Chapter 16 Exercises: Death

A note before you begin: These exercises involve reflection on mortality — your own and that of people you have lost or may lose. Please engage at a pace that feels right for you. Some exercises may surface difficult emotions, and that is appropriate and normal. If any exercise feels like too much right now, skip it and return when you're ready. There is no deadline, and there is nothing to prove.

Comprehension

Exercise 16.1 — Map the Frameworks

In your own words, write a brief summary (3–4 sentences each) of what each framework teaches about death and how to relate to it:

  • Epicurus
  • The Stoic tradition (Marcus Aurelius)
  • Heidegger
  • Buddhist impermanence
  • African philosophy / the living-dead

Then, without looking at the chapter: which one do you find most intuitively convincing on first reading, and why? Which one is hardest for you to take seriously, and why?

Thought Experiments

Exercise 16.2 — The Symmetry Test

Take a moment and actually try the Epicurean/Lucretian symmetry argument. Think about the billions of years before you were born — the entirety of human history that passed without you. The Roman Empire. The Renaissance. The century before you were born.

(a) Is there something that feels relevantly different to you between the pre-birth period and the post-death period? If so, what is it?

(b) Nagel's deprivation account says that death harms you by taking away goods you would otherwise have had. Does the pre-birth period also deprive you of goods you would otherwise have had (the pleasures and experiences of a longer life)? If so, does the symmetry argument actually work?

(c) If the Epicurean argument is logically correct — if death really isn't an experience and therefore can't be suffered — why do you think it doesn't feel more reassuring than it does?

Exercise 16.3 — The View from Above

Try Marcus Aurelius's "view from above" meditation. Spend five quiet minutes imagining your current concerns, projects, relationships, and ambitions from a distance — first from the perspective of your city, then your nation, then the span of a century, then geological time.

(a) What, if anything, looks different from the wider perspective?

(b) Did this feel clarifying, or did it feel like a threat to things that matter to you? Why might that be?

(c) The Stoic point is not that nothing matters but that some things matter differently at different scales. What in your life looks more important from the wider perspective, not less?

Exercise 16.4 — The Obituary Exercise

Write the obituary you'd like to have written about you. Not the one you think you'll have — the one you'd genuinely want.

Focus not on accomplishments and credentials (those can be in it too, but they're the easy part) but on character: what kind of person do you want to be remembered as? What do you want the people who knew you to say about who you were to them?

Then put the obituary aside and ask: what does the gap between who I am today and who I want that obituary to describe tell me about my current priorities?

This exercise is not meant to produce guilt. It is meant to produce clarity. The goal is information, not self-condemnation.

Exercise 16.5 — Heidegger's Question

Heidegger argues that death is "non-relational" — it is mine alone, and no one can take it from me or share it. In this singularity, it addresses a question specifically to me: what is this particular existence for?

Set aside five minutes and try to actually sit with this question — not as an academic exercise but as a genuine inquiry.

(a) What answer arises, if any?

(b) Does the question feel threatening, illuminating, or something else?

(c) Heidegger distinguishes between living according to what "one does" (the anonymous convention) and living authentically (according to what actually matters to you specifically). Is there any area of your life where you recognize yourself living more according to convention than authentic conviction? What would it look like to move the other way?

Journaling Prompts

Exercise 16.6 — Your Relationship with Mortality

This exercise asks for honest, private reflection. There are no correct answers.

Write about your relationship with mortality — either your own or the deaths of people you've lost, or both.

Some prompts to help you start, if you need them:

  • What is your earliest memory of learning that people die?
  • Has the death of someone close to you changed how you live? If so, how?
  • What are you currently most afraid of losing?
  • Do you have a working understanding of what death is — is it an ending, a transition, something else? Does it matter to you what the answer is?
  • What, if anything, does philosophy (explicit or implicit) offer you when you think about death — either your own or others'?

There is no prescribed length. Write what's true.

Exercise 16.7 — Negative Visualization (Gentle Version)

The Stoic practice of negative visualization applied to relationships is sometimes described as "imagining the worst." But the version most worth practicing is gentler than that: simply remembering, in the presence of someone you love, that this is not guaranteed.

You don't need to practice this with elaborate mental imagery. Try it as a simple orientation: the next time you are with someone you care about — a friend, a parent, a partner, a child — let yourself be present to the fact that this specific moment is itself, and will not be again in exactly this form.

(a) After trying this, what did you notice?

(b) Did it make the interaction feel more precious, more anxious, or something else?

(c) Stoics would say the anxiety, if it arises, is a signal that you already care deeply — which is good. The practice is not meant to make you fearful but to cut through the distraction that makes you miss what is actually here. Did it do that for you?

Progressive Project Component

For your Meaning section of the Examined Life Portfolio:

Write a 400–600 word entry addressing:

  1. Which philosophical framework for thinking about death do you find most honest and most useful? Not necessarily the most comfortable — the one that best accounts for your actual experience and offers genuine resources.

  2. How do you currently relate to your own mortality? Is it something you think about? Something you avoid? Has something happened in your life that forced you to engage with it?

  3. Bronnie Ware's research identified the five most common regrets of the dying. Reading them, do any land for you? Not as a verdict on your life so far, but as information about your current direction?

  4. What, if anything, do you want to do differently in light of this chapter? Again: not a manifesto or a resolution — just an honest note about what, if anything, this chapter has moved in you.

A Note on Limits

This chapter, and these exercises, offer philosophical frameworks. Philosophy can be a genuine resource in the face of mortality — it clarifies, it provides language, it connects you to thousands of years of humans grappling with the same reality.

But philosophy is not the only resource, and it is not always enough. If you are currently grieving, the frameworks here may feel cold or abstract or precisely wrong for where you are. That is not a failure of the frameworks or of you — it is the honest limit of what philosophy can do. Grief has its own rhythm, its own requirements, its own timeline. Chapter 37 is written for the moments when philosophy is not enough.

Please take care of yourself.