Being Mortal: Illness, Medicine and What Matters in the End (Wellcome Collection)

In the end, people don’t view their life as merely the average of all of its moments—which, after all, is mostly nothing much plus some sleep. For human beings, life is meaningful because it is a story. A story has a sense of a whole, and its arc is determined by the significant moments, the ones where something happens. Measurements of people’s mi

how we seek to spend our time may depend on how much time we perceive ourselves to have.

In 1943, the psychologist Abraham Maslow published his hugely influential paper “A Theory of Human Motivation,” which famously described people as having a hierarchy of needs. It is often depicted as a pyramid. At the bottom are our basic needs—the essentials of physiological survival (such as food, water, and air) and of safety (such as law, order

There’s no escaping the tragedy of life, which is that we are all aging from the day we are born.

We are running up against the difficulty of maintaining a coherent philosophical distinction between giving people the right to stop external or artificial processes that prolong their lives and giving them the right to stop the natural, internal processes that do so.

What were her biggest fears and concerns? What goals were most important to her? What tradeoffs was she willing to make, and what ones was she not?

Somehow, instead of holding on to the lifelong identity that was slipping away from him, he managed to redefine it. He moved his line in the sand. This is what it means to have autonomy—you may not control life’s circumstances, but getting to be the author of your life means getting to control what you do with them.

This is why the betrayals of body and mind that threaten to erase our character and memory remain among our most awful tortures. The battle of being mortal is the battle to maintain the integrity of one’s life—to avoid becoming so diminished or dissipated or subjugated that who you are becomes disconnected from who you were or who you want to be.

Studies find that as people grow older they interact with fewer people and concentrate more on spending time with family and established friends. They focus on being rather than doing and on the present more than the future.