Since the beginning of human consciousness, attempting to answer the question, “What happens after death?” has only led to an increase in the number of untestable hypotheses and opinions. Other than the uncontestable fact that your physical body will disintegrate after you die, there is neither hard nor soft evidence to support any of the other views and opinions. In a nutshell, we do not know anything at all about what happens to our non-physical selves after death.

Today’s conversation is not about what happens after you die. It is, instead, about something more useful – your wealth just prior to your death. In my recent TEDx Talk, I shared ideas about building your wealth, and today’s conversation drills down into one specific component of the thinking, planning, and execution of that wealth building – your wealth at death!

What Motivates Today’s Topic?

Even if you do not pay taxes, death is guaranteed to you. Therefore, a time just before death is similarly guaranteed. It struck me that, even though death is guaranteed to all of us, and we use our human cognitive abilities to often pointlessly debate what happens after it, we do not take our thoughts to dwell on our state during the time near and before death. This formed part of the ideas I shared in my recent TEDx Talk.

Why do we not think much at all about the hour, day, week, month, or year immediately prior to death?

Why must we think about that duration just prior to death if we are to manage our wealth in the best manner possible?

What, if any, is an ideal state of wealth in that window of time that I am suggesting you think about?

How might we construct a path of thinking, planning, and action connected to that period of time before death?

How does intentionally thinking about the moments just before death change the way we live today and tomorrow?

Let’s answer these and other questions now.

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Contents

What Motivates Today’s Topic?
Defining Your “Pre-Death Duration”
Why do we think so much about Post-Death?
Why Should You Focus More on Your Pre-Death Duration?
Using Wealth as a Universal Measure of Your State
Defining “Net-Pleasure”
1234Total Net-Pleasure in Your Life
Wealth vs Pleasure
Why Define an Ideal Wealth State at Death?
1234The Cheeky Challenge
1234Multiple State Transitions
1234The Importance of Defining an Ideal Wealth State at Death
Ideal Wealth Pre-Death
1234External Wealth
1234Internal Wealth
12341234The Ideal Method for Death
12341234The Ideal Death Day
12341234Physical Wealth at Death
12341234Mental Wealth at Death
12341234Emotional Wealth at Death
12341234Spiritual Wealth at Death
Reaching Our Ideal Wealth Pre-Death
Take-Home Message
Parting Message

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Defining Your “Pre-Death Duration” [top]

Death, like your birth, has a unique timestamp, even if it is revealed only after you die.

Your Post-Death Duration is an infinitely long duration during which you cannot do anything.

I define the Pre-Death Duration to assist our thinking and action. The end of that window is revealed without ambiguity only after you die. The start of your Pre-Death Duration can have multiple definitions depending on our focus. So, it can be a minute before you die, an hour before you die, the day before you die, the month before you die, and so on.

We will return to the position and size of this flexible window today and in the future to understand how we can use it to our advantage.

Why do we think so much about Post-Death? [top]

Given that we do not know what happens to us after we die, and given that we cannot plan to do anything after we die, why do we think so much about the Post-Death Duration?

Let us consider 3 buckets: psychological, cultural, and evolutionary factors.

The fear of the unknown makes the afterlife—whether heaven, reincarnation, or nothingness—more intriguing and comforting than the often distressing reality of dying. Also, cognitive avoidance and optimism bias lead people to distance themselves from thoughts of suffering or decline before death.

Cultural and religious narratives emphasise post-death scenarios. The narratives are curated to serve the purpose of society through traditions or religious behavioural compliance.

Evolutionarily, survival instincts drive humans to seek continuity, making the idea of an afterlife more appealing than contemplating the end of existence.

Why Should You Focus More on Your Pre-Death Duration? [top]

If you want to think about Post-Death, that is fine. Just do not allow it to be at the expense of thinking about the Pre-Death Duration. Through a legally binding will that you could write on this side of death, you can hope to influence the actions of others after you die. On the other hand, also from this side, Pre-Death, you can most definitely do many things about both the time of your death and your trajectory leading up to it.

Using Wealth as a Universal Measure of Your State [top]

For every time coordinate, if we use wealth as a universal measure for your state between birth and death, it could encompass all that gives meaning to the future potential in your life, as long as we consider your wealth to include both buckets – your external wealth and your internal wealth.

Defining “Net-Pleasure” [top]

Thanks to the Unholy Trinity, your natural instinct is to seek pleasure and avoid pain. Over any duration, we can define the Net-Pleasure from living to be the total pleasure you experience in that duration minus the total pain you feel in that duration.

    Net-Pleasure = Total Pleasure – Total Pain

So, for example, the Net-Pleasure for you over the next 24 hours might be the net addition and subtraction from: “A delicious meal with a friend, a sunset walk, being stuck in traffic on the way home, a slight headache before dinner, a favourite dessert, a little stress from stock markets moving against you, peaceful sleep for a few hours followed by disturbed sleep because of someone snoring.”

Total Net-Pleasure in Your Life [top]

Being animals, our natural instinct is to primarily satisfy short-term goals and give secondary importance to longer-term goals. If we are to live and enjoy life as “higher creatures,” we must be more “aware” that there is a tomorrow beyond today and ensure that our Total Net-Pleasure over our entire life is high.

Wealth vs Pleasure [top]

Wealth is a stock variable, a snapshot in time measure. Pleasure (and pain) are flow variables – like income and expenses – they are experienced across a duration of time.

