We can:

A. Lie to ourselves about them,

B. Avoid thinking about them, or

C. Try to accept the parts we can’t change and change what we can.

If you’re in camps A or B, don’t read this post!

Here are Thirteen Difficult Truths:

1. Irrationality – we humans are not rational, despite the fact that most of us want to believe we are. Our beliefs and behaviors are influenced by nearly-invisible social forces and numerous cognitive biases.

But I believe we can learn to become significantly more rational and that there are important personal and societal benefits from doing so. This is a major part of why I created Clearer Thinking. 

2. Wrongness – we’re wrong about some of our deeply-held beliefs. We don’t know which (being right and being wrong usually both feel like being right). We want to believe that our tribe is right, the enemy tribe dangerously wrong, and the other tribes irrelevant. The truth is much more complex and interesting.

We can be right more often by seeking out the strongest contradictory perspectives, by creating feedback loops with respect to our ideas, and by learning to play devil’s advocate to our own views.

Try, for instance, the “Belief Challenger.” 

3. Challenges – we each will experience big losses, stressors, and setbacks. Some of these could send us into a negative spiral.

This will suck, but we can build up mental health skills that help.

Try, for example, our apps https://www.uplift.app (for depression) and https://www.mindease.io (for anxiety).

4. Aging – as we grow older, we will lose physical strength, attractiveness, and perhaps also cognitive abilities.

However, by exercising regularly and eating healthy food, we can likely slow our decline. We can create hobbies and sources of joy that we can benefit from at all ages.

5. Bereavement – we will lose many of the people we love. Friendships will fray, relationships will end, and the people we love will die.

But we can focus on finding lifelong friends, exert effort to detect and repair fraying, make new friends proactively, and squeeze in all the love we can. We can also encourage our loved ones to engage in healthy habits to extend their lives.

See, for instance, “Daily Ritual: A Habit-Creation Tool.”

6. Mortality – one day, we’ll be gone.

However, by taking great care of your body, you can likely give yourself more years. By being as grateful as you can to exist each day, you may be happier during those years. By funding more rigorous life extension research, we can one day give more years to many.

See, for instance, “Longevity FAQ“.

7. Extinction – one-day, humanity will go extinct.

However, the actions we take over the coming decades/centuries could determine whether humanity lasts only a little more time or a VASTLY longer time. Our wisdom must grow faster than the power of our technology. Support and fund “existential risk” work.

See, for instance, “The case for reducing existential risks“.

8. Randomness – we’re at the mercy of a tremendous amount of luck. Some are born sick orphans in squalor, some healthy, into loving families, in wealthy countries.

We didn’t choose, but we can make the world better for others and give more people good luck.

See, for instance, “Leaving Your Mark on the World.”

9. Rejection – some people won’t like us. And whatever we do or create, some people will think it sucks.

But we can surround ourselves with people who really like and value us, who support us even if they sometimes don’t like our behavior or think our projects are pretty dumb. They help us be better.

10. We will mess up and fail many times.

But by accepting (to the best of our ability) that we (and everyone else too) will fail many times, it frees us to try harder things and to have self-compassion when we do fail. If we learn what we can from each failure, we create a silver lining (“sometimes you win, sometimes you learn.”)

See, for instance, “Learning From Mistakes.” 

11. Uncertainty – there are deep, important mysteries we will never know the answer to and major unknowns we can’t resolve. Major philosophical and personal questions of the utmost importance will go unsolved.

But we don’t need certainty to be happy. We can live with the big unknowns, even while striving as a species – and as individuals – to understand the world as best we can. We can also, at least, learn to be less of a mystery to ourselves.

See, for instance, “Life-Changing Questions.” 

12. Disappointment – we won’t get all the things we want. At some point, we’ll badly want to get a certain job, achieve a certain goal, or be with a certain person, and we’ll never get it.

But we can learn to better accept reality for what it is. And even though we can’t have all that we want, we will get some of what we want, and we can get over the things we wanted and didn’t get.

See, for instance, our article on resetting your psychological baseline.

13. Animality – we are creatures who can reason, speak, understand physics, invent ideas, write stories, think abstractly, transform the world, etc., and yet we are also animals at the same time. We aspire to be something more than animals, and yet we have animal bodies, drives, constraints, reactions, and impulses.

But we can learn to work with, rather than against, our animal nature. When our inner mouse is afraid of something we know is not dangerous, we can learn to soothe it. When our inner dog badly wants something that we know is not in our long-term interest, we can make a compromise by giving ourselves something else we desire that is not so out of alignment with our goals. When our inner bee wants to copy others in doing something that violates our values, we can find other ways to fit in without compromising our integrity, or we can find a new colony that suits us better.

Importantly, since these are difficult truths for all of us, we can face them together, seeking to help one another.

