I have some bad news: you're going to die soon. Ten years, give or take. Nothing personal. Everyone is in the same boat.

So what? We should probably try not to die. I'm doing something on that front, not my best exactly, but something. I still have free time. The question is what to do with it.

Despair is one option, but it's unpleasant and doesn't seem especially warranted. I was always going to die. There may just be less time than I assumed.

So, supposing we have ten years: what then?

1. Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die. Pleasure enjoyed in the moment retains its full value regardless of when you die. I don't think imminent mortality makes beer taste better, but it might remind you to taste it. You can also take up smoking; it probably won't be what kills you.

2. Make peace with death. Not capitulation. I mean getting to a point where you can look death in the eye without being paralysed. Without this, you'll live in denial and make the predictable errors, or you'll find the be merry part harder than it sounds.

3. Stop deferring. Make a bucket list if you want, but stop doing things whose payoff lies decades away. That means avoiding careers and credentials that only reward you at the top of a long pole: certain PhDs, startups, consulting, politics. Whether to have children I'll leave to you.

These are reasonable, as far as they go, but they assume death is certain when it's merely possible. We might die, or we might end up in some post-AGI world, or AGI won't arrive and we'll get an ordinary future. Many things that make sense if you're definitely dying (liquidating your retirement savings, say) make considerably less sense if you're only probably dying.

The second complication is more interesting. It's not just you who might die. It's everyone. This is worse for the obvious reason, but also a subtler one: there will be no more humans after us. No one to read your novel. No one for your drug to cure. No one to sit in the shade of the tree you planted. As Samuel Scheffler puts it, there will be no afterlife.

Without that afterlife, we are forced to confront what the whole human project actually means. We can no longer defer the question to our descendants. If we are the last generation, the story ends here. Every unfulfilled promise stays unfulfilled. Every unanswered question goes unanswered. Our mistakes echo, unredeemed, through empty time. All the hopes and disappointments of history fall on us alone.

The dead expect a great deal of us.

Email me if you'd like to do your part to stop us all dying.