A conversation between The Examined Life host Kenny Primrose and behavioural scientist Victor Strecher about what death can teach us about living, the relationship between purpose and health, and the question that can bring us closer to what matters most. 

This conversation originally appeared on The Examined Life podcast with Kenny Primrose. It has been edited for length and clarity.

KP: What is the question that you think we should be asking ourselves?

VS: It sounds so simple – maybe even a little “woo-woo” – but: Who am I?

Who am I as a human being? As you start diving more deeply into that, what you’re really asking is: What do I care about? What matters most? What are the important things in my life? Those are the things that may give me direction.

Two thousand years ago, Seneca said that it doesn’t matter how much wind is in your sails if you don’t have a harbour. You need a harbour. You need a direction. You need to know who you are. 

As a behavioural scientist in a school of public health, I’m used to trying to motivate people to change their lives: to get a vaccination or a mammogram, quit smoking or overcome an addiction. We often try to convince people to do these things by frightening them. If you don’t quit smoking, you’ll die. If you don’t get that vaccination, you could die. 

But very often, one of the reasons people smoke is to reduce stress – and what are we doing? We’re stressing them. 

I began wondering whether we should think more about people’s identities. If our behaviours and emotions are the branches of a tree, and perhaps the trunk represents the strengths we possess when we’re at our best, what is the root system? What are our core values and our purpose? And what is the reservoir feeding that root system? Is it our family, our community, our religion? Increasingly, is it social media and the people influencing us there? 

I’ve spent the past 15 years trying to understand how we can help people answer this fundamental question: Who am I? 

KP: How has that question worked itself out in your own life?

VS: Fifteen years ago, our 19-year-old daughter, Julia, died very suddenly.

She had been born healthy, but when she was six months old she caught a chickenpox virus that attacked and destroyed her heart. She became one of the early children to receive a heart transplant. She went on to nursing school, but when she was 19, she passed away suddenly and unexpectedly.

About a month later, I found myself two miles out on Lake Michigan in a kayak at 5.15 in the morning. The lake is 87 miles wide where I live, and I was thinking about continuing towards Wisconsin, another 84 miles away. Of course, I would never have made it, and I knew that.

It was beautiful, smooth, quiet, dark and cold. The sun came up, and I don’t know how else to explain it, but my daughter seemed to be inside me, talking to me. 

She said: “You need to get over this.” 

It wasn’t that I should get over my grief. It was more: You need to get over yourself – over your grief and your ego – or you’ll die. You have a choice. 

At that moment, I genuinely had a choice between life and death. I had nothing to live for, as far as I could see. But I turned around and came back. 

When I reached the cottage, I sat in my kitchen and felt as though I were looking down on myself from the ceiling. I said: “Vic, you’re in deep trouble. You have to fix yourself. No one else can fix you. And you’re a behavioural scientist, so if you’re worth your salt, you should be able to do something.” 

I instinctively took out a piece of paper and started writing down the things that mattered most to me. 

The first was my family: my wife, Jeri, and our older daughter, Rachel. Then I started thinking about what mattered at work. I could have written my research or my colleagues, and they were important, but the first thing I wrote was: my students. 

I circled it. 

The University of Michigan had given me as much time as I needed to recover. Not that you ever really recover, but it was an incredible blessing. That morning I called the university and said: “That’s not the advice I need now. I need to teach as soon as possible. And I want to teach every one of my students as if they’re my own daughter.” 

That completely changed my life. 

When I returned to the classroom, I would look out at my students and silently say: You are all my daughter. Every one of you is Julia. 

I started taking more time with them. Students would wait outside my office, and I would make time for every one of them. Sometimes I invited them to our home, where my wife would make pancakes. I began living a much bigger life. 

I started caring about the things that mattered. And I stopped caring about the things that didn’t matter. I didn’t care what Kim Kardashian was wearing or whether our sports team won or lost. I cared about the things that mattered most to me – and that completely changed how I acted. 

KP: There’s a mystical dimension to that experience. As a scientist, how do you make sense of it?

VS: I don’t know how to make sense of it any more than I understand quantum mechanics or why relativity exists. I don’t know whether we even have the instrumentation to understand these things.

The evening before I went out onto the lake, somebody had sent me a collection of Rumi’s poetry. I read these lines:

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you. 
Don’t go back to sleep. 

That night I had an incredibly vivid dream. I was rollerblading with Julia through a medieval European town. She was a young girl again. We came to a beautiful white building that looked as though it might be a church, a mosque or a synagogue. Julia said: “We need to go there.”

Inside was a steep spiral staircase. I said we couldn’t go down because we were wearing rollerblades. She said: “We can.” 

We began floating downwards. At the bottom, three women came towards us wearing the same dress. I turned to Julia, and suddenly she was 19 years old and wearing that dress too. 

She said: “It’s time to go.” 

