Fairly Philosophical Friday: Living like you're about to die.

I'm sure you've been asked this question: You have x time to live, so how will you spend it? You create a bucket list of things you would like to do before your predictable demise. The exercise is supposed to make you think about what is important to you. But it often seems to take on a whimsical attitude, as if it were impossible to think about something as morbid as death. This is probably a defense mechanism on our part. After all, who wants to think about death? But sooner or later, that's how we're all going to go.

There is another reason for that whimsical attitude, I think. That bucket list seems like work. Who wants to go on that tour of Europe when it's a lot easier just to take the weekend off and play tourist in your local area? Who wants to write that long — at times arduous and soul crushing — novel when it's a lot easier to write a blog about how hard it is to write that novel? It is perhaps an evolutionary mechanism to find the easy way out. The animal who goes after the hard — yet more emotionally satisfying — target is also more likely to get himself killed, and therefore decrease the likelihood of siring offspring. But the one who finds the easier and, evolutionary speaking, better way to catch prey will have more chances to mate. That's one hypothesis for the evolution of procrastination.

In our modern society, we no longer have to struggle to survive, for most of us. Even the most poor of us don't have to worry about being eaten. And our jobs — the civilized equivalent to hunting — usually doesn't include putting our lives at risk. But our genes don't know that; they're are still stuck in Neolithic times when it was a lot easier to spear a fish than a woolly mammoth. So it's hard for us to get motivated to be healthier, or to learn French, or whatever. Because those things require burning calories, calories that our genes need to be preserved for the next hunt.

How do we overcome our evolutionary demotivation? Often those exercises in what you would do if you had a finite time to live tell us to live every day as if it were your last. A nice sentiment, but that usually doesn't work because emotionally you just can't believe that today is your last day unless it were actually true. Certain meditations try to overcome that obstacle by having the meditator contemplate deeply the nature of death and what it means to have a finite time to live. The pitfall I see there is that there's the risk the meditator will simply conclude it's better just to meditate than to do anything else. Perhaps that is okay for some. But for me, at this time in my life, I would much rather not spend my life navel-gazing.

Still others refuse to believe death is truly the end of existence, so they subscribe to some notion of the afterlife. Perhaps belief in heaven, or reincarnation, or whatever, has as much to do with the fear that one's life has been wasted as it has to do with the fear of death. But I simply can't believe in a mystical afterlife that has no evidence for existence beyond some ancient books of fairy tales.

So what is my solution? I'm not sure. That's still a work in progress.