Remember: you must die.

Life only feels very, very long because we haven’t witnessed eternity yet. And how old you feel comes down to how you lived, not how long you existed for.

Let me get you in on this: death precedes biological cessation. Meaning, death is experienced long before, and after, the body stops counting down the seconds.

First, it’s experienced as internal divestment: through the shedding of ego and old selves. Second, as external withdraw: through the loss of relational presence or attachment. Death, here, is the severing of inner and outer human connection.

We also draw a red line between social and civil death: the quiet, administrative erasure that happens when your existence is no longer attuned, necessary, or allowed to breathe in the spaces you once could.

From this, I’ve come to see death, of all kinds, as motivating: because every encounter with death, is a wake-up call. To consciously participate in my own life.

Life becomes torturous not because it actually is long, but because we mistake it’s duration for depth. We lay where we should have moved, and call that survival. Even a real death sentence is not torturous because of the certainty of death, it comes from believing that you will be here forever.

Death asks whether you are moving toward the destination you are meant to arrive, or lingering in a place you have already left. It presses you with a daunting question: if you knew you had only one day left — or that this single day was all you had ever lived — would you be proud of how you spent it? Or would you mourn a terrible fate as if it were already sealed?

The Infinities of Divine and Social Timelines

When being alive was not a guarantee, your existence is already an achievement, or at least the prerequisite for all there is to aspire to.

Here’s a life hack: societal timelines and statuses lose their authority if you believe in life after death. When the ceiling for achievement is ever-expanding — in this life and the next — every moment is always moving you an inch closer to death of some kind, rather than milestone.

Even your biological death can be lived up to as a meaningful milestone, not a consequence, when you recognize that a life well lived is measured not in curated accolades, but in the conscious use of time. What matters is not how closely you followed prescribed paths, but how you intentionally spent your moments. For it is those moments that determine your rank in the next world — not just how high you rose in this one.

Imagine if your last words were prompted by this:

Did you ever fear death — or only the height of your ranks? And where?

Did you ever fear mortality — or just mediocrity? And where?

Our obsession with milestones misses the point, because your existence itself was a gift — a flawlessly timed one. And while time is fixed in a way that is always intentional, it moves in a way we can’t control. You don’t need to wait for a coming of age, when coming into existence was proof enough of your timeliness. If your worth were truly contingent on achievement, birth itself would disqualify you — and yet here you are. Your arrival was your evidence.

Necropolitics and the Value of Aliveness

And yet, not all deaths are experienced equally. Beyond the social and cosmic, the political world assigns value — or disposability — to lives.

When neither personal meaning nor higher purpose anchors most human life anymore, our inner and outer worlds naturally run the risk of decay. Necropolitics, as Achille Mbembe theorizes, maps out this terrain exactly: through the socio-political management of life and death.

At the heart of Mbembe’s theory are “death-worlds” — conditions in which populations, or even ourselves, are systematically exposed to social, political, and economic forces that render our lives effectively disposable. In these spaces, full participation in life is no longer equally guaranteed or valued. This is because the social and civil recognition of existence — access, belonging, even the permission to be seen — is unevenly assigned. Life and death become statuses assigned through political power. Necropolitics shows that aliveness itself can become a measure of privilege, rather than a universal human experience.

This hierarchy of life is evident in our present-day reality: where being alive or dead can function as a social rank rather than a universal, and shared inevitability. In a system of tiered death-worlds, to be among the “living-dead” — or physically dead — signals exclusion from belonging. Whether you are old or young at 30, depends on your type of death. And if you let it, what begins as structural marginalization can harden into self-perception: as socially imposed limits that are absorbed as self-imposed ones.

Understanding this, your aliveness is as sacred as gold — not only metaphysically, but politically, and as a resource.

So now, knowing that your aliveness carries cosmic significance and social consequence — would you live differently?

If aliveness is not just a state, but a social status — would you treat it as power, or wait for permission?

No matter what society says about the deadlines it draws, our death is inevitable.

How we choose to measure time can change, but not when our time will come. That time is fixed. Your time is never cut short, it is always just in time.

So if you are still here, just remember you were gifted with time.

And remember that this life is a test of time; to be just in time is merely a matter of time, and what you make matter in that time.

Your real cause of death will not be the lack of stardom; it will be determined by how well you trained yourself to balance on a rope thinner than a hair, and sharper than a sword. With each step a choice, each moment counted. Life is an operating room, don’t spend it like a room to be waiting in.

With your passing, strangers will eventually occupy the spaces you fought so hard to “own”. Because life will always go on for you elsewhere. You didn’t just come into this world, you will come out of it.

So remember to live.