If We Can’t Outrun Death, Then What?

I.

On the 1st of November, 1755, an earthquake of magnitude 7.7 or higher struck Lisbon, Portugal. The churches were full, and thousands of candles were lit to celebrate All Saints’ Day. The shaking went on for more than three minutes; the vaults came down on the congregations, and the thousands of lit candles caused nonstop fires.

Men, women and children ran from the churches to the sea. They thought they would be safe there, because they had seen the fissures and the cracks in the ground. Forty minutes later, a massive tsunami came down and levelled them. The number of deaths reached forty thousand or more.

The neighbourhood of Alfama sat on bedrock. It remained largely intact and high enough to miss the water, but Baixa, the district below it, sat on the river floodplain. It didn’t survive.

The same city. The same earthquake. Only geology mattered.

Not faith. Not virtue. Not prayer.

II.

Europe was shocked by the disastrous events of that day and went into deep reflection.

Malagrida, an Italian Jesuit missionary with huge standing at the Lisbon court, published a pamphlet in 1756 insisting the cause was not natural but the sins of the city. He condemned the men for clearing the rubble and rebuilding rather than repenting.

Voltaire, the most celebrated writer in Europe, was deeply troubled by what had happened in Lisbon. Within weeks, he wrote the Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne. Three years later came Candide, his most famous work, in which he used the catastrophe to take apart blind optimism and religious fanaticism. The world, he suggested, is chaotic. It doesn’t follow any moral code, and sometimes terrible things happen for no reason at all. By the end of the book, Candide—the protagonist—gives up trying to explain suffering through philosophy or religion. Instead, he tends his garden.

Pombal, the King’s chief minister, took control in the aftermath of the disaster by burying the dead and feeding the living. Later on, he sent surveys and questioned parishes so they could rebuild, assuming the earth would move again.

Three men asking different questions and acting in different ways.

III.

I was eight or nine, playing outside in the garden. On the red hardened earth, there was a colony of ants carrying little bits of food. I couldn’t work out what the food actually was. They were streaming towards an anthill. A long line of them. And the thought that came into my mind was that I could just step on them. Like God, I could end them. No reason. Just because my foot was there.

I can’t remember what I did, but I think, in the end, I didn’t do anything.

I hadn’t thought about this for fifty years. Until now, that is.

Perhaps, to the ants, I could’ve been the earthquake.

IV.

I wear an Oura ring. I wear an Apple Watch. I measure how many hours I sleep. I measure my heartbeat, my body temperature, my VO2. I test a set of specific biomarkers every six months.

As much as I can, I adjust things to be as healthy as possible.

At 58, I’m readying myself for the next part of my life. I am not going to retire and play golf all day. I don’t want to be a dead man walking. I want to be healthy. I want to be strong. I want to be active. I want to live my life to the fullest.

Am I just trying to buy more years?

Am I subconsciously telling GOD that here I am, listening and practising every life hack, so that He might give me a pass?

The irony is that all the optimisation I have done buys no guarantee. I can never outrun death or know the day that I will die.

I could walk out of the door right now, and a bus could hit me. I could be shot by mistake. I could fall out of the sky in a plane. There is no insurance against any of that.

But to be honest, I don’t really feel this fear of death. I don’t think about it day-to-day. Even when I read back through my diaries, it isn’t there.

Yes, I do feel fear for my kids. Sometimes I worry when they are out late. I still want to know what time they take off and land on every flight.

When I had an unusually high PSA result, I got scared that I could have prostate cancer, and for a few days I was genuinely worried. But later results proved the earlier one was false. And within days, I’d forgotten about death.

And when my wife went through cancer, I was very afraid for her, but somehow always felt that she would win the battle. And she did win it. Again, a few weeks later, I forgot about my fear of death.

In The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker says that innately in us there is a terror of dying, and that since the feeling is unbearable at full strength, we build ways to keep it out of mind. He calls this resulting mechanism the ‘vital lie’.

That’s why I can’t see the fear of death in my diaries. That’s why we are always looking to do something greater than we are, to leave some kind of legacy. To feel that we mattered.

The ring I am wearing. The HYROX I am doing. The Substack I am writing. The novel I want to write. Mentoring my son to take over my company. All so that I can feel that I existed.

To outlast death.

V.

Pombal responded to the 1755 earthquake by building in a new way to prevent earthquakes from causing as much damage. The new Baixa was built with three-dimensional timber frames embedded in the stone masonry to make the structure less rigid and more elastic.

He accepted that another earthquake could strike and built accordingly.

The Carmo Convent was deliberately left roofless. Never rebuilt. Kept open to the sky.

I like that. Not because I want to spend the rest of my life thinking about death, but because I don’t want to forget that I am alive. I will keep working on my health, writing my heart away, building the company, worrying and loving my family, and making plans for years I cannot guarantee I will see.

I cannot outrun death. None of us can.

But perhaps the answer to the question is not to try. Perhaps it is to know the earthquake is coming, but build anyway.