Immortality Is a Dirty Lie (But You Gotta Believe It Anyway)

My dad was diagnosed with his first cancer fifteen years ago. After the initial shock, he fell into a deep depression conflated with his retirement, and effectively stopped living. At one point, he had not simply got up out of his chair enough that doctors told him if he didn’t move some, he’d lose his ability to walk at all.

Faced with something he couldn’t quite wrap his head around, he gave up. But he didn’t die. He just diminished, day by day, focused more on what he could no longer do and resistant to any attempt to do other things. He used to exercise back in his forties (a fact he let me in on in his last days) but refused to do anything that resembled physical activity once stricken with disease.

He was told he could lose some weight to navigate some of his issues; he preferred a pill, which became pills, which became an endless supply of expensive pills. Like a chess player who only plays to keep playing rather than to win, he settled into a long, slow demise knowing that at some point, the party would be over. He had embraced a prison of his own body, waiting out death for as long as he could but without the fire to get up and live.

He stopped believing in his own immortality.

Somewhere between the first time you faked confidence in a middle school dance and the last time you Googled “how long does it take to die of a broken heart” while holding a Taco Bell burrito like a rosary, you started to suspect the truth: you’re not gonna make it out of this alive.

That’s the catch. That’s always the catch. We are, every single one of us, terminal meat puppets on a slow conveyor belt to irrelevance, spouting big ideas while our joints fail and our teeth yellow like antique piano keys. And yet…

And yet…

The ones who thrive, who build, who risk, who burn like chemical fires instead of slowly composting in the waiting rooms of life? They don’t believe in death. Not really. Not deep down. Because in order to thrive, to truly thrive, to grip life by the scruff and shake meaning into it like a vending machine that ate your last dollar, you have to believe you will live forever.

You have to stare at mortality, pants around your ankles, and scream: “Not today, motherfucker!”

Thrive is a weird word. Corporate. Punchy. Sounds like a quarterly report on ketamine. “We’re not surviving this quarter, Greg. We’re thriving. Pass the aioli.”

But what it really means is this: to thrive is to grow in hostile conditions. It’s the weed in the concrete. It’s the cockroach with a business card. It’s the divorced dad who becomes a slam poet instead of buying a boat.

And growth—real, blood-and-bone growth—requires risk. It requires big, dumb, stupid hope. The kind of hope that says, “Sure, I could lose everything, but I’m gonna try anyway.”

Nobody walks into a burning building thinking they might not make it out. They walk in believing they’ll pull a dog from the flames and get a Netflix movie starring Ryan Gosling. That’s the delusion. That’s the engine. It’s the lie of immortality, and we need it like oxygen.

Death Is a Fact, Not a Lifestyle

It’s popular right now to be existentially chic. Everyone’s into death. We meditate on it, journal about it, hashtag it into faux enlightenment. There’s a whole industry built around “memento mori” merch—skull rings and candle-lit yoga with a side of nihilism. I briefly dated a woman who fetishized the Grim Reaper, called herself a Satanist, wore a lot of black, and fucked a lot of random dudes. She claimed she was defying the Underworld as she made a show of reading runes and tarot cards. I wasn’t buying it.

Knowing you’ll die is not the same as living like you will.

Real knowledge of mortality—not the Pinterest version, but the visceral, sweat-slicked realization that your bones will turn to dust and your Instagram will become a digital tombstone—it paralyzes. It stalls the engine. It turns the brave into bureaucrats.

You can’t paint like Basquiat if you’re worried about your colonoscopy.

You can’t love like a lunatic if you’re constantly calculating the emotional ROI.

The people who actually do things, make weird art and start ridiculous businesses and propose to people in airport terminals because “fuck it, we might die tomorrow” all suffer from a form of spiritual immortality. They believe in tomorrow like it’s a birthright, even while today punches them in the throat.

I once met a guy who believed he would live to 122. He ate raw garlic, biked to work, and told everyone he was “reverse-aging” thanks to seaweed enemas and daily cold plunges. I won’t say I hated him but despised is pretty close. He had the eyes of someone who never had a hangover or an existential crisis.

