Sooner or later we all face death. Will a sense of meaning help us?
Warren Ward from AEON website
It’s one thing to imagine “death the teacher” when you have thought yourself into believing that, one way or another, death is not the end at all. Then what death teaches you is that in order to attain what you imagine your fate to be beyond the grave, there are certain requistes propelling you to choose particular behaviors in this side of it.
But what does death teach you when you have instead thought yourself into believing that what awaits you on the other side of the grave is oblivion…the utter obliteration of “I” for all time to come.
Many of course will see the lesson here as revolving around behaviors that sustain your existence. And that becomes problematic because you can find yourself not choosing to do things you would like to try because these behaviors bring with them an increasing possibility that one’s life is endangered. Or you can find yourself in situations where others expect you to act in certain ways that you hesitate to choose because there is in turn increasing dangers involved. Someone might threaten those that you love but you note the risk that in intervening your own life is put at risk.
There are in fact countless existential contexts in which what you believe about death can have a profoundly problematic impact on how you react to them.
Same here. Ask that question to scores of people living in different historical, cultural and experiential contexts and you are likely to get different “top 5” answers. That some answers will occur more often than others reflects the continuities that all of us share as human beings. But individual regrets would seem to be manifestations of dasein. Each of us will regret different things for different reasons. And philosophers would not appear able to pin down the most “rational” things that one ought to regret.