For me, reflecting on the difficult truths that we all face gives new meaning to the idea that we should “be kind because everyone is fighting a great battle.”

It’s tough being a human. But thankfully, we are not alone. Let’s make the best of this together.

This piece was first written on March 5, 2021, and first appeared on this site on October 28, 2022.

You shouldn’t spoil the movie: imagine going to a movie that has a lot of good parts, but you don’t enjoy those good parts because while they’re happening, you keep thinking about the fact that the movie will eventually end. If it doesn’t make sense to do that in a movie, then it makes even less sense to do that in your life. You may find it helpful to simply note when disruptive thoughts about death occur and remind yourself at those times that they are counterproductive if they are distracting you from enjoying “the movie.”

Death doesn’t harm you while living or dead: if a person is alive, then death has not reached them yet, so a person’s death cannot harm that person while they are still living. If a person is dead, then they do not exist, and so can experience no harm. Hence your own death cannot harm you either when you are living or when you are dead. So if death is a harm to you, it is a harm to you during those seconds or minutes when you are transitioning from alive to dead, but at least that period is very short-lived and has not happened yet.

Death is bearable: if it is not death itself that you fear, but rather the suffering that sometimes comes before death, keep in mind that very, very few people commit suicide upon nearing death, suggesting that the suffering that sometimes comes before slow deaths is probably very rarely truly intolerable (unless the barrier to committing suicide is very high).

You are incredibly lucky to exist at all: you may not feel it every day (or even most days), but the fact that you exist is an extremely lucky chance occurrence. Consider, for instance, that male ejaculate contains on average about 280 million sperm, and that if ANY of these had fertilized your mother’s egg other than the one that did, you would not exist right now. And that’s just one of a vast number of coincidences that were required for you to be born.

It could be worse: there are probably quite a few things worse than total oblivion (hell, for instance, or just being tortured for years). To me, this contrast effect (comparing death to even worse things) makes me feel better about death itself since it is merely oblivion and could be worse.

Your impact can live on: the things you choose to do while alive can impact distant generations living long after you are gone, even if you are not a famous scientist or influential politician. For instance, if you have children, then the way you treat them will have effects on how they treat their children and hence how their children treat their own children, etc. (at least, assuming the world doesn’t end before then). Or, if over a span of a number of years you end up giving ten thousand dollars to malaria prevention, it could very well save a person’s life, which could have long-term positive consequences for that person’s parents and spouse and friends and children. More generally, there are ripple effects for many actions that you take, which end up having second-order and third-order consequences that could extend long past your lifespan.

Full acceptance can make it easier: instead of fighting mentally against the reality that you will die, truly accepting that it will happen and then focussing on how to live your life with this constraint can be less upsetting in the long run. Of course, this doesn’t mean that you should give in to dying soon: you should still do everything you can to extend your life while fully accepting that it is eventually inevitable.

We’re in this together: remember that everyone who was born more than 125 years ago is now dead, that this is something all humans face, and that (unless some truly remarkable new technology is invented, which I’m hoping for, but which is a long shot) we all share this hardship. Talk to others about how they come to peace with death. Lean on them. You don’t need to go it alone.

You can have one hell of a ride: even though the ride must end, you can make it a damn good one. With hard work and some luck, you can have a truly amazing and meaningful time while you’re here.

Finiteness does not mean meaninglessness: occasionally, people find that the fact that things will end makes everything feel meaningless. But if you believe this is true, that implies that you believe things would only be meaningful if they lasted forever. I don’t know about you, but this intuitively feels false to me. My gut says the opposite is true, at least in the sense that finiteness imbues greater meaning to each minute, making time more precious.

Death is a reminder to deeply savor: because of death, we should make an extra effort to try to savor the taste of every bite of chocolate, the feeling on our skin when we walk outside into nice weather, the coziness of being indoors when it’s raining, the excitement of each deep connection we make with other human beings, the start of our favorite song, the smell of fresh air, and the thrill of grasping a new idea. If you lived forever, you could consume each of these things an infinite number of times, but you only have a finite number of each of them left, so experience them as fully and completely as you can manage.

Death is bad, but you can find peace with it: don’t get me wrong, death is NOT a good thing (except in the rare instances where it cuts a bad existence short). It is undeniably bad because it causes good things (things that we value) to cease. One day of happy, meaningful, altruistic life lived is better than just one hour of it, and one year of it is better still (all else held equal). Even if there are a few problems that death makes simpler, like overcrowding and avoiding the stagnation of ideas, in the absence of death, we could find better solutions for these problems. But even accepting that death is truly bad, it is something we can learn to be at peace with.
Consider returning to the list above when you feel your own mortality weighing on you heavily, and see which of these framings you find most helpful.