You are going to die.
Yin and yang. Life and death. You can’t have one without the other. So, instead of bitching about it, here are a few tips to dealing with the concept of your inevitable death.
Forge ahead
Have a free moment? Trick question — you’re a student. You can’t sit there and contemplate the possibility of an afterlife; you’ve got a paper on communication below the threshold of awareness to write! If that doesn’t keep you busy, I’m sure staying up all night with your math textbook will be enough to keep your mind off it.
Delegate
Why worry about these things at all? You (probably) won’t have to deal with your death for at least another 50 years — why not simply put off the anxiety and delegate the responsibility to your future self? Instead of worrying about lowering your lifeless body into the ground, simply wait and ponder these thoughts while you’re dealing with other pleasant questions like “what have I done with my life?” and “why doesn’t anybody love me?”
Have a one-night-stand
Nothing like the adrenaline rush and thrill of a hook-up with a perfect stranger, or even someone you know for that matter. Rather than thinking about the fact that next to nobody dies peacefully in their sleep, instead think about the many joys and pleasures of sex. As you both fumble for protection, try not to fixate on terrifying statistics such as how 0.6% of all sudden deaths occur during sex.
Eat
What are questions of life and death when compared to a full box of Oreos? Worthless. Science fiction writers used to imagine a gun that could erase memories. Had they known that they could accomplish the same thing with a box of pizza, they may have saved themselves some time. Instead of wondering why we bother to do anything at all if it’s all going to end anyway, think instead of the sweet, sweet taste of Charleston Chew.
Ultimately, the only thing we can do to gracefully deal with mortality is to understand that mortality is inherently graceless. To finish, I’d like to leave you with a line from the BBC’s Blackadder, which I believe has the whole thing right: “I am therefore leaving immediately for Nepal, where I intend to live as a goat.”
