The Incredible Way Mortality Awakens Happiness
What if happiness isn’t something to chase, but something that wakes up when you stop taking life for granted?
The Strange Gift of Remembering You’ll Die
Mortality has a way of stripping things back to what’s true.
It asks us to see the miracle of an ordinary morning. The melody of birdsong. The sunlight resting on your skin, reminding you that you are still here, still capable of love.
That’s the strange gift of remembering that life will end. It breaks our endless urge to strive. It calls us home to what’s real: this moment, this breath, this fleeting, precious chance to be alive.
HAPPINESS BOOSTING EXERCISE attached to the bottom of this letter.
The truth is, many of us are waiting for happiness to arrive, for life to start.
We wait to have enough, know enough, be enough. And while we wait, we chase ghosts: the ghost of success, the ghost of perfection, the ghost of a future where everything finally makes sense.
These ghosts keep us running in circles, further from the quiet joy that’s been here all along.
We keep postponing joy, as if one day the universe will send an invitation marked now it’s safe to be happy. But the future never comes. It never has. There is only this heartbeat, this sunlight.
Here and now.
Awe, the Doorway to Joy
When you regularly acknowledge your mortality, you stop waiting. You start to understand that joy isn’t found in the grand achievements. It’s in the small, pulsing details of being alive.
The taste of good food. The sound of rain on glass. The feeling of someone’s hand reaching for yours in the dark.
“When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive—to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.” (Marcus Aurelius)
From personal experience, I’ve found that when you become more aware of mortality, joy becomes presence. Simple. Humble. Radiant.
I begin to feel awe again, not the kind reserved for cathedrals or sunsets, but for the miracle and magic of being here at all.
What Science Says About Mortality and Happiness
Science, too, has started to rediscover this ancient wisdom. Please read about our fear of death, and how that ‘Grandmother fear’ quietly shapes our lives.
A 2012 study published in Psychological Science found that when participants were reminded of their mortality in a reflective way, they became more likely to express compassion and prioritise meaningful goals over superficial ones.
Another, from the University of Missouri in 2018, showed that gentle mortality reminders actually reduced anxiety and increased joy and appreciation for life, while fear-based reminders had the opposite effect.
Even neuroscience is beginning to echo this. In a 2019 study at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, neuroscientist Yair Dor-Ziderman and his team discovered that the human brain instinctively suppresses self-related thoughts of death.
When participants saw their own faces paired with death-related words, their brains essentially shut down the association, as if saying, “That can’t happen to me.” This quiet denial helps us function day to day, but it also dulls our sense of awe, and our ability to be happy. When we consciously lift that veil, even slightly, we reconnect with wonder.
In essence, when people are asked to reflect mindfully on their mortality, not in panic but in awareness, something remarkable happens, they report gratitude, connection, and a clearer sense of higher purpose.
When You Know Life Won’t Last, Everything Shines
Have you ever noticed how moments become luminous when you know they won’t last? You become grateful for everything: your friend’s smile, the clouds in the sky or the last page of a book.
Mortality gives everything edges, and it’s those edges that make life shimmer.
Death reminds us that joy was never meant to be permanent. It’s meant to be felt in its ephemeral beauty.
When we stop grasping for more time, we start using the time we have. We forgive faster. We let people in. We don’t need everything to be perfect, because we finally understand everything is already precious.
Our life becomes more aligned and we enter into flow, with all the benefits that state brings. We stop measuring life by what we own and start feeling it by how we live, through love, purpose, and contribution.
When you are in flow, and truly happy, wealth starts chasing you, in money, in meaning, opportunity and fulfilment. Real abundance begins when you live in flow with life itself.
That’s the quiet freedom of mortality. It brings you back to your true self.
Perhaps that’s what real happiness is: not a constant high, but an intimacy with life itself? A willingness to feel it all, the beauty and the grief, the endings and the beginnings, and still whisper, yes.
The awareness of death doesn’t take happiness away. It deepens it.
Happiness was always here, in the beautiful, fragile, flickering light of now.
Are you ready to step into presence and truly embrace happiness?
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Live Happy,
Hoppy
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Transformation Exercise
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