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scenarios, playing with possibilities and generalizing from what we have seen, enabling us to learn, reason and extrapolate.
    The survival benefits of these faculties are obvious: from mammoth traps to supermarket supply chains, we can plan, coordinate and cooperate to ensure our needs are met. But these powers come at a cost. If you have an idea of yourself and of the future and can extrapolate and generalize from what you see around you, then if you see your comrade killed by a lion, you realize that you too could be killed by a lion. This is useful if it causes you to sharpen your spear in readiness, but it also brings anxiety—it summons the future possibility of death in the present. The next day you might see a different comrade killed by a snake, another by disease and yet another by fire. You see that there are
countless
ways in which you could be killed, and they could strike at any time: prepare as you will, death’s onslaught is relentless.
    And so we realize, as we see the other living things around us fall one by one, that no one is spared. We recognize that death is the real enemy; with our powerful minds we can stave him off for a while with sharp spears or strong gates, full larders and hospitals, but at the same time, we see that it is all ultimately fruitless, that one day we not only can but surely will die. This is what the twentieth-century German philosopher Martin Heidegger famously described as “being-toward-death,” which he considered to define the human condition.
    We are therefore blessed with powerful minds yet at the same time cursed, not only to die, but to know that we must. “Man has created death,” wrote the poet W. B. Yeats. Other creatures blindly struggle on, knowing only life until their moment comes. “Except for man, all creatures are immortal, for they are ignorant of death,”wrote the Argentinean author Jorge Luis Borges. But we bring death into life: we see it coming for us in every storm or forest fire, snake or spider, illness or ill omen.
    This is a central theme of philosophy, poetry and myth; it is what defines us as mortals. It is represented in that most ancient and influential of stories, the book of Genesis: if they eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, Adam and Eve are told, they will die—mortality is the price of knowledge. Since we attained self-awareness, as Michel de Montaigne wrote, “death has us by the scruff of the neck at every moment.” No matter what we do, no matter how hard we strive, we know that the Reaper will one day take us. Life is a constant war we are doomed to lose.
    B UT the second idea—and the other half of the Mortality Paradox—tells us quite the opposite: that our own obliteration is impossible. The fact is, whenever we try to imagine the
reality
of our own deaths we stumble. We simply cannot envision actually not existing. Try it: you might get as far as an image of your own funeral, or perhaps a dark and empty void, but you are still there—the observer, the envisioning eye. The very act of imagining summons you, like a genie, into virtual being.
    We therefore cannot make death real to ourselves as thinking subjects. Our powerful imaginative faculties malfunction: it is not possible for the one doing the imagining to actively imagine the absence of the one doing the imagining. “It is indeed impossible to imagine our own death; and whenever we attempt to do so we can perceive that we are in fact still present as spectators,” wrote Sigmund Freud in 1915. He concluded from this that “at bottom no one believes in his own death … [for] in the unconscious every one of us is convinced of his own immortality.” Or as the English Romantic poet Edward Young put it: “All men think all men mortal, but themselves.”
    This applies no matter how far into the future we attempt tolook: whether one or one thousand years from now, we cannot help but be present in what we see. There is no limit to just how far into