My Life Countdown

We must live out our lives, to whatever extent we can, in clear-eyed acknowledgment of our limitations, in the undeluded mode of existence that Heidegger calls “Being-towards-death,” aware that this is it, that life is not a dress rehearsal, that every choice requires myriad sacrifices, and that time is always already running out—indeed, that it ma

I am now 33 years old, and it feels like much time has passed and is passing faster and faster every day. Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, and then I have to live with the forfeiture of all the other options those choices foreclose.

If you really thought life would never end, he argues, then nothing could ever genuinely matter, because you’d never be faced with having to decide whether or not to use a portion of your precious life on something. ‘If I believed that my life would last forever,’ Hägglund writes, ‘I could never take my life to be at stake, and I would never be sei