Quick question, and be honest: who, exactly, sold you on the idea that going on, and on, and on — forever, with no end — would be a good time?
We never seem to interrogate it. We’ve quietly decided that death is a mistake — a clerical error, a glitch, an oversight by some cosmic management team that really ought to have built us better. We treat it as a disease: the one remaining bug in the human design, just waiting for the right patch. And so the whole project of modern life becomes more time, at any cost, for as long as possible.
But here is the thing nobody mentions. If you actually got it — infinite time, on this one spinning rock, with this one set of knees — you would, eventually, hand it back. You’d beg to.
The Unpruned Tree
Start with the pure logistics, because they’re damning enough on their own.
Imagine the wish came true and every life were saved, indefinitely, no exceptions, everywhere, all the time. It sounds gorgeous and humane right up until you actually picture it: nothing falling away, nothing ever making room, everyone packed tighter and tighter with each passing century. A tree that is never pruned doesn’t flourish. It chokes. The noble-sounding dream of holding on to absolutely everyone forever turns out, in practice, to be completely unlivable.
Seen that way, dying is oddly gracious. It’s the honorable move — stepping back from the table so someone else gets a turn at the game. It’s why we have children in the first place: a way of arranging for life to carry on without any one of us being made to lug the torch the entire distance. At some point you get to pass the baton, exhale, and tell the next runner, alright — you take it from here.
Children Can Still See the Scratches
There’s a deeper reason, though, well past the logistics. Given enough time, we lose the magic.
Watch a small child with a beetle, or with the scratches on a wooden floor. To them it is pure, undiluted wonder — because they haven’t yet learned to run the world through the two filters we spend all of adulthood installing: will this help me survive, and can I profit from it. Everything is still astonishing because nothing has been sorted and shelved yet.
Then we age, and we get tired, and we label. The beetle becomes a pest. The scratch on the floor stops being a tiny mystery and becomes one more thing on the list to fix. We fret about the mortgage and the pension and exactly where we rank. And somewhere in there, very quietly, we stop seeing — and the moment we stop seeing, we’ve wandered out of the only game nature seems to be playing at all: the universe waking up and having a look at itself.
That, I suspect, is the real reason for the hand-off. New eyes. Nature appears to find it far more interesting to keep minting brand-new, unjaded people who can still be floored by a beetle than to keep the same handful of us hanging around forever, growing more certain and more bored by the decade.
The Thing We Sweep Under the Rug
Because we’re so thoroughly rattled by all this, we’ve turned death into a secret — the great unmentionable, the elephant nobody will name in the room.
You can watch the saddest version of it play out in almost any hospital. A grandmother is dying, and she more or less knows it. The family knows it. The doctor knows it. And so everyone embarks on an excruciating round of mutual pretending — you’ll be back on your feet in a few weeks, Gran — all in the name of “keeping her spirits up.” The result is unbearable: the one person actually walking through the most important passage of her life is left to face it alone, unprepared, and often sedated so far past awareness that the single most profound thing that will ever happen to her barely registers as an experience. We are so frightened of the moment that we quietly drug people right past the doorway they came all this way to walk through.
The One Thing the Ego Can’t Win
And that is a real loss, because death is the one situation the ego simply cannot bluff its way out of. It is the ultimate, non-negotiable surrender — the single appointment you cannot reschedule, delegate, or out-argue.
Which is precisely what makes it an opportunity, if you’ve got the nerve to meet it with your eyes open. If you can let go before you’re forced to — set down the white-knuckled grip on being a separate, permanent someone — something quietly extraordinary happens. The trance breaks. And from there, people have been known to look back over the whole strange ride and say, without a trace of bitterness, I wouldn’t have missed it for anything. So that’s what it was for. You finally understand the thing by loosening your hold on it.
Give It Back
And here’s the part that ought to embarrass us, gently.
Nature runs entirely on returns. A leaf does its green work all summer, then lets go, falls, rots, and becomes the precise nutrients that feed next spring’s growth. Nothing is hoarded. Everything is borrowed and repaid. It’s the most elegant accounting ever devised, and it asks exactly one thing: give it back when you’re done.
And then there’s us — the one species that flatly refuses. We’ve invented an entire craft devoted to not returning: we pump the body full of preservatives and seal it inside a box built specifically to keep the earth out, as though being eaten in our turn were the supreme indignity. Which is a remarkable stance to take, when you sit with it, given that we spent every single day of our lives eating — the plants, the animals, the whole borrowed feast — and now, handed the bill at last, we’d really rather not settle up.
So maybe stop treating your expiration date as a design flaw. It was never the bug. It is the entire reason the thing runs at all — the pruning that keeps the tree alive, the exhale that makes room for the next breath, the falling leaf that is already, quietly, on its way to becoming soil.
You don’t have to fix it. You only have to, eventually, hand it back. And in the meantime — while you’ve still got the whole improbable loan of it — try to go and see the scratches on the floor.