This article was taken from the September 2012 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.

When the top brass at Stanford University invited Steve Jobs to address graduating students in 2005, they probably knew he wouldn't recite the usual peppy slogans about believing in oneself.

But the now-famous message he delivered was still shocking: he told them to dwell on death. "Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life," he said. The Apple cofounder may have pushed consumer tech towards a previously unimaginable future -- but he got it done by reminding himself of the oldest truth: sooner or later, his time would run out.


This stance wasn't always so unusual: the tradition known as "memento mori", Latin for "remember you shall die", once flourished. In ancient Rome, according to legend, victorious generals ordered a slave to follow them on parade, repeating the phrase as a spur to humility. The essayist Montaigne thought writers should work at desks with a view of a graveyard: it tended to sharpen the mind. "Let us deprive death of its strangeness; let us frequent it; let us get used to it," he urged. The Buddha advised his monks to meditate in morgues, among corpses: that way, they'd never forget that they too were nothing but flesh and bones. More recently, we've been able to shut death away behind the doors of hospices and funeral homes. But there are welcome signs that, aided by the web, memento mori is making a comeback.

It's not solely a matter of playful apps such as the Death Clock, which uses actuarial data to estimate when you'll kick the bucket, then displays a clock counting down to that date.

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There's also the deadly serious field of "thanatosensitive design", which involves building death awareness into social media. Now that our lives unfold via online sharing, what happens to all those "lifestreams" when we're gone? Many firms are reluctant to release dead people's passwords to their relatives -- who says privacy ends at the grave? -- and so thanatosensitive features let users make a proactive plan instead. (A Facebook app, IfIDie, helps you prepare last words, to be published upon your passing.) Intentionally or not, all such tools are reminders of the inevitable, countering the deep-rooted tendency that the psychologist Ernest Becker crystallised in the title of his magnum opus The Denial of Death.

Offline, too, memento mori is back, in the form of groups such as the London-based collective Death Cafe, which holds "pop-up" gatherings in coffee shops "to increase awareness of death with a view to helping people make the most of their (finite) lives." The idea comes from the Swiss sociologist Bernard Crettaz, who wanted to overcome the "tyrannical secrecy" surrounding death.

Such meetings may be little more than a chat over tea and cakes, but that's the point: to deprive death of its strangeness, knitting mortality awareness into the fabric of daily life, instead of waiting until confronting it is unavoidable.


According to the academic field of "terror-management theory", our efforts to avoid thoughts of death explain many psychological phenomena, from bigotry to whether we smoke. We respond to reminders of death, such research shows, by becoming more aggressive or intolerant -- but that's surely only because the reminders come as a shock, which is exactly what memento mori aims to reduce. The right kind of reminders can help us to focus on what matters, and perhaps make us better people: in one study, people walking in a cemetery were 40 percent likelier to help out when one of the researchers dropped a notebook. The aura of mortality seemed to make them more considerate.

Many innovators dedicate themselves to finding ways to prolong human life. But it's good to know that some are focused on helping us remember that you can't, so far as we know, prolong it indefinitely.

Oliver Burkeman is the author of The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking (Canongate)