a has been at 44?!?!? :-/

@Foolaholic I ran a harp workshop at the weekend, and two of the people taking part had ‘play the harp’ as part of their bucket lists… Don’t think it was with a view to a grand exit though, ha ha… “death by harp”!!

@harple Death by harp-oon.

Occasionally; usually when spending time with my (much) older siblings, or when I feel limits to what my body can do, limits that weren’t there even a few years ago. Disconcerting, but… better than the alternative, of course.

Not as much as I used to. I try to focus on being a decent person and helping others in my own way when I can. I went through many bad times dealing with tragedies of those close to me and I’ve been close to death several times myself so I don’t obsess with my own mortality like I used to. I’m sure being a theist and seeing death as a transformation period rather than the end has alot to do with my way of thinking as well.

Probably not daily, but still very often. I wonder how much time I have left to live as the man I should have been for the last 45 years. Birthdays used to really upset me. This year is the first in a long time that I haven’t fellt like my chance was slipping away.

When I was 19 years old I had cancer and that has affected my mentality about life. At that time I realized that I, like most people, had assumed that I would live a long life, maybe I could count on 70+ years or so. In an instant that all changed. I realized that I may only have a few years left to live. I thought of what I would want to do if that were the case. Should I continue in my present course? Did I want to reevaluate my goals? I decided no, I wanted to continue on my chosen path.
One night I was staying up late as I often did during those days trying to stretch out the days as much as possible. I was looking out the picture window of my parent’s house to the street where I used to play as a child. I had this epiphany where I realized how much time we waste worrying about what other people think and say about us. How we make ourselves miserable in the process and how life is much to precious to waste time like that. I resolved to keep in mind every day just how precious life is. Not to let anything petty let me lose sight for one moment how beautiful the world can be.

I read that “If you concentrate on finding whatever is good in every situation, you will discover that your life will suddenly be filled with gratitude, a feeling that nurtures the soul.” —Rabbi Harold Kushner

It isn’t always easy to keep this in mind but I try to hold onto it. To me, that is the real reason for remembering my mortality. Every moment lost is one never to be regained.

I’m 41 now. Mom was 44 when she died. I’ve occasionally thought about when I’ll die, but I probably will more in three years.

I don’t think about it that much. I mean it’s gonna happen some day, so what the hell. What I do think about though is my physical health and how it needs to improve, so I think that’s pretty relevant. Not that I’m not afraid to die, and unless some of my actions involving death are subconscious, it’s not something I dwell on so much. (unless I imagine myself in a zombie scenario or something)

Almost never. Everyone dies and my time is coming eventually. Since it’s inevitable, I don’t let it trouble me.

OMG I’m still here !

Since we were talking about luck the other day… I’m still holding out the hope of immortality. First time for everything, right?

Only once each lifetime.

The aches and pains that I took for granted when I was younger now take on an importance they never had before, of course I freely admit I do have hypochondrical tendencies. I don’t worry about a pain in my toe or finger but just about anywhere else and my brain goes into overdrive figuring out if it is a heart attack, the onset of something terrible! Then after I convince myself I am terminally ill, I have to convince myself it is probably nothing and I am just over reacting. It is truly exhausting being me.

But all in all, I am healthy so I just accept that dying is a part of living and it is going to happen when it is going to happen, there is nothing I can do about it, so why waste time worrying.

I don’t think explicitly about my own mortality, rather I think about how short our time on earth really is. I remember my Father and what he was doing when he was my age, and how I measure myself by his example. He was my age when I was 13. By that time he had fought in three wars, built our home, seen so much of history, that I an awed. His father saw even more. And two more generations before that we weren’t even a Nation yet. How much I have lived and how I have stayed the course? History, as we know it is but a blink of an eye, or a strobe flash in the stream of time. What wonders will my son see in his lifetime? Mankind’s development is accelerating so quickly that I marvel at what is to come after I am gone.

Sometimes when I look at my daughter, I think about how there will be a point that she’ll go on without me. And someday, god willing, she will be an old lady that nobody will be able to imagine that she was ever a baby.

@harple, I did say almost… with my blood preasure issues I could POP, anytime :-/

After spending a semester in Ireland and taking courses on prehistoric histories, it’s interesting to see just how much our ancestors thought about mortality. If you look at areas that were populated by prehistoric, nomadic peoples, you noticed that there areas where they lived and worked are barely decorated, and populated by only those items that are essential. Burial sites, by comparison, are commonly covered by megaliths and microliths and located geographically in the most stunning spots. What’s more, many structures (such as Newgrange in Ireland) are aligned with the heavens . Newgrange itself, it built so as to receive optimal sunlight on the winter solstice.

Looking at the way they lived and died and worshiped, you get the sense that the way they understood it, life was fleeting but death was eternal. It’s an interesting perspective, and one that I think modern cultures should embrace more. We are so intent on clinging to the light that it gets a little weird, and as Jae Rhim Lee discusses in her TED Talk, it’s not having a very positive effect on our planet.

@Foolaholic That seems a very benevolent interpretation of the past, a romanticizing of a people’s history. A more straightforward explanation it seems was they were afraid of dying and made up stories about an afterlife to pacify themselves.

Not that it’s material. They did what they did in response to the certainty of their individual deaths. Just like individuals, societies deal with the inevitable end in different ways.

I asked the question because of the frequency with which I worry about getting a life’s work done. Silly, I know. But it got me to thinking about how our forebearers thought. Knowing that human beings haven’t changed any in the last 30,000 years, I wonder just how much of the reshaping of the planet has been propelled by people thinking thoughts like I think.

@6rant6 True, that’s just one interpretation and I am an optimist.

But to say we haven’t changed at all seems unfair, because if nothing else we’ve changed biologically. I don’t know much about biology, but I assume that includes the brain, in it’s functions and chemistry. I think the fact that we don’t know exactly what our ancestors 30,000 back thought is proof enough that we’ve changed since then.

@Foolaholic When I said we haven’t changed, I meant biologically. We know that becauser we can see how similiar DNA is among people all over the world. There’s no evidence of changes since the population exploded. That’s a great simplification, but biologically, it appears we haven’t changed.

To me, that’s comforting. I can understand by lineage much better knowing they had the same power to consider, pretty much the same natural inclinations, and many of the same issues.

I do not devote huge portions of time or energy to it. When someone way younger dies it reminds me how fragile life is and you may think you have so much time to do things but be out of here before you hit your 30s, or in some cases before you are even a legal adult. When it is a person near my age, it is a reminder the day is well spent and the wick is almost burned up. It makes me start to think i will start losing friends and one day they will lose me. Death, where it use to somewhat scare me, has no grip any longer, in some ways I wish it would hurry up;.