Mortality Salience

Architecture and Mortality (2004) , Glenn Brown

Have you ever watched or heard something completely unrelated to you and just shattered in tears and couldn't understand why?

That happened to me last night.

I was watching a reality show, completely minding my business, and something about someone else's story just cracked me open. And I sat there crying, confused at first. Why does this hurt so much? This isn't even my life. This isn't even my story.

But then I realised. It wasn't their story that broke me. It was mine.

Because something about watching another person lose what defined them, watching time take something irreplaceable, made me feel the truth I had been intellectually knowing but never actually feeling. That everything ends. Not as a dark thought. As a fact. A real, undeniable, sits-in-your-chest fact.

And then my mind just started opening files.

My grandparents. I never thought they would leave. I just assumed they would always be there, the way you assume the sun will rise. And then they weren't. The heartbreak that had me in pieces for weeks, the one that felt like the end of the world, barely registers now. The things I was so anxious about three years ago don't even exist on my radar anymore. All of it rising up at once. Every person, every memory, every version of myself that has already passed.

This is what mortality salience does to you. It doesn't just remind you that people die. It reminds you that moments die. That this exact version of today will never exist again. That the people in your life right now, your family, your friends, even the complicated ones, are temporary. Not as something to fear. As something to honour.

And when that really lands, something shifts.

Blame starts to feel like a waste of a life. Anxiety starts to feel like paying interest on a debt that may never come due. And presence, just being here, just appreciating now, starts to feel like the only reasonable response to being alive.

Because here is the thing. None of it, not the goals, not the plans, not the competitions, not the heartbreaks, none of it deserves my anxiety. What was supposed to happen was meant to happen. Every closed door, every loss, every ending positioned me exactly here. And I have spent so much time auditing my own life, waiting to feel ready, waiting to arrive somewhere, not realising that I was already there.

You are not auditioning for your life. You are already living it.

So I want to live now. Appreciate my people while they are here. Do the hard things without the crushing weight of what if. Stop carrying grudges that are costing me more than they cost anyone else. Love people well. Let things go.

And when life cracks me open like it did tonight, I want to let it. Because that kind of crying isn't weakness.

It's just a soul that's finally paying attention.

P.S. Mortality salience is simply the awareness of one's own mortality. When it hits, it doesn't feel like a psychology term. It feels like everything.