Some months ago, Ozy Brennan wrote the excellent The Life Goals of Dead People. If you haven’t read it already, I highly recommend doing so. It does an excellent job of laying out why, as a person who is alive, goals like “I want to take up less space” and “I want to be less selfish” are less useful than they sound. If you are still living and breathing, it is good to have goals that a living person can do better than a corpse can.

I worry that “dead people goals” is starting to occupy a similar cultural space as “slave morality“, as a catch-all term for anything the speaker doesn’t like.

Want to travel, but you’re concerned about responsible tourism? Not dead people goals.

Want to do machine learning research, but you’re worried about the environmental impact and water consumption of data centres? Not dead people goals.

Want to write a novel, but also writing a novel is hard and expensive and takes a toll on your mental health? Not dead people goals.

For something to qualify as “dead people goals” or a “dead people goals mindset”, it has to be most easily accomplished by a corpse. Corpses can’t do responsible tourism, because they can’t do anything. Corpses can’t worry about the environment, because they can’t do anything. Corpses can’t weigh up the cost to their sanity of writing a novel versus the regret they’d feel about not writing a novel, because they can’t do anything, because they’re dead.

I also think that not having dead people goals is a starting point, not an end point. Once you’ve decided to have living people goals, a vast and slightly terrifying conceptual space of different things you want to do opens up before you. Do you choose to travel or write that novel or adopt 2 cats or work on the Millennium Prize Problems or grill in your backyard? How do you balance your living people goals with the living people goals of the people around you? Does it matter how well you know the living people around you? Does it matter if other living people say they don’t want you to pursue your living people goals?

These questions are big and messy and complicated. They’re certainly much more messy and complicated than deciding you want to have dead people goals. They’re also much more messy and complicated than deciding that anything that makes you think about how to rank your living people goals is a kind of “dead people goals” mentality.

Living is an incredibly rare, precious, wondrous thing. Infinite other beings could have lived, but here we are, right now, at a point in the universe where life can exist at all. And it’s terribly short, and terribly frustrating that we barely have any time to figure out how to rank our living people goals.

Here we are; make the most of it. Or maybe grill in your backyard and invite some living people round to discuss your living people goals.