“Death doesn’t come for you. It waits for you to arrive.”


This was not meant to be a statement of warning. It seemed to be a narrative of events that did not feel necessarily final, that somehow continued irrespective of any understanding or lack thereof.

It occurred independently, in parallel to the process by which it was observed, as something unavoidably intrinsic, unseparable from the act of experiencing itself, death seemed something else entirely, at least to me, for the longest time. A limit, an ending, a border between the familiar territory of one’s life and the alien country of whatever comes next. A binary division, one that had to take place somewhere, with some clear delineation

But death is not an edge.

Death is an embedding


Imagine where you were ten years ago. Think about what you cared about, the fears that tormented you at night, the view of the world you held, your personality. All of that is gone, dead, long before this moment, before you reading this sentence, because you are no longer that person.

You are somebody else now, just not as consistently or evidently as before.

This transition took place gradually enough for you to remember the old you in broad outlines and, more importantly, to mistake this incremental process for something continuous and uniform. The same goes for your entire life. The part of it you consider over is dead, gone, terminated, and all of this is happening every second of every day. We just like to save our terminations for later, when all the parts are assembled, packaged, put on display with flowers and a wreath to mark the occasion.


Death is a continuation

One without conservation, preservation, or interruption


Heraclitus once said something along the lines of “no man ever steps in the same river twice”.

It is often assumed to be a metaphor about the nature of change and continuity but is demonstrably no more nor less than what it says:

people do not step into rivers twice because the waters are always flowing, moving, changing, and so are their bodies, their perceptions, their personalities. It is not something we experience because we are too small to notice, too far away, but no less real for that.

Death is the same process without pause, without retention, without the illusion of continuity, and therefore without any meaningful distinction between what was, is, and will be.


Humans are the only creatures that have the desire to imbue death with meaning, and we dedicate entire lifetimes to the task, across cultures and civilizations, producing religions, philosophies, and social institutions. The reason we want death to mean something always has been that we fail to notice its physical simplicity and the sheer indifference of its occurrence to any particular context or content. It does not judge how you live your life, it does not comment on the quality or quantity of your years, it does not reward faithfulness nor punish impurity. It is not the end of your narrative that delivers a final moral lesson but rather the cessation of your ability to produce and consume any narratives at all, whether as an author or a subject.

The assumption that life is somehow meaningful, that death serves a purpose, is always the assertion of those who think of themselves as authors of their lives, and thus it should be treated with the skepticism due to all unsubstantiated ontological claims. There is no fairness in death, just as there is none in the birth of rivers or the flight of birds.

Life does not move towards death as its goal or limit but rather contains it as an element, one that neither conserves nor interrupts the overall continuity of its flow. Death is no more a conclusion than a border or an ending, no less real but demonstrably no different from any other limit experienced by sentient organisms. There is no approach to death, only a gradual modification of perception akin to anything else that begins to unfold and then dissipates long afterwards. There is no meaningful distinction to be drawn between the process of dying and the act of living because both are modifications of the same fundamental substance, one that demonstrates consistency only at a certain remove, in abstraction.

We talk about life as if we understand what it is, but all we really know are its effects, the impressions it leaves on us, these too dissolving eventually with time. It is not a process but rather a collection of unrelated events that present themselves as connected only to the extent of being perceived as such, from a particular vantage point. The same could be said for death, although the evidence for it existing is more scarce, the confidence in it lower, at least until one is sufficiently close. We imagine life to be a traversal with purpose because we mistake inertia for motion, but in truth, there is no destination except to move, no direction that cannot be questioned. Everything is repetition on some scale, everything proceeds in patterns greater or lesser, closer or more distant, until they vanish without warning, without cause, without any reason at all.


“There is no end because there is no beginning, only these strange, strange things called processes.””

There is no death except the dissolution of reference frames, which no human can perceive directly and so we attempt to describe it as if it were a thing, a force, an entity with qualities of any sort.

We think of death as something to arrive at one day and to experience, if we can only figure out what it is. It is none of these things, is what is being said, because it is merely a loss of context, which is itself a form of de-reference. That is why there is no perspective from which death can be observed as something occurring because once you experience it, you have ceased to be a conscious agent capable of observing anything at all. It is what makes death unique, inescapable, and yet simultaneously comprehensible to all who have ever lived, because we can always speak about it indirectly, in metaphors that conceal its true nature from those who seek it. And so we speak in quotes, as if that might help, and people are always asking what death is, if they can know it, and if they can experience it, despite all this, despite everything said, everything written, everything obvious at the moment of reading these words, at the moment of thinking them.

Maybe this is why people remember certain phrases or combinations of words and forget the rest, the impression they make on them, what they seem to signify, what they open up or close off. That is the only thing to be said about death, about the end, that it runs out, that there is no direction in it, that there is no momentum or qualities to conserve. Not that we are not approaching it but that we already are, every second of every day, in everything we say and do.