The Uncomfortable Truth of Life

(indistinct chatter) - [Narrator] If I worked at Starbucks, instead of writing people's names on their coffee cup, I'd write the following; "One day, you and everyone you know will die. And beyond a small group of people for an extremely brief period of time, little you say or do will ever matter. This is the uncomfortable truth of life, and everything you do is but an elaborate avoidance of it.

We are inconsequential, cosmic dust bumping and milling about on a tiny blue speck. We imagine our own importance. We invent our purpose.

We are nothing. (dramatic music) Enjoy your fucking coffee. " Nobody likes to think about their own death, but it's necessary.

In fact, it's possibly the most important mental exercise we can do, and here's why. Death is the only thing that we can know with any certainty. As such, it must be the compass by which we orient all of our other values and decisions.

Left to our own devices, we will obsess over wealth, fame, and beauty, even though these things bring our lives little meaning and great amounts of stress and anxiety. Without acknowledging our own death, we make the superficial appear important and the important appear superficial. Charles Bukowski once wrote, "We are all going to die, all of us.

What a circus. That alone should make us love each other, but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by life's trivialities.

We are eaten up by nothing. " Death reminds us that we must ignore life's trivialities, that we must choose values that stretch well beyond ourselves because this is the timeless rule of happiness. And whether you're listening to Aristotle, or Confucius, or Harvard psychologists, or Jesus Christ, or a fucking Disney princess, they more or less all say the same thing, that happiness comes from caring about something greater than yourself.

This is the feeling that we go to church for. It's what we fight in wars for. It's what we raise families and save pensions and build bridges, and create startups for, this fleeting sense of being part of some great unknowable cosmic form.

Ultimately, death forces us to confront the question of legacy. While most people worry incessantly about how to live a great life, the real question is, what will we leave behind? Because you are great already, whether you realize it or not, whether anybody else realizes it or not.

And it's not because you launched an iPhone app or you finished school a year early or you bought yourself that sweet ass boat. These things do not define greatness. You are already great because in the face of endless confusion and certain death, you continue to choose what to give a fuck about and what not to.

This mere fact, this simple optioning of your own values in life already makes you wealthy, already makes you successful, already makes you loved, even if you don't feel it. You too are going to die, and that is because you were fortunate enough to have lived. And while microscopic in scope, your existence will echo across the universe, reverberating in the tiniest and faintest ways, leaving your indelible mark in its wake.

You don't have to be massive to have meaning. You don't have to be remembered to have created value. The way the trees that have fed our ancestors have been long dead and forgotten.

We too will be dead and forgotten while our life force will have taken on some great, new, unnoble form. So yes, take a moment, give thanks for the miracle of your individual existence and enjoy your fucking coffee.