Then they disappeared. 

I woke up with the bed soaked in tears. I looked out at Lake Michigan and it was perfectly still. I wanted to go back to sleep. I thought: I can find you, Julia. I want to be where you are. 

Then I remembered Rumi’s words: “Don’t go back to sleep.” 

I stayed awake, and that changed my life. 

As a scientist, how do I interpret that, other than by saying that there is something much bigger than what we understand in this world? We don’t grasp a great deal of reality. But I still believe it is my job as a scientist to try to see it – to try to quantify the unquantifiable, including what it means to have a purpose in life. 

KP: Did that experience help you answer the question “Who am I?” by showing you what you valued?

VS: Very much so.

What are the things that matter most to me? What are the things I value? And what are the things I don’t really value – the things that don’t matter most? 

Once you make that distinction, you can begin making decisions about how to spend this brief period of time we have on the planet. 

Julia taught me that. She lived for 19 years, but she lived 19 big years. She taught me to live every day as if it might be my last. 

Marcus Aurelius said: “Don’t live your life as if you’re going to live for 10,000 years.” 

Death is life’s change agent. It is a very important component of life. It helps you focus on who you are, what matters most and how you want to devote your energy and vitality towards your purposes. 

In my graphic novel, I bring the Grim Reaper into my classroom. The Grim Reaper explains that the shadow death brings to life helps us see what life really is. It’s like adding a drop shadow to a piece of text: suddenly, the text stands out. 

That is what death does. It provides the background that allows life to stand out, rather than leaving us in the middle ground where we so often sleepwalk through our days. 

KP: Are there better and worse purposes for us to pursue?

VS: Absolutely. Some people build their purpose entirely around wealth, attractiveness or power. We have found consistently that people whose values are strongly focused on those things are more likely to develop depression. 

But a purpose can also be self-transcending and still be dangerous. Hitler had a purpose. Terrorist groups can have a purpose. People may be willing to die for a cause, but that doesn’t mean the cause is good. 

That takes me to Nietzsche’s metaphor of the camel, the lion and the child. 

The camel says: Load everything onto my back – all the joys, the sorrows and the knowledge. In other words, fully educate me. Education is not simply taking courses. It’s seeing life. It’s travelling, meeting people and discovering how the rest of the world lives. 

The camel then becomes a lion. The lion goes into the wilderness and confronts the “thou shalt” dragon. On each of the dragon’s scales are the words “thou shalt”: thou shalt do what your religion, community, political affiliation or family tells you to do. 

The lion destroys the dragon and becomes a child. The child is innocent and free enough to construct its own values and purpose. 

I don’t know whether any of us can become completely free of the values we inherited. We may still be living from an expired credit card handed to us by our families or communities. But can we research ourselves deeply enough to develop values that are truly our own – and sufficiently well-informed that they do not become dangerous? 

That is an important part of finding purpose. 

KP: Do you see the current crisis of meaning as a crisis of purpose? 

VS: I think there is a distinction between meaning and purpose. 

Meaning implies that there is some underlying sense or continuity to the universe. As an agnostic, I simply don’t know whether that exists. I’m not saying it doesn’t. I just don’t know. 

Albert Camus was similar. He said: I don’t know whether God exists, but it is really important to have a purpose. 

In The Myth of Sisyphus, Sisyphus pushes his rock up the mountain each day, even though it always rolls down again. The point is not necessarily that he will succeed. The rock gives him something towards which he can direct himself. 

We need some form of direction in our lives. When we set a goal, we persist for longer. We are willing to put up with discomfort and pain. Even as children, we might try to swim underwater to the other end of the pool. Our lungs are bursting, but we can see the wall ahead of us. We may not reach it on the first attempt, but we try again. 

Having a direction gives us some degree of joy.

JB: How might someone who doesn’t know their purpose begin to find it?

IM: Start very simply. Ask: What matters most? 

When I returned from Lake Michigan, I instinctively wrote down the things that mattered most. And it turned out that the things weren’t things. They were people: my family and my students. 

You might begin by asking: Who relies on me? Who do I care about? What could I do to make a difference for those people? 

Look at the photograph on your smartphone – something you may see dozens of times each day. Is it your granddaughter, your spouse, your dog, a work of art or a place in nature? What does that image say about what matters to you? 

You can also try what I call the headstone test. Imagine that you died today. What would you want written as your epitaph? What would you hope people would say about you at your memorial service? 

People often struggle when they retire because they have to repurpose their lives. Perhaps they’ve spent ten years dreaming about playing golf every day – but after five days they realise their knees hurt and they’re not very good at golf. 

What might lie beyond that? Could you volunteer somewhere that matters to you, invest yourself in a cause, join the board of an organisation or help children learn to read? 

Our research suggests that people who engage in these ways live longer. Even their epigenetic clock – a measure of biological ageing – appears to be affected.