I think about death more than I used to. Not in a morbid way. In a practical way. When I'm caught in a spiral of trivial worries — an email I should have worded differently, a social slight I'm replaying, a decision that feels enormous but won't matter in six months — I ask myself a question that cuts through the noise with almost violent efficiency: when I'm dying, will I care about this?
The answer is almost always no. And the relief that follows — the sudden, clarifying perspective that reduces the unmanageable to the irrelevant — is something I've come to rely on. Death, it turns out, is the best prioritization tool I've ever found. It doesn't tell me what to care about. But it tells me, with brutal precision, what not to care about. And that, for someone prone to anxiety and overthinking, is a gift.
Death contemplation — the practice of intentionally facing one's mortality — has a long philosophical and spiritual history. The Stoics called it memento mori: remember you will die. Buddhist traditions incorporate meditations on death and impermanence. The purpose is not morbidity. It's clarity. When you remember that your time is finite, the things that matter come into focus. The things that don't matter fall away. The question "what should I do with my life?" doesn't get answered by adding more information. It gets answered by subtracting everything except what's essential. Death does the subtraction.
Personality shapes how people relate to death contemplation — who benefits from it, who avoids it, and why.
Neuroticism is the obvious factor. Highly neurotic people tend to avoid thinking about death. It triggers anxiety. The avoidance is understandable. But it's also costly. The neurotic person who avoids death contemplation is also avoiding its clarifying effect. They're stuck in a loop of worrying about things that, from the perspective of mortality, don't matter. The practice of death contemplation — done gently, not as a confrontation but as a perspective shift — can be especially valuable for neurotic people. It doesn't increase anxiety when done right. It reduces it. The things you were anxious about look different from the perspective of your deathbed. Smaller. More manageable. Sometimes irrelevant entirely.
Openness determines the willingness to engage with the exercise. High-openness people are more comfortable with existential questions. They don't need to have answers to tolerate the discomfort of big, unresolved topics. Death contemplation comes more naturally to them. Low-openness people may find the exercise pointless or distressing. They need a more practical frame: not "contemplate your mortality" but "imagine you only had five years left — what would you stop doing?" The frame is the same. The packaging is different. Find the packaging that works for your personality.
Conscientiousness shapes what the contemplation produces. Highly conscientious people tend to respond to death contemplation by making plans — bucket lists, legacy projects, structured approaches to "making the most of the time I have." This is productive. But it can also miss the point. The point isn't to fill your remaining time with more achievement. It's to clarify what kind of achievement — or non-achievement — actually matters. The conscientious person needs to ask not just "what should I do before I die?" but "what, from my deathbed, will I be glad I did — and what will I wish I hadn't spent so much time on?"
Pause and Reflect: Imagine yourself at the end of your life, looking back. What do you hope you spent your time on? What do you hope you didn't? Now look at your calendar for this week. How much of it aligns with the first list? How much with the second? The gap between them is the gap between the life you want to have lived and the life you're actually living. It's worth looking at.
The psychiatrist Irvin Yalom, who has written extensively about death and existential psychotherapy, suggests that the awareness of death can function as an "awakening experience" — a shift from living inauthentically, according to others' expectations, to living authentically, according to your own values. The person who has confronted their mortality, Yalom argues, is less likely to waste time on things that don't matter. The confrontation strips away the trivial. What remains is essential. This is not a one-time event. It's a practice. The awareness fades. The trivial creeps back in. The practice is to return, periodically, to the perspective that death provides — not to dwell in morbidity, but to reorient toward what matters.
One exercise from Yalom's work: imagine your own funeral. Who is there? What are they saying about you — not the polite eulogy, but the honest, private reflections of the people who knew you best? Would you be satisfied with what they're saying? If not, what would you need to change about how you're living now to close the gap? The exercise is uncomfortable. It's meant to be. The discomfort is productive. It's the friction between the life you're living and the life you want to have lived. Don't run from the friction. Sit in it. Let it guide you.
How do you practice death contemplation without spiraling into existential dread? The key is dosage and framing.
Dosage: you don't need to dwell on death for hours. A few minutes, occasionally, is enough. The Stoics recommended a daily practice — briefly, in the morning, reminding yourself that this day could be your last. Not as a threat. As a perspective. The practice takes thirty seconds. Its effect on how you move through the day is disproportionate.
Framing: death contemplation is not about preparing for death. It's about clarifying life. The question isn't "how do I want to die?" It's "given that I will die, how do I want to live?" The shift from death-focus to life-focus is essential. Death is the lens. Life is the subject. Don't stare at the lens. Look through it at what it illuminates.
A practical exercise: the "eulogy exercise." Write two eulogies for yourself — one based on your current trajectory, one based on the person you want to become. Not the achievements you want listed. The qualities. The impact. The way people describe you when you're gone. The gap between the two eulogies is instructive. It tells you where you're misaligned. Not with someone else's expectations. With your own values. The values you haven't been living because you've been too busy to notice the gap.
Death contemplation is not for everyone. Some people find it genuinely distressing, and forcing it isn't helpful. But for those who can tolerate the discomfort, it's one of the most powerful tools for cutting through the noise of daily life and reconnecting with what actually matters. The trivial worries, the petty grievances, the endless optimization of things that won't count at the end — death quiets all of that. What remains is clarity. And clarity, for people who've been lost in the noise, feels like coming home.
The MyTraitsLab Personality Test can help you understand the personality patterns that shape your relationship with big questions. Because the question of what matters isn't answered by a test. But understanding who you are — what you value, what you fear, what you're drawn toward — provides the raw material. The test gives you the map. Death contemplation gives you the courage to use it.
