The Beauty of Ephemerality: Why We Should Cherish the Fleetingness of Our Lives

Last year, I struck up a conversation with a man sitting next to me at the bar of a TGIF at Miami International Airport. I never learned his name, nor did he learn mine. Still, we enjoyed nearly an hour-long conversation: we discussed his son’s hesitance to pursue a degree in the humanities, despite his obvious aptitude for writing and his dismal performance in computer science courses. The man sought my advice as a philosophy professor about how to persuade his son to switch paths.

I will probably never see this man again. Yet there was something touching to the ephemerality of our encounter. I don’t long to meet him again, but simply enjoy the memory of the pleasurable moment I had with him. I wonder if such moments might help us cope with our own ephemerality. Can the same beauty and poignancy be applicable to a person’s life as a whole? Is there something to life’s brevity that is worth admiring rather than mourning?

Philosophers often discuss the urgency that facing death lends to our lives. For example, in his magnum opus Being and Time, the twentieth-century philosopher Martin Heidegger claims that anxiety is the mood in which we authentically face up to our mortality. He leads into the discussion of anxiety by speaking of the “tranquilizing” effect our everyday talk about death…