This is a continuation of our death conversation from the podcast and honestly this part is the one that stuck with me the most. So one of the guys mentioned he actually wrote a paper on this back in school – the five stages of grief that most people associate with losing a loved one (denial, anger, bargaining, fear/depression, acceptance) apparently also apply to accepting your OWN mortality. Like you go through the exact same stages when you’re facing your own death as you would grieving somebody else’s.
Which honestly kind of blew my mind a little when I thought about it. You deny it first (“that’s not happening to me, not soon”), then you move into fear once it starts to feel real, then bargaining kicks in where your basically trying to buy more time any way you can, then anger that it’s happening at all, and eventually, if you get there, acceptance.
So naturally the next question was, what does bargaining actually look like in this context. And the answer is kind of fascinating – you see it with billionaires pouring money into life extension research, cryogenics, the whole “freeze me and bring me back later” Walt Disney urban legend thing. But for most regular people it looks a lot smaller and more human – if you have a loved one who’s sick and you know they’re dying, bargaining looks like just wanting a little more time. Just a little longer. Please.
Then we got into a genuinely interesting hypothetical – if you had a literal gun to your head and truly believed you were about to die, would that change your perspective? And the argument was yeah, absolutely, it would drastically shift how you think about death in that moment, because if you really had made peace with dying you wouldn’t fight to survive in that situation. You’d just accept it. But almost everybody, when actually faced with real imminent death, fights like hell to live. Which kind of proves that deep down most of us haven’t actually made peace with it the way we claim to have.
One of the guys pushed back on this a little, saying he genuinely thinks he’d be chill even in that scenario. He used this wild analogy of imagining himself in a D-Day situation, rolling up on the beaches of Normandy, knowing the gate’s about to drop and it could be over any second. And he was like, honestly, however that plays out, it plays out that way, I’m at peace with it. Which is either genuine acceptance or just really good bravado, hard to say for sure until you’re actually in that position.
Someone else in the group admitted they wished they had that same level of nonchalance about it, and honestly, same. I think most of us fall somewhere in between – logically accepting that death is coming, but not actually being tested on that acceptance in a real high stakes moment.
What I took away from this part of the conversation is that grief isnt just something that happens to you when you lose someone else, its something you go through internally when you come to terms with your own ending too. And most of us are probably a lot further back in that process than we’d like to admit, sitting somewhere in fear or bargaining, telling ourselves we’re already at acceptance.
Anyway, kind of a heavy one but a genuinely interesting framework to think through. Curious where you’d honestly place yourself on that five stage scale when it comes to your own mortality.
