Tag: death

Death and Taxes and a Meaningful Life

The certainty of death and taxes, famously noted by Benjamin Franklin, is challenged by modern realities. Wealth disparities skew tax compliance, while transhumanists envision overcoming mortality. Authors Burkeman and Beal argue that confronting our finitude enriches lives. Ultimately, recognizing life’s limits prompts meaningful existence and societal responsibility.

a close up shot of dollar bills
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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.

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Retirement as Rehearsal

Retirement shows you how finite your time is. If you stare retirement in the face long enough, then you can even see your death looking back at you. No wonder it can be hard to retire.

As a young academic hired into a largely older faculty in the mid-1990s, I watched certain colleagues become increasingly grouchy as they approached the final stage of their careers. Thirty years later, I get it: your sense of self, your vocation, the edifice that has housed your purpose and given your days and years meaning—all of it coming to an end. The conventional wisdom on this life phase invokes the perils of aimlessness and loss of identity as we step away from our work. Yet the research on the relationship between retirement and purpose is not all negative, and Hyrum W. Smith, the “father of time management,” urges “purposeful retirement.” Still, retirement shows you how finite your time is. If you stare retirement in the face long enough, then you can even see your death looking back at you. No wonder it can be hard to retire.

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Finding Vocation in Loss, Suffering, and Death

One’s truest sense of vocation is always revealed in the meaning of one’s life. Here we encounter the… paradox that we must share with our students—that the question of meaning is finally dependent on the reality of death. We ask about the meaning of life because the fact of death makes our lives seem so absurd. Put another way, the fact that we will inevitably die forces each of us to ask if there is meaning in the midst of such apparent meaninglessness.

There could be no better time than the present moment, with the Covid-19 pandemic threatening human life all over the world, to ask the question, “How might we find vocation in loss, suffering, and death?” To help us think about that question, I want to begin with a story.

It was almost twenty years ago when I learned that the Lilly Endowment had awarded Pepperdine University, where I taught at that time, a $2 million grant to support the “theological exploration of vocation” with our students.

I was ecstatic, and only moments after that call, I met one of my classes and shared the news with my students. They all were delighted—all, that is, except one. Far from delighted, he seemed distressed and troubled and told me straight up, “This project strikes me as a gift to children of privilege, a project that will simply cater to their own self-absorption. Most of the people in the world,” he continued, “don’t have the luxury of thinking about their ‘vocation.’ Life for them is a struggle simply to survive.”

My student’s words hit me like a bolt of lightning and reinforced a truth I already knew—that to serve our students well, this project had to encourage them to envision their lives and careers in terms much larger than themselves.

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