Nothing is certain except for death and taxes.
When Benjamin Franklin popularized this saying in 1789, he was referring to the new American Constitution, which he believed shouldn’t be considered certain or permanent, at least not without the active participation and vigilance of its citizens—a republic, he suggested, if we can keep it. Absolutely nothing is certain—not even the bedrock of our nation’s democracy—except for death and taxes.
And maybe not even those.
We all know that the richest among us get out of paying taxes, or at least out of paying their fair share. The Budget Lab at Yale predicts that reductions to federal IRS staff will lead to an increase in “noncompliance,” which will in turn widen the “tax gap”—that is, the difference between taxes legally owed and taxes actually paid. (Those unpaid taxes amount to $600 billion per year. That’s billion with a “b.”) Taxes remain a certainty for those of us whose income comes primarily from wages and salaries. Compliance here is essentially 100 percent, since the taxes are taken from our paychecks. For those with more “passive” and “opaque” forms of income, paying taxes is far from certain.
When it comes to death, “transhumanists” such as Jason Silva see new technologies as enabling us to overcome any and every limit, including the ultimate limit of mortality. They tend to see death as a problem to be solved—by uploading human consciousness into computers or otherwise replacing our fragile, mortal, “wetware” bodies (whose obsolesce seems planned) with better-designed, more enduring mediums. For transhumanists, death is only certain for those who fail to seize the exponential power of new technologies.
In these ways, death and taxes are not as certain as we once thought, or at least no longer certain for the richest and most powerful among us. But here’s a question that is harder to answer: Can we have meaningful lives without them?
I’m not aware of people discussing the relation between living a meaningful or purposeful life and filing your return on or before April 15. On the other hand, there are a number of contemporary authors writing about vocation who have rediscovered an important existentialist maxim. In Martin Heidegger’s words, it is only when we accept the certainty of death—and, indeed, embrace the nature of human existence itself as “being-toward-death”—that we begin to live authentic, purposeful, and meaningful lives.
For example, in Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, Oliver Burkeman explicitly draws on Heidegger when arguing that one must consider one’s own finitude in order to live well. The average life span is around 4,000 weeks. That is the time we are allotted—maybe more, maybe less—and it delimits the period between being thrown into existence and ripped from it. Most of us actively avoid confronting this fact, believing against all evidence that we can “save time” and safeguard our futures with proper “time management.” For Burkeman (and Heidegger), time is decidedly not something that we have, or can save, or can manage efficiently to get a handle on our fate. We are rather in time like fish in water. We pass through it and it through us. The existential truth, Burkeman argues, is hard to accept:
Instead of simply living our lives as they unfold in time—instead of just being time, you might say—it becomes difficult not to value each moment primarily according to its usefulness for some future goal, or for some future oasis of relaxation you hope to reach once your tasks are finally “out of the way.”
The bad irony of all time-management schemes and our death-denying culture at large is that if death and the future really were things we could control, “nothing could genuinely matter,” Burkeman writes, “because you’d never be faced with having to decide whether or not to use a portion of your precious life on something.” But the happier irony holds true as well: “the more you confront the facts of finitude instead—and work with them, rather than against them—the more productive, meaningful, and joyful life becomes.”
In When Time is Short: Finding our Way in the Anthropocene, Timothy Beal extends these existential truths from an individual’s life to our collective lives. He begins the book examining our denial of death as a species. By this, he means not only that each of us tends to deny our own mortality (which is also true), but also that we, in this time of climate change and the onset of a sixth mass extinction, avoid the reality that homo sapiens might soon make themselves extinct. We should face this very real possibility, or even likelihood, according to Beal. When we don’t—when we assume that we will be able to geo-engineer our way to climate stability or abandon this broken planet and colonize a new one—we only perpetuate the problems that plague us. Alternatively, once we admit that the time our species has left may very well be short, we might collectively act with courage, compassion, and care for that which truly matters. Beal asks, “As time becomes short, what really matters for our communities and our world?”
Considering this question, he wonders whether we might decide not to drill for more oil in the Arctic Circle but restore Alaskan wood bison instead. We might discontinue plans to colonize Mars and instead “get better at practicing neighborliness.” We might decide not to “biomedically solve for death” and spend our time “dramatically improv[ing] the quality of life for people in poverty around the world.”
Just as with an individual’s life, we as a species can do meaningful, ennobling work when we finally admit that each of us—and perhaps the whole species—won’t go on forever.
Beal adds one final irony to the ironic reversals characterizing living meaningful lives in the face of death. Even if we are wrong, and the human species continues indefinitely, the work we do after facing our extinction is exactly what we should have been doing all along. In Beal’s words, which conclude the book: “What matters most when time becomes short is always what matters most” (my emphasis).
For both Burkeman and Beal, the reality of death, when squarely faced, can turn our attention to what matters most. It can help us forge meaningful lives. It’s an insight explored by great existential literature, including that by Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and the holocaust survivor Victor Frankl. The theology of Deanna Thompson and the religious-psychological insights of Bonnie Miller-McLemore likewise testify to the power of lament and fullness of life that can emerge by letting go.
And taxes? Aren’t they—no less than death—a necessary limit that makes “your one wild and precious life,” as Mary Oliver writes, so very precious, meaningful, and purposeful? Well, maybe not. But this video reminded me of all the social programs I depend on, which mark “my” life as contingent, dependent, and social through and through. I might just send in my tax return more conscious of—and grateful for—this certain fact.
Readers interested in other posts on Vocation Matters on time and its relation to purpose and our search for meaning, should see Hannah Schell, “Vocation and the Folly of Time Management,” Paul Burmeister, “Vocational Calendars and the Giftedness of Time,” Gina Hausknecht, “Retirement as Rehearsal,” and Julia Fogg, “The Carnegie Hour and the Vocation of Student Learning.”
Jason Mahn is professor of religion and director of the Presidential Center for Faith and Learning at Augustana College, Rock Island, IL. His essay “The Conflict in Our Callings: The Anguish (and Joy) of Willing Several Things” appeared in Vocation Across the Academy: A New Vocabulary for Higher Education (Oxford 2017). He has recently authored Neighbor Love through Fearful Days: Finding Meaning and Purpose in a Time of Crisis (Fortress 2021), co-edited So That All May Flourish: The Aims of Lutheran Higher Education (Fortress 2023), and contributed to The Christian Century. For other posts by Jason, click here.
