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Friends,
This is the fourth* in a series of episodes on How To Live in 2025, focusing on the thoughts, feelings, and actions we need to thrive, develop,  create, and resist. In other words, tools that don’t merely deaden us in the frantic pursuit of survival, but that assist us in nourishing ourselves, each other, and the world, all together.

This episode’s theme is DIE
and my guest is CAITLIN DOUGHTY.

Caitlin is the author of several bestselling books on death: Smoke Gets in Your Eyes And Other Lessons from the Crematory, as well as a book on death rituals around the world From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death, and her book about death questions for children, Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs?: Big Questions from Tiny Mortals about Death. She’s also the host of the popular YouTube mini and mid length documentary channel, Ask A Mortician. She’s also a frequent guest on the show, last appearing on AEWCH 250.

Together, we ask:

How can we face the challenges of our time without first facing our own mortality?

The fear of examining our own deaths and the deaths of others motivates both our ability and refusal to act in the face of the obstacles rising up to meet us.

It is of course normal and healthy to be concerned for our own safety; but when our relationship to death goes unexamined, we have reactive responses from an unexamined fear… which means we cannot act out of the truth. Our responses to political economic, and cultural challenges are guided by reflex rather than intention, pureness, and purposefulness.

What kind of thinking, feelings, and actions would arise right now in response to the challenges humanity is encountering if we had a closer, more intimate, and even loving relationship with death?

What could the world look like if we understood our lives were made substantial by transience? By thresholds? By series of productive crises, loving flutters, and illuminating fluctuations?

My hope is that in listening to this episode the crack of light between eternities of darkness becomes brighter for you, that in the transience, the potential in being an individual and alive is strengthened. 

Please stay on until the end of the episode to listen to an exercise you can do, what I call the Loss List.

*Here’s the first episode of the series, ENVISION with ROB HOPKINS, the second, PRAY with BASTIAAN BAAN, and the third, CONNECT with DEAN SPADE