When the clouds begin to cry blood and the stars tumble down into the gooey black sea and the sun embraces a permanent eclipse; when the world turns topsy-turvy, and everything inverts into nothing—that is when we have truly reached the end of our collective journey through space and time.

And waiting at the end of our flash-in-the-pan existence is nothing but static nonexistence. No grand welcome into heaven, no treacherous drop into the fourth circle of hell, no transmigration into another form. From dust we came, and to dust we shall return.

But eschatology is a controversial business, and many would vehemently disagree with me.

Christians, Jews, and Muslims all believe in an eternal afterlife and trace a linear chronology for humanity’s overall trajectory: societal decay or the rise of evil, the arrival of a messiah, the day of reckoning, and the establishment of a new era of peace. Eastern traditions operate in cycles: Hinduism counts time in yugas, and Buddhism speaks of the kalpa, both recurring epochs of gradual decay followed by cosmic renewal that reflect their belief in endless karmic rebirth, or samsara. The Norse had Ragnarök; the Zoroastrians had frashokereti, the final renovation of existence. Even modern science has gotten into the eschatological economy, offering its own portfolio of fantastical endings: mirror-life microorganisms rewriting the biosphere, rods from God raining down from orbit, or, most anticlimactic of all, the slow heat-death of a universe winding down like an unwound clock.

Regardless of the specific mechanism, however, all these beliefs and theories deal with the same question: what happens when everything ends, and more fundamentally, what can we do knowing that it is inevitable?

Perhaps that is why mortality has been the prescient obsession of some of history’s most powerful men and its most pitiful fools. From Gilgamesh wading into dark water in search of the flower of eternal life to Bryan Johnson’s vampiric blood-transfusion regime, the end of human existence has, for many, presented itself as a problem to be overcome. Rulers, explorers, and tech-billionaires alike have fallen victim to this vacuous pursuit of immortality.

But there is a figure who embodies this pursuit in the most peculiar way of them all: Peter Thiel. The venture capitalist, conservative provocateur, and archetypal villainous billionaire has poured millions into life-extension research and once told an interviewer that he considers death not natural but a collective resignation that we have dressed up as wisdom to avoid confronting our own cowardice. He has signed up for Alcor, the cryonic company that will freeze your body after death in hopes of future revival, expressed interest in parabiosis, the process of transfusing the blood of the young into the veins of the old, and backed several early-stage startups working on regenerative medicine and cellular rejuvenation.

What makes Thiel interesting, though, is that he is also a professed Christian, a student of the French philosopher René Girard and devout believer in his theory of mimetic desire, and a man who has spent considerable time thinking about eschatology in its traditional theological sense. Girard, who mentored Thiel at Stanford, believed that human history was building toward a final existential dilemma: either a complete renunciation of violence or complete annihilation as mimetic violence leads us to total war. Thiel absorbed this. He thinks in terms of endings, of civilizational turning points, of the delicate balance between the Katechon and the Antichrist.

But there is something almost tragicomic about his position, notwithstanding the myriad internal contradictions and self-serving logic at the heart of it. This is a man who accepts a Christian teleology, who believes to some degree in resurrection and the redemption of history, simultaneously pursuing solutions to death that would render these beliefs redundant. Though he is certainly not representative of most people, I do believe his actions reflect a shared human paradox: that even among those who profess a belief in some version of the afterlife, when the moment finally arrives, there still exists a fear of entering it. Thiel has simply made that ambivalence visible and expensive.

He and the rest of the modern transhumanist movement have fallen into a reductionist trap. They read mortality as a bug in need of a patch rather than a core feature of our existence. Just imagine the richest, most powerful people in human history staring down the same abyss as every person who has ever lived, and concluding that the abyss is simply underfunded. There is something repulsive about it all. And something, I think, that misses the point of life.

Steve Jobs, in his 2005 commencement address at Stanford University, called death “life’s greatest invention,” the mechanism by which the old makes way for the new, the omnipresent reminder to make the most of the time we actually have. Marcus Aurelius returned again and again to the same meditation on death in his private journals: “Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now take what’s left and live it properly.” Montaigne wrote that to philosophize is to learn to die, and meant it as an invitation to do so, for if you could learn to die, you could learn to live. Seneca, in letters written while the emperor who would eventually order his suicide was already turning suspicious, argued that the fear of death and the waste of life are the same disease: that the person who cannot face the end is the same person who has never truly begun. Heidegger made it the cornerstone of Being and Time, his magnum opus: only through confronting our own finitude, what he called being-toward-death, do we stop drifting through existence and begin to actually inhabit it.

These are not men who found peace in death. They are men who found meaning because of it.

I believe I have found the same. Sometime before I was sucked into the black hole of bedtime doomscrolling, I spent sleepless nights staring at the top of my ceiling, imagining myself levitating upwards, becoming enveloped by the darkness, and fading away amidst the enormity of the universe. I was afraid of disappearing, trying to imagine non-existence and finding the attempt itself terrifying. That anxiety has largely quieted. I have arrived at something like a working acceptance, a rough truce with the reaper. I am here now; I will not be here forever; the second fact does not cancel the first. My own ending has become the fuel to create a life worth looking back on, or, as I keep telling others, a movie worth watching.

But what I have not made complete peace with is everyone else’s.

This is the part of the equation that the philosophers tend to handle too cleanly, or at least the part I keep finding myself unable to resolve on their terms. My death, I can philosophize. It is mine alone to make meaning of. But the deaths of the people I love are a different problem. They are not me, but they have shaped me, and it is difficult to imagine a world without their irreplaceable, unforgettable idiosyncrasies: the ways they laugh, their subtle linguistic tics, their full-faced smiles, and their whimsical and beautiful minds that one day, without warning, will all disappear. No amount of framing has yet convinced me that this is supposed to hurt any less. It involves a grief that is not about you, cannot be resolved by you, and will arrive regardless of how much equanimity you have managed to cultivate on your own behalf.

So, I hold both things at once: the genuine belief that mortality, the most definitive form of transience, is what makes life worth inhabiting, and the unavoidable sadness of watching it take the people I cannot imagine living without. I don’t think those two things contradict each other. I think they are simply what it means to love someone in a world where everything has an ending: to know the wheel of time turns, to be grateful it gave you this, and to recognize you will have to let it go.

I have chosen to walk with the wheel. It may be anguishing, it may be terrifying, but in the end, it is what makes me cherish every little moment I’ve ever had on this big, beautiful planet. The birds chirping in the background, the chocolate milk I glug readily after work, the simple fact that I can take another breath of fresh air and wake up to another vibrant morning. All of it is made more valuable by the fact that one day I won’t have it anymore.

But I refuse to surrender myself to time and let it carry me to my end like a passive rider; no, I have chosen to burn with it until my wick melts away. My being has been sparked with the light of passion, of love, and though I am still young, I have resolved to live with death always in mind. If I am only here for a short time, then I must experience everything I can. I must pursue my dreams. I must fail again and again. I must explore the world. I must chase greatness. Most importantly, I must remember to live. For now, though, my soul has cried out with a joyful shout, and I must answer it with the beginning of my story, my canticle of fire: