The Life Goals of Dead People

Advice for the excessively guilty

Photo by Mr Xerty on Unsplash

Many people who struggle with excessive guilt subconsciously have goals that look like this:

• I don’t want to make anyone mad.

• I don’t want to hurt anyone.

• I want to take up less space.

• I want to need fewer things.

• I don’t want my body to have needs.

• I don’t want to be a burden.

• I don’t want to fail.

• I don’t want to make mistakes.

• I don’t want to break the rules.

• I don’t want people to laugh at me.

• I want to be convenient.

• I don’t want to have upsetting emotions.

• I want to stop having feelings.

These are what I call the life goals of dead people, because what they all have in common is that the best possible person to achieve them is a corpse.

Corpses don’t need anything, not even to breathe. Corpses don’t hurt anyone or anger people or fail or make mistakes or break rules. Corpses don’t have feelings, and therefore can’t possibly have feelings that are inappropriate or annoying. Once funeral arrangements have been made, corpses rot peacefully without burdening anyone.

Compare with some other goals:

• I want to write a great novel.

• I want to be a good parent to my kids.

• I want to help people.

• I want to get a raise.

• I want to learn linear algebra.

• I want to watch every superhero movie ever filmed.

• I don’t want to die of cancer.

• I don’t want the world to be destroyed in a nuclear conflagration.

• I don’t want my cat to be stuck in this burning building! AAAAA! GET HER OUT OF THERE

All of these are goals that dead people are noticeably bad at. Robert Jordan aside, corpses very rarely write fiction. Their mathematical skills are subpar and, as parents, they tend to be lacking. Their best strategy for not dying of cancer is having already died of something else. And there is no one less suited than a corpse for time-sensitive emergency situations.

Dead people goals often involve avoiding things, while alive people goals are more likely to involve achieving things. After all, often the easiest way to avoid a bad outcome is not to do anything—you can’t lose all your money gambling if you don’t step into a casino—and dead people are great at not doing things.

But the two concepts aren’t quite the same. If you’re trying to avoid the world ending in a nuclear apocalypse, you will probably have to take quite a lot of actions related to that. Conversely, you might want to achieve the goal of taking up as little space as possible, but this is still a goal best reached by going to a crematorium.

If you want to be dead, that’s your own business. But if you would like to continue to be alive, it’s a bad idea to set goals for yourself that boil down to “try to get as close as possible to being a corpse while continuing to respire and consume nutrients.”

If you are a living being, you will have needs. You will want things. You will take up space. You will have to eat, and sleep, and take time for recreation and relaxation. You will feel things, sometimes unpleasant things. Sometimes you will make mistakes. Sometimes people will have negative feelings about you. You will have an impact on the world, however small.

As an alive person, you have one major advantage over dead people: you can take actions. You can work jobs and write novels and learn math and parent children and watch movies and rescue adorable animals in need. You will be much happier if you play to your comparative advantage.