Last Saturday, I had nothing planned. I sat on the couch and scrolled through my phone for no real reason. When I looked up, an hour was gone. I had not read the news. I had not talked to anyone. I had just moved my thumb up and down the screen, again and again.
It felt strange afterward. I was bored, but I did not actually feel the boredom. The time just slipped out of my hands.
So I started wondering: what is boredom, really?
When we are bored, we usually act like we have plenty of time. Nothing needs to be finished today, so we can do anything, or nothing. This feeling of “plenty of time” is strange if you think about it. No one actually knows how much time they have left.
Then a big, maybe silly, idea came to me. What if successful people simply do not have this feeling? What if their whole mindset is built on the fact that death is real, and it will happen to them, personally, not just to other people in the news?
It felt like a big jump. But I was curious, so I had a bunch of academic papers and theories dug up for me. It turns out psychologists have been studying something close to this for decades.
The first thing that surprised me was a well-known framework called Terror Management Theory. Researchers have run hundreds of experiments where they remind people of their own death, then measure what happens next. Most of the time, people do not become wiser or kinder. They become more defensive. They judge people who think differently more harshly. They want more expensive brand-name things. Thinking about death does not seem to make people grow. It makes them protect themselves.
So my hypothesis looked broken already.
But when I looked closer, the story was not that simple. There is a difference between being vaguely scared of death and actually sitting with it, in detail, on purpose. One study found that within the same experiment, people who felt anxious about death became less likely to help others, while people who calmly reflected on death became more likely to help others. Same trigger, opposite paths. It is not really about whether you think about death. It is about how you face it.
That reminded me of Seneca, the old Roman philosopher. In his essay On the Shortness of Life, he wrote that life is not actually short — we just waste most of it. The kind of leisure he valued was not empty time. It was time spent looking straight at your own limits. If you think you have unlimited time, leisure is just a blank space. If you know your time is limited, leisure becomes the richest part of your day. I did not expect my question about boredom to connect to a 2,000-year-old book, but here we are.
One more thing caught my attention. Researchers found that how much time you feel you have left changes what you care about. Young, healthy people usually chase new knowledge and new connections. But the moment people feel their time is limited — after a serious illness, or a big life change — they suddenly start prioritizing the people already close to them.
This reminded me of my phone battery, honestly. When it is at 100 percent, I open random apps without thinking. When it drops to 5 percent, I suddenly become very serious about which app deserves that last bit of power. Maybe time works the same way.
So here is my simple, honest conclusion. “The more you think about death, the more successful you become” is too strong a claim, and honestly, more research points the other way. But how you face death — vaguely afraid, or calmly looking at it — really does seem to change what you prioritize. That is about as far as I can take this. I am not going to solve the biggest mystery of the human species from a bored Saturday afternoon.
Writing all this reminded me of something else, something that happened a few weeks earlier.
I saw an older man trip and fall on the sidewalk. I rushed over and helped him up. It was nothing dramatic — I just held his arm and picked up his bag. After he steadied himself, he looked me straight in the eye and said, “Thank you.” Something about the way he said it landed somewhere deep, and it stayed with me.
I still do not fully know why those two words hit me that hard. If I use the theory I just found, maybe he had faced enough of life’s limits, death included, that gratitude simply came out of him naturally. It is a tidy explanation, and it might even be true.
But I do not think I need to force it into a theory. I would rather just accept that “thank you” as something good, without turning it into proof of anything.
Human neurons are a strange thing. I started with boredom, ended up at death, and somehow landed on a stranger’s “thank you” on the sidewalk. I have no idea how those wires connect. I will leave that mystery to someone smarter than me.
A few things I read while writing this:
- Terror Management Theory — an overview of the “thinking about death makes people defensive” research (and, more recently, doubts about how well it replicates).
- How death anxiety and calm death reflection push helping behavior in opposite directions — Xie et al. (2024), Frontiers in Public Health. This is the “same trigger, opposite paths” study I mentioned.
- Seneca, On the Shortness of Life — the old Roman essay on wasted time and real leisure.
- Socioemotional Selectivity Theory — the idea that how much time you feel you have left quietly changes what you prioritize.