If We Had Expiration Dates Stamped On Ourselves: A Thought Experiment in Mortality
On my 40th birthday, I found myself in a spontaneous thought experiment: what if I chose my own expiration date, and that date was 40 years from today?
The idea came from the 1971 cult-classic movie Harold and Maude.
Harold and Maude has been my favorite movie since my first viewing in my early 20’s, and I’ve seen it many times since. It’s a quirky and beautiful film about an almost-80-year-old vivacious firebrand named Maude, and 20-year-old macabre recluse named Harold, who meet through their mutual hobby of attending strangers’ funerals.
Maude is uncontainable, irreverent, and luminous. A Holocaust survivor implied to have known profound suffering and loss, she moves through life with fierce delight and absolute freedom. She frees canaries from pet shops, liberates people from their possessions (eh-hem, steals) to teach them non-attachment, transplants trees growing in city medians to the forest, and gently but persistently teaches Harold that death is not the opposite of life, but part of it.
Throughout the film, she subtly foreshadows her intention to end her life on her 80th birthday:
"Well, I mean 75 is too early, but at 85 you're just marking time,” and later on, “It’ll all be over on Saturday!”
Harold, meanwhile, is transformed by her vitality. She is the Oz to his Kansas, and he is enraptured by her full-color living.
Then, after a sunflower-filled 80th birthday dinner where Harold asks for her hand in marriage, Maude calmly reveals:
“I took the tablets an hour ago. I’ll be gone by midnight.”
I so clearly remember the moment I began this thought experiment. It was a beautiful spring day. I was on my lunchbreak, eating a Surefire sandwich in IOOF park in Gunnison, Colorado. I was wearing a cobalt blue dress and feeling hot and uncomfortable in my Spanx.
I don’t know why the thought of Maude’s planned exit on her 80th birthday popped into mind at that moment (maybe because I was thinking “Death to Spanx!”), but it has since become one of the more meaningful and enduring thoughts I’ve had.
If I were to become my own version of Maude, it would have made my 40th birthday the exact half-way point in my life. And it would, barring an early fatality, give rhythm to the remaining arc of my life.
Once I started viewing my life through the lens of this known end date, I noticed my priorities beginning to reorganize themselves almost automatically. I suddenly started feeling a sense of urgency about living, because if I followed through, I had just reached the fulcrum point where the scale would start to tip towards more yesterdays than tomorrows.
Of course, we all reach that fulcrum point. But because we don’t actually have expiration dates stamped on ourselves, we are (blissfully?) unaware of the exact moment it happens.
I think it’s a gentle tipping at first, like the first few weeks after the autumn equinox in northern latitudes, where the light still seems about the same—or at least it’s easy to fool yourself into thinking so. Then suddenly it’s late October and you can no longer deny the darkness of winter’s cloak coming to engulf you; the urgency to soak up as many mild-weathered and low-angle sunbeams as possible takes top billing.
Such is the process of aging.
Midlife, perhaps, is simply the moment when we begin to feel the weight of more yesterdays than tomorrows. And with that realization often comes a tectonic shift in priorities.
From my years of working with people, their money, and their life plans, I had noticed that most people don’t realize it’s “late October” until their mid-to late-50’s, or even later. Realizing this at 40 made me feel like I’d gotten a jump on the game, like I still had plenty of summer left to live as large as I could dream. It felt like a gift of time.
Not long after I began this thought experiment, I serendipitously read Die With Zero by Bill Perkins. His core argument landed with high resonance: most people are far more attentive to maximizing their money than maximizing the actual experience of being alive, and that dying with money left over is equal to dying with unlived life potential.
Inspired by one of the exercises he recommends in the book, I built on his concepts and, as I do, escalated it into full existential theater:
I completed three online life expectancy calculators, averaged the results, subtracted a few years to account for the difference between my lifespan and health-span, and then installed a countdown timer on my phone.
Perkins’ exercise focuses on setting a countdown timer based on your lifespan, but I found myself more interested in anchoring off my health-span, or the years in which I still have the mobility, cognition, energy, and independence to fully inhabit my life.
So my countdown is not merely about how long I might live, but how long I might actually enjoy being alive.
My averaged life expectancy calculators put my estimated expiration date at age 102. So, perhaps the end of my health-span would be sometime between 92-100. That’s well beyond my Maude-inspired expiration age of 80.
However, I chose to set the countdown timer to 11:02 PM on Sunday May 29th, 2061. That’s 80 years to-the-minute from when I was born.
I think what I respect the most about Maude’s character is that here you have a woman who is bursting at the seams with vitality; indeed, she appears to be the least likely person to die-by-choice, and yet she elects to push back from the poker table with all her chips. She walks away from a fun game while she is still winning, and she goes out knowing it.
I turn 45 next week, and at the time of this writing, my countdown timer (which I named “Becoming Maude”) says I have 35 years, 0 months, 9 days, 8 hours, 28 minutes, and 33 seconds left.
I have no idea if I will/would/could follow through with “Becoming Maude,” and the point was never whether I actually would.
The point was what changed in me once time stopped feeling abstract.
As I’ve watched my “Becoming Maude” timer tick down over the last five years, I am noticing myself starting to think, “hmm, maybe 85 would still be okay—maybe I should update that timer.” That feels a bit like sniffing the milk after its expiration date and deciding it’s still perfectly fine.
But I’m keeping it as it is, because more than anything, I don’t want to squander whatever time I have left as a human on earth as this moment in history writes itself. I don’t want to reach the end of my health-span having an overly burdensome weight of Regrets, Unfinished business, Guilt, or Shame—what we death doulas call RUGS.
We have an acronym for it because so many people reach the finish line carrying a wheelbarrow full of them.
The most important transformation for me as a result of this thought experiment has been the way the urgency inspired by the exercise has changed how I move through the world.
I’m not procrastinating on what’s important to me. In fact, I’m doubling down on my priorities. I’m letting go of what I’ve outgrown. I’m saying yes to what fits me better.
So even if I do not ‘Become Maude’ and end up having another 12-20 years of health-span beyond 80, I can regard that additional time as purely icing and sprinkles.
Watching time count down has become less of a countdown to death and more of an immunization against unrealized life potential.
What about you? How does awareness of your mortality sharpen life? What happens when time becomes finite in a felt sense? What constitutes “enough life”, and is longevity always the highest good?
