I recently read How to Die by Seneca, and I agreed with much of it. He’s right that living in fear of death is no way to live. Death is inevitable. Pretending otherwise just makes us anxious and keeps us from living fully.

But much of the book talks about suicide and tries to downplay it. Seneca argues you shouldn’t kill yourself until all hope is gone, when there’s nothing left but suffering. But people lose hope far too easily. That worries me. If we normalize death too much, people in pain might give up too soon. And if society accepts death as trivial, we risk taking other people’s deaths lightly or even encouraging them, especially among the vulnerable.

I’ve been depressed several times in my life. Suicidal ideations have for the most part gone away for a long time especially now that I have a wife and daughter. That’s a powerful reason to live but it’s also troubling. What if they weren’t here? What about people who don’t have loved ones? Does their life matter less? Instead of just telling us not to fear death, why not tell us why to live?

That question matters even more when you think about the bigger picture. Every star in the universe will eventually go cold and all that man has built will be forgotten. It’s like playing a game where you’re guaranteed to lose in the end. Why do we keep playing? Seneca doesn’t say.

And what does it mean to live well? Should I quit a dull but stable job for something more fulfilling? Should I stay and use my money to help others? What does a “good life” look like? If death is inevitable, then how we spend our short time here matters even more.

Another worry I have with Seneca’s calm view of death is how it might shape society. If enough people believe that death is nothing, many might choose it when things get hard. The ruthless, those willing to inflict or endure pain, could dominate while the more sensitive disappear. That would warp our values and our power structures. And if death is just a return to nonexistence, we might become detached to the point of apathy toward injustice, toward suffering, even toward the death of a child. Seneca says there’s no tragedy in death, whether young or old. But that feels emotionally shallow. The death of a child is more tragic than the death of someone who’s lived a full life, no?

Seneca isn’t offering a religious answer like “eternal life in heaven.” In fact, I think that answer can sometimes keep us from facing mortality honestly. I’ve heard people like Trey Gowdy say that a silver lining to children killed in school shootings is that they’re now with Jesus. That feels deeply wrong. If people like Trey truly believes that is the better place, why aren’t they and their children playing in traffic to get there sooner?

I saw a TikTok video of a woman who refused to turn off her car while pumping gas because, as she said, “If Jesus wants it to be my time, it’s my time.” That’s not courage, that’s denial. It’s avoiding responsibility by pretending we have none.

I don’t want to attack faith. Many Christians would reject those examples too, but I do think we need to face mortality honestly. Pretending death doesn’t matter because heaven awaits us might stop us from asking deeper questions about what we should do while we are here.

I see this good life we attempt to make becoming more constrained in the near future as AI becomes increasingly powerful. I’ve seen first hand it’s capability in my own job. I would not be surprised if my job was automated away tomorrow with just a bit more work. This has me worried on a personal and societal level. I used to think people displaced by automation just needed to retool and learn new skills. But that’s not easy. It takes time and money. Since the industrial revolution, that meant finding different ways to compete for manual labor, but now even intellectual work is being overtaken.

AI could solve countless problems: disease, energy, scientific discovery, innovative inventions, and do it cheaply. But the benefits won’t be shared equally. As businesses need fewer workers, wealth will concentrate further. Big companies will buy up smaller ones and lay off workers. The poor will become too poor to sell to. Meanwhile, the rich, owning the machines, will keep accumulating more wealth. And that’s not just an economic problem. Extreme wealth threatens democracy itself. A handful of people with outsized money also have outsized political influence. They shape laws, control information, and bend public policy toward their interests. Over time, the system stops serving the many and starts serving the few. Democracies become plutocracies. And when economic opportunity disappears for most people, political equality often follows.

I’ve always supported free markets, but with caveats. I believe in minimum safety nets ensuring that everyone can survive, but still motivating people to work to improve their lives. And I think taxation should help people become wealthy but make it harder to stay wealthy, because wealth itself is a powerful tool for generating more wealth, and unchecked, it undermines democracy.

That worked in a world of scarcity, where people took more than they needed and contributed less than they could. Where human labor and knowledge were necessary and free markets using prices to match supply and demand and reward innovation were the best option. But in a world where humans can’t compete with machines, and the problem of scarcity is solved by automation, those assumptions break down. We will have to redistribute wealth, not out of ideology, but survival. Otherwise, most of us won’t make it.

And this change is coming at a terrible time. We have leaders more interested in enriching themselves and their friends (already the wealthiest among us) than in preparing society for what’s ahead. I fear growing desperation and chaos. The rich may wall themselves off, while police states grow harsher to contain the poor.

There’s also the question of morality. Many of the behaviors we call moral evolved because they helped us survive: they let us build coalitions, raise children, and cooperate. But if we cured death, if we no longer needed others to survive, those pressures might vanish. AI could create chemicals or neural implants that keep us perpetually happy. It could stop aging and even death itself. If that happens, will we stop needing each other? Will many/most of us stop being moral?

We might all inject ourselves with chemicals and plug into virtual realities and become full-time hedonists. Most people recoil at that idea. But think about how many imagine heaven: eternal bliss, no work, no struggle, no striving. How is that different? Why do we insist we need purpose and hardship here on earth, but not in heaven?

Even heaven, I suspect, could get boring. In the show The Good Place, everyone eventually grows tired of paradise and chooses nonexistence. Eternity, even blissful eternity, is still a very long time.

Maybe that’s the real point: life’s meaning is inseparable from its limits. Death gives urgency. Struggle gives shape. We live not because we’ll win, we won’t, but because playing the game well matters.