We only live once, so let’s live well
(7/31/2026) – I try not to think about death much.
But when you’re five thousand feet above the ground on the longest cable car in the world, and the door suddenly swings open, you think about death a little bit.
We were on our way to Ba Na Hills, a theme park perched on the mountains above the city of Da Nang, Vietnam, just above the cloud cover, reachable by a half-hour cable car.
(Visiting a communist theme park is a little bit like having a fever dream in a dead mall. There are arguments for more collectivist economic systems; the quality of their theme parks is not a strong one.)
Da Nang is going through an economic transformation, so the cable cars were state-of-the-art, like ones we’d ridden in Rio and Spain and Albuquerque. (I can’t resist a cable car.) I didn’t think anything of the heavy winds blowing through – it would storm later in the day – until suddenly it thrust the doors open.
The guide and I were closest to the entrance, so we each grabbed a door and held them closed until the wind died down. No daring one-handed rescue necessary.
But when something you thought was going to be a barrier between you and a mile-high fall erupts in a mechanical failure, yeah, you think about death.
I’ve always had trouble with death. Many of our local groups hold death cafes, many of our chaplains have amazing workshops on how to support the dying, and I’ll admit that I simply avoid these empirically useful, beloved, and strategically valuable bits of programming.
The realization that I was going to die hit me on my eleventh birthday in perhaps the silliest possible way. I was supposed to meet my “girlfriend” at the time in Club Penguin – an online chat room where you controlled a cartoon penguin avatar through a series of winter-themed locales – at 8:53pm, the exact moment I was born. She had trouble with her internet connection and we missed the moment. And I realized that there was never going to be another opportunity for us to meet up in Club Penguin at exactly my eleventh birthday ever again, and that’s when my fifth-grade brain grasped the finality of existence and I was gripped by terror at my own mortality.
It didn’t help that my dad, who was 65 when I was born, had just had a serious health scare, and we were – I was – deeply worried about losing him. I couldn’t imagine a world where I couldn’t talk to him or hear his voice. It’s still the hardest thing about my atheism – I wish I could believe in my heart it was possible to see him again.
I spent years gripped in the fear of death, and it brought me to explore Christianity in my early teens. (When you’re the son of a famous atheist, you’re sort of the only twelve-year-old boy in America who is scared to tell your Dad you want to START going to church.) I didn’t enjoy going to church. I never really believed the stories. I didn’t like the ministers and while I normally love singing, I even disliked the hymns. But I was there trying desperately to grab onto some faint belief that death was escapable.
I’ve come to really loathe the way the religious right weaponizes our fear of death to try and coerce us into membership. One of the things that makes it harder for humanists to recruit – but ultimately forms our ethical core – is that we use no such carrots or sticks. People shouldn’t belong to something – or behave well – to acquire a reward or avoid punishment, because people behave better when things happen for their own sake. As Vonnegut said – being a humanist is about behaving decently without any expectations of rewards or punishments after you’re dead.
I was talking with Jake, our Organizing Director, about this today, and he told me about how religious folks once tried to convince people that Robert Ingersoll – the great agnostic – had a deathbed conversion. “They so want us to validate them in their final moments,” Jake said.
I saw a TikTok recently where a young woman asked atheists why they would knowingly fail Pascal’s wager – the hypothetical offered by the seventeenth-century mathematician Blaise Pascal, that says we ought to believe in God because we don’t want to risk the eternity of Hell.
My answer to that is simple: If there is a world where people are burned for what they believe, I’d never kiss the hand that lights the match.
But I doubt it. I doubt there’s anything, and always have. I’ve felt more at peace with that reality as I’ve matured. I’ve found comfort in the idea that, as the humanist Terry Pratchett said. “No one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away.” That we live on through the ways we impact the others we love and help even in unseen ways, through the things we build and write and draw and design and organize and their impacts on the people who come after us. I can still feel close to my dad – often when I’m organizing against some sort of better-funded, sanctimonious foe, which is part of why I love this job. In that sense, he’s not gone.
Realizing those things has helped me make an uneasy truce with death. And I knew it was true when the door blew open and my first thought wasn’t “let’s send up a prayer just in case” but “how the hell do I get this thing closed?”
And then I stood up and got to work, because that’s what we do as humanists. We know we’re promised one world and one life, and so we protect it that much more fiercely.
Next time you visit a communist theme park, make sure the cable cars are in good shape. We only live once, so let’s live well.
For humanity,
Fish
PS: We’ve got a very special episode of the How to Humanist podcast coming out on Monday with me and Nick Fish, President of American Atheists, as we talk about how secular movement organizations can work better together to face down our Christian Nationalist foes. Many of you have told me you’d want to see organizations in our community work together more closely – and Nick and his team are great and generous partners that people should know better if they aren’t already involved. Tune in!
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The American Humanist Association (AHA) works to protect the rights of Humanists, atheists, and other nontheistic Americans. The AHA advances the ethical and life-affirming worldview of Humanism, which—without beliefs in gods or other supernatural forces—encourages individuals to live informed and meaningful lives that aspire to the greater good of humanity.
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