Death Is the Greatest Cheat Code to LIVING!

Welcome to I of the Hurricane

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Somewhere along the way, you start asking it. Did I screw this up? Did I waste the one life I had? That question almost broke me. This is where I put it back together. Welcome to Eye of the Hurricane. Reclaim your calm.

The Coin Flip Thought Experiment

SPEAKER_01 0:25

What if knowing that we're gonna die with 100% certainty is the ultimate cheat code for us to live our best lives? So do me a favor, I want you just to imagine a scenario that could lead to you being immortal. So let's picture a world like this one. Except we're gonna have one rule that's gonna deviate. And that is when you turn 75, every one of us is gonna go through a ritual. And that ritual is gonna be made up of us standing in front of the people that we love and we get a flip of coin. So the cool part's gonna be this: if it's heads, we get to pick our favorite age. We'll get our body back, we'll get the energy back, we'll get the face that we had, whatever age you choose. If it's 28 or 35, um, you get to live in that forever. So you go back to it, you stop aging, you're in a position to where there's no sickness that's gonna take you, there's no chance of an accident forever is really starting today. Tails is gonna play out like it does for us now. We just keep living and dying really the exact way that we do now. So that's a world I want us to sit in for the next 10 minutes. So let's build it out a little bit more because really the the details of both of those worlds matter. So, excuse me, not everyone's gonna make the coin flip, right? We know that. Some of us are gonna die before 75, the same way that people do now. There's gonna be accidents, there's gonna be illness, there's gonna be all the randomness in life where people's lives get taken from them. But for those of us that do make it there, 75 isn't just a birthday, right? It's the day that we've been thinking about as long as we've understood that this rule actually existed. So it gets here and we stand there and we flip the coin. And half of us who make it there walk away. We never age another day, we never get sick, we never die. We really, for the rest of existence, we just uh are able to live. The other half are gonna lose. And when they lose, nothing dramatic happens per se, but they will go on and they'll just keep living and they'll keep aging and eventually they'll die the way they would have anyway. But if we really picture that, what it would look like, kind of in our mind's eye, a world where dying isn't guaranteed. If you had a real door out, if there was really a chance, even if it felt like a long shot, which in this case wouldn't be that long of a shot, you now imagine living inside of that world and what it would look

The Countdown to 75

SPEAKER_01 3:02

like. So imagine you were 40, and somewhere in the back of your mind, every single day, you there would be a number that you would be counting down, knowing you're 35 years out from your coin flip, right? Then you're 25 years, then you're 20 years, and then you get to an age like I don't know, 60, and you feel like the finish line is close enough that you can actually see it. And then 65 gets here, and the mass starts to get real, and you're going, oh, that's what, 3,650 days away. And then 70 rolls around. And you, I'll bet, I would just bet at 70, you would start to be very careful, and not just like a healthy careful, but almost superstitious, right? Almost superstitiously careful because you're so close. And we couldn't imagine coming all this way and not making it to the coin flip just to have a chance. But here comes 71 and 72 and 73, and every year it now feels like it weighs more than the last one because every year is one more year we might not get to spend, you know. So it becomes extremely stressful. But when you get to 74, the people around us, they wouldn't be talking about turning 74 like happy

The Moment of the Flip

SPEAKER_01 4:14

birthday. It's more like, wow, you've got one year left. You're almost there. Then all of a sudden you get through and you make it to 75. So it's the day, right? It's the one that that really you've been waiting on the whole time. We stand in front of all the people we love and we get to flip the coin. And for a few seconds, the entire really the weight of every year that we've lived um comes down to which side of the coin lands upwards. So some of us win, and it's probably gonna be the best moment that we've ever had. And some of us are gonna lose. And I want to think about what it would look like if you were in a position where you went through your hardest moment, getting to 75, flipping the coin and losing. Because it wouldn't just be losing, but it's it's losing after getting all the way to the finish line, after all the decades of hoping and thinking and ruminating about it. And then walking away from that coin flip, knowing that you're going to be in a position where you're gonna keep aging, keep declining, and eventually die exactly as you would have. Except now the difference is you know exactly what you didn't get. Something that other people did get. Some people would have had spouses and parents and best friends that had won the flip. And the entire possibility during your flip is that you're gonna spend eternity with them, and all of a sudden that possibility is gone.

The Reality of Certain Death

SPEAKER_01 5:42

That's a world where death is optional for some of us, some of the time. And that doesn't sound peaceful at all. It sounds like the most stressful way a person could possibly live. But the thing is, it's not our reality. We don't get, you know, to be in a position to flip a coin at 75. There's no ritual, there's no 50-50 shot, there's no no door over there that's marked forever. We we spend our whole lives trying to reach every single one of us without exception, we know is gonna die. Right? I mean, so there's something so freeing about that. And I know that saying that we know we're gonna die sucks. Like, I mean, I know that's not a good feeling to have. Um it's not fun to say out loud, but if you kind of work through it, I think there's something underneath it that we don't talk about enough. And that is because we know we will die with certainty, and there are no coin flips, and there are no chances for other outcomes. We are free from something that would have trapped every one of us. So we don't have to spend our time calculating in the 40s the odds of living forever. We don't have to spend our 70s just wide knuckling our way um trying to get to this this ritual that doesn't exist. And we we don't have to carry that, you know, the possibility of really getting getting all the way to 75 and losing when we get there. I mean, I can't imagine what that feeling would would actually feel like. It'd be absolutely incredible. But we don't know how it'll go. We don't, we don't know when. We don't know when it comes to death how that's going to play out. And that part is still uncertain. And if we're honest, it's that uncertainty that carries a tremendous amount of weight. But the ending itself, that's not in question. There's no version of this where we outsurvive everyone we love and keep going alone forever. And there's no version where we almost escape it and unfortunately we flip the coin wrong and we don't. So I guess what I'm proposing is this that certainty itself, it's the thing that lets us stop spending energy on outcomes that were never actually on the table. You know, we get to put that in energy somewhere else instead. We can put it into today or our projects or into the people in front of us. Um, we we can we can put it into the years that we have left instead of being in a position where um we're worried about the gamble that we're gonna have, about the years that we might never

The Freedom of Certainty

SPEAKER_01 8:19

get. So I'm not saying this to make it sound like death is easy. It isn't. It's the hardest thing we'll ever do, I'm sure. And none of us really know what it looks like when we get there. I just think it's worth sitting with, knowing something for certain, even something like this can bring a sense of relief, and it can put us in a position to where we're able to attack each and every day. Um, knowing the end result is the end result, but we can live our best days now instead of worrying about what could be if we lived in that alternate

Attack the Day

SPEAKER_01 8:53

universe. So attack the day, make some mistakes, go out there and take some chances and just enjoy the time that we have. So I appreciate you joining and hope you enjoyed. Thanks.