"When you're on your death bed ...
Be careful about the advice you take
Bet you’ve heard this question from some coach or guru:
“When you’re on your death bed, will you wish you had spent more time at the office?”
Sounds kind of profound and mysterious and spiritual, doesn’t it? Well, it’s actually a somewhat loaded question to ask yourself, and it is designed to push you in a very particular direction.
Imagining yourself on your death bed sounds like it gives you a special elevated place from which to survey your whole life with heightened perspective. What it actually does is confront you with a big blast of existential ANGST (dread, terror)!
When we are confronted with the terror of death and non-existence, our brains tend to seek out the comfort and safety of loving connections. It’s a smart survival strategy: children are primed to run into the arms of adults for protection. So when we imagine our own deaths, we don’t trigger a grand profound life perspective but rather a very specific safety reflex tilting toward our most important relationships.
So the ‘death-bed’ thought experiment is in fact a subliminal prescription for spending more time with the people you care about and less time in your (real and metaphorical) ‘office’ where you are building whatever achievements and accomplishments you care about in your life. Maybe you DO need to spend less time at the office and more on other life priorities, and that’s a reasonable balancing option to consider. But maybe not.
The question you really want to ask yourself periodically is
WHAT REALLY MATTERS MOST TO ME RIGHT NOW ?
It’s the only meaningful lens through which we mortals can make good life assessments and decisions about where to invest the precious and limited time we are given.
Ah yes, the ‘deathbed guilt trip.'
It's perfect for inspiring spiritual panic and a sudden urge to quit your job and hug your squirrel.
What matters now feels like a far more honest and useful compass.
Happy Happy Saturday Baird.
I want to be remembered as a good person, if I am remembered at all, which might beg the question who do I want to be remembered by. But to your query - what is most important right now - allows a flexibility which might show more personal growth.