We must live out our lives, to whatever extent we can, in clear-eyed acknowledgement of our limitations, in the undeluded mode of existence that Heidegger calls Being-towards-death’, aware that this is it, that life is not a dress rehearsal, that every choice requires myriad sacrifices, and that time is always already running out – indeed, that it may run out today, tomorrow, or next month. And so it’s not merely a matter of spending each day ‘as if’ it were your last, as the cliché has it. The point is that it always actually might be.
