Against the Fetishization of the Deathbed

Why the value of a life should be judged from within it, not from the end of it

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Do not go gentle into that good night - Dylan Thomas

There is a sort of orthodoxy in our thinking about what matters in our lives that takes our final stretch of life to be the ultimate arbiter of its value; when you’re lying on your deathbed, will you be thinking fondly of all the time you spent watching TV shows and learning train facts? “Obviously not,” you say, and this is supposed to show that those aren’t the things that truly matter in your life. But I think this approach to thinking about our lives is misguided.

On the most literal interpretation of this way of thinking, you should care very much about the things you are actually going to think back on on your deathbed. Since you probably won’t remember very many things from your deathbed, this would detract a lot of value from most things in your life. Additionally, it would arbitrarily make random events of your life more valuable, simply due to whether you will happen to look back on them or not. But this is also obviously a very uncharitable interpretation, and not what the idea is getting at.

A more plausible thought is a conditional one: The parts of life that are most valuable are those that if you were to remember them from your deathbed, you would look back on with fondness. So the way to determine how valuable something you’re doing is, is to imagine how you would feel about it if you were at the end of your life looking back at it. But consider now the experience of eating a tasty piece of candy. I take it this is a pleasurable and valuable experience to have in itself. Although if you look back at that experience from your deathbed, you probably won’t be thinking fondly about that time that you ate a piece of candy—the moment has passed. Maybe you value having had that unique type of experience, but we can imagine that you eat another identical piece of candy, and then another. The additional pieces of candy won’t give you unique experiences, and eating more candy won’t really give you more things to look fondly back at from your deathbed. Nevertheless, eating two pieces of candy is more valuable and pleasurable than eating one (disregarding health impacts etc.)—the value of having a pleasurable taste-experience won’t disappear if you have experienced another token of that type of experience before. But the value of these sorts of repeated, fleeting experiences isn’t captured by looking back at them, since their value is contained in the moments they’re experienced.

So it at least seems like the value of a moment isn’t wholly determined by how you would look back on it, as some of the value is contained just in the experience when you have it. But it might still be that the things that you’d look back at fondly are more valuable, in virtue of that fact. Here we get into a more general point about the value of memories. I don’t really think that remembering things has a special value beyond the value of the particular moments you spend remembering. I mean, what is remembering really? It seems like it’s just a sort of mental state you can be in at a certain time, of thinking about a previous mental state you have had. So it looks like the value of remembering will have to be something about that mental state, namely the quality of having it. Thus just like the value of eating a piece of candy comes from the quality of that experience, the value of remembering comes from the quality of the experience of remembering. This is all to say that the value of remembering is no new kind of value—it’s good to have a good memory in exactly the same way that it’s good to have any other type of good experience. But now it becomes clear that an experience being memorable or good for looking back on can’t make that experience itself more valuable. Whether or not watching a good movie is the sort of thing you could look back on fondly isn’t relevant to the value of watching that movie itself—what matters is what it’s like to watch the movie while you’re doing so.

It then seems like memorable moments can at best only be instrumentally valuable insofar as you will actually think back on them at some point, and enjoy doing this. We are now back to something like the first interpretation of the thesis—moments in your life are more valuable if you actually remember them fondly from your deathbed. But this is only in the very trivial sense that the experience of remembering is valuable at that time because of how it feels to remember; it equally makes your cup of coffee this morning more valuable if you think fondly back on it right now. This is surely not something to guide our life-pursuits around. Instead we should aim at having these valuable experiences themselves, of which memories are only a subset.

Imagining how you might retrospectively judge what you’re doing right now might in some ways be a useful heuristic, in that you can often be hard to judge how what you’re currently doing might affect the value of future moments. After all, you should probably not just be concerned about the value of your life right now, but the value of it as a whole,¹ and imagining whether you will regret a current action is a good way of seeing whether that action might negatively affect future moments. But it’s again important to not then think that the retrospective judgement of something is actually relevant to how worthwhile that thing is in itself.

This has all been pretty abstract, but I think this will affect how we think about many of the things we’re doing in our lives. One very concrete example is that I quite like watching reels on Instagram. From my deathbed, I probably won’t be thinking back on all the time I have spent watching stupid, short videos, but that doesn’t really matter, as I have been laughing my ass off having a good time during the time that I have actually been watching them, and that makes it valuable in itself. There are obviously all sorts of other adverse effects here, like that shortform content can be super addictive to the extent that you’ll be scrolling through more and more videos while wishing you would stop, even when you aren’t enjoying the time you’re spending anymore. For this reason you’d probably be better off doing many other things in most cases. But this has nothing to do with whether it’s a memorable experience, and the time that you have actually spent enjoying watching funny videos is not made less valuable by the fact that you won’t look fondly back on it.

I will just add that from what I’ve said, it might sound like I’m proposing some sort of hedonism. This is not the case. It might be that relationships, for example, are more valuable than the experience of having them in itself. The point is simply that none of the value of, say, a relationship lies in how you might retrospectively judge or remember it.

I generally don’t like the folk way of talking of philosophy as a way of life, or something that should inspire you, or whatever. But I will say that far from finding this thesis demotivating or depressing, I find it very uplifting: The value of your life is not something you are building towards, and which you only get to appreciate just as it’s all over.—it’s something you’re experiencing right now. This very moment is a part of the value of your life, and you’re enjoying it as you read (assuming the current moment is valuable, which—let’s be real—it couldn’t not be when you’re reading Wonder and Aporia). I will say that there I also feel some sadness in the fact that once you have experienced the value of a moment, you’re never getting it back. The best you can do is think back to it, but in doing so you are only experiencing another, novel, moment, which will itself pass.

Will I look back fondly on having had some fleeting pleasure from my deathbed? Probably not. But why should I care about what I will think from my deathbed?—it’s only one of many moments of my life, no less important than the rest, and in this moment right now I am very happy to be having this experience.

At lunchtime I bought a huge orange—
The size of it made us all laugh.
I peeled it and shared it with Robert and Dave—
They got quarters and I had a half.

And that orange, it made me so happy,
As ordinary things often do
Just lately. The shopping. A walk in the park.
This is peace and contentment. It’s new.

The rest of the day was quite easy.
I did all the jobs on my list
And enjoyed them and had some time over.
I love you. I’m glad I exist.

The Orange - Wendy Cope

1. Unless Parfit has something to say!!