But he was thriving. Obnoxiously so.

Because he believed that the future was his. That every day was a chapter, not a countdown. And because of that, he took risks. He started things. He pissed off lesser mortals by being confident in a world designed to crush confidence under the weight of analytics and anxiety.

Thriving isn’t humble. It’s audacious. It’s arrogance with a planner. You have to believe you’re eternal to matter even temporarily. You have to think the game goes on forever in order to play like it counts.

Nihilism Is for Cowards with Philosophy Degrees

Nihilism is a cop-out.

It’s a mental shrug in a leather jacket.

And don’t get me wrong, I’ve played that song. I’ve smoked the clove cigarettes, read the Camus, whispered “nothing matters” like a curse to the moon. My third ex-wife luxuriated on the epic Chaise Lounge of the Nihilistic Living Room. But nihilism isn’t edgy, it’s lazy. It’s the cozy weighted blanket of the intellectually disengaged.

Thriving requires rejection of the void. A deliberate, defiant flipping of the middle finger to entropy. My mom is a full-on believer in Jesus of Nazareth and it is her way of maintaining that ridiculous, undeniable optimism for the future. For her, she is immortal because her deity has made that promise. Even if you don’t believe in God or heaven or cosmic justice, you have to believe in your own narrative immortality. That you will matter. That what you do echoes beyond the closing credits.

Otherwise, why not just rot? Why not choose the same dialysis-driven diminishment my father chose?

Why not just fill your days with content and carbs until your last breath is indistinguishable from a sigh? Why not, in that last and final breath, ask the nurse about your credit score?

Because we’re not built for that. We’re not meant to lie still. We are meant to make noise.

Stripping off the spiritual latex for a minute, let’s talk about forever.

Not pearly gates. Not reincarnation. Not whatever Silicon Valley is promising with brain uploads and sex robots named Carl. I’m talking about impact. About legacy in the blood-and-ink sense.

Believing you’ll live forever doesn’t have to mean eternal consciousness. It can mean leaving dents.

The book you write.

The kid you raise.

The mural you paint on a city wall nobody asked you to.

The friend you convince not to jump.

The laugh you give a stranger on the worst day of their life.

That’s forever.

That’s the version of immortality that isn’t delusional. That version is actionable.

People who thrive believe that what they do sticks. That it lands. That it matters. They believe they exist in the narrative fabric, not just the cellular one. That their story will be told, even if it’s only in the trembling voice of someone who loved them once.

Fear is a Houseplant in a Pot You Keep Watering

Fear is real. It’s there in every “what if.”

What if I fail?

What if I get sick?

What if I’m forgotten?

But thriving is not the absence of fear. It’s redecorating around it.

Fear is a houseplant. You don’t kill it, it just sits in the corner, muttering. You acknowledge it, maybe even water it a little, but you don’t let it dictate the furniture arrangement.

People who thrive build lives with fear as a roommate, not a landlord.

They buy the ticket. They take the ride. And when death knocks they don’t pretend they’re ready. But they’ve lived like they had all the time in the world, which is the only sane way to spend a limited amount of time.

In the end, we are all just apes who read trying to give meaning to the blinking cursor of existence. We invent gods, write manifestos, tattoo quotes on our biceps because we cannot accept the blankness of the void.

That’s not a flaw. That’s the feature.

We need the lie.

We need the myth.

We need to believe, if only for the length of a breath, that this all goes somewhere. That what we do isn’t just sandcastles before the tide.

Because the alternative is paralysis. The alternative is a beige life of half-choices and safety rails. The alternative is survival in the absence of life.

And who wants to be the guy who survived the world but never actually lived in it?

So yeah—you’re going to die.

So what?

Get in line.

The trick isn’t to beat death. The trick is to make death show up late because you were too busy setting the sky on fire with your weird little passions and dumbass hope.

Thrive like you’re eternal.

Lie to yourself in the most productive way imaginable.

Build like you’ll never run out of time.

Love like it’s not a limited offer.

Rage against the brevity of it all with art, sweat, laughter, and absolutely unearned confidence.

Pretend you’ll live forever.

Because if you do it right, a part of you just might.