For external wealth, income increases wealth and expenses reduce it.

For internal wealth, there is a dimension additional to pleasure-and-pain. The dimension of good-and-bad. Some pleasures are good for you and increase your internal wealth, and some pleasures are bad for you and reduce your internal wealth. Similarly, for pain as well. Consider the involuntary pain from disease – it reduces your internal wealth. And consider the wise choice of voluntary pain from moderate physical exercise – it increases your internal wealth.

Why Define an Ideal Wealth State at Death? [top]

With any endeavour, it is better to work towards an ideal state. Even if we never reach it, without a goal, we are directionless. Not having articulated a goal, it is mathematically almost guaranteed that you will not reach the goal that you truly desire but did not make the simple effort to articulate.

The Cheeky Challenge [top]

At this point, you might perk up and say, “Ah, but who cares what my final Wealth State at Death is if I have enjoyed life?” That cheeky challenge is not without merit because in answering it today, we can learn a lot about how to live our lives from tomorrow. So, I will first present some uncontestable facts about reality and then present a wise answer to the cheeky challenge.

Multiple State Transitions [top]

You have heard it being said that “Life is a journey, not a destination.” It is important that we unpack that and articulate a comparison of the journey we call “life” and the typical travel you might do in your “everyday life”. Let’s start…

• You do want the journey to be comfortable and even pleasurable.
• Unlike your everyday commute that you would like to do in the shortest time possible, with this journey called life, we would like it to be as long as possible, as long as the journey is pleasurable.
• Much like your city commute, where you want to avoid garbage dumps, the noise of traffic, polluted air, being stuck in traffic jams or caught out in bad weather, you also wish to travel through life with maximum Net-Pleasure between now and death.
• If your route cannot avoid garbage dumps, the noise of traffic, polluted air, being stuck in traffic jams or bad weather, you might be fortunate in being able to afford travel in a private or public vehicle where you do not get affected by them. The requirement here is for external wealth so that you can own or rent the use of such a vehicle.
• The equivalent Rolls-Royce in the journey we call your life is one that does not need much money. Some money, up to a point, for ensuring the basics and a little bit more, is good, but beyond that, the marginal benefit keeps reducing.
• While it is possible that you may not reach your office or holiday destination, there is a 100% guarantee that you will reach death!
• Whether it is your daily commute or vacation travel, you can usually start yet another journey once you reach your current destination. On the other hand, in your journey that you refer to as “my life”, your final destination is death, and once you reach it, there is no way out.

and, now the most important comparison:

• There is a causal link between the quality of one neighbourhood that you drive through and neighbourhoods adjacent to it, i.e. rich neighbourhoods next to rich neighbourhoods. That link is easily broken because the causal nature is weak, e.g. million-dollar homes a block away from a slum in Mumbai or New Orleans. Using jargon, there is only a tiny degree to which there is a causal nature in the positive autocorrelation observed between consecutive neighbourhoods that you pass through. Said differently, correlation is not causation. Or, equivalently, association is not causation. On the other hand, in your life journey, there is a strong path dependency. A positive outcome observed is highly likely to have been caused by a set of prior positive actions. Equivalently, a negative outcome observed is highly unlikely to have occurred by chance. Luck is something we conveniently attribute our life events to too much, instead of accepting the reality of our ability to make things happen both directly and indirectly. Put differently, there are very few chance events. You do control outcomes a lot more than you tell yourself.

The Importance of Defining an Ideal Wealth State at Death [top]

We agree now that what you will experience tomorrow is a direct result of what you do today. You want to travel in style and enjoy the journey of your life in its entirety. Therefore, during your enjoyment of each stage, starting with today, you must make appropriate choices to ensure that you enjoy the subsequent stages too.

Knowing where you are right now, and where you want to end up finally, what we call Pre-Death, there are many points on the timeline between now and then that you can deliberately place wealth milestones at today. If life’s outcomes were not path-dependent, you could try to enjoy only harmful pleasures with the confidence that you can eliminate all negative outcomes instantly. Alas, in truth, such an approach is short-sighted or, to put it more bluntly, stinks of foolishness.

Knowing that you cannot affect the following 2 periods:

• the past, which is ever-expanding
• the period Post-Death, which is infinitely long

you are left with the entire period between now and Death during which you can make a difference. Whether or not you fear death or the pain that you associate with Pre-Death, you can work constructively to do 2 distinctly different things:

• delay the date of death, i.e. expand the duration for experiencing pleasure
• reduce the total duration during which you will experience pain

while at the same time enjoying the entire journey.

By actively defining your Pre-Death wealth, you can do route planning to navigate through a very long life of growing your internal, external and total wealth, while maximising your lifetime total Net-Pleasure.

That answers the cheeky challenge!

Ideal Wealth Pre-Death [top]

Giving serious consideration to your wealth in the duration just prior to death, we can break it into 2 buckets – external wealth and internal wealth and ask the following:

What might be the ideal type of each, and at what ideal level should each be?

Let us describe what we would like to ideally see in each of the 2 buckets. Let us start with your external wealth.

External Wealth [top]

You would like it to be that on the day that you die, all of your material needs are met for that day (e.g. comfortable clothes, pleasant weather, food you relish), and at the end of that day, your financial net worth can have dropped to zero. You will not be around to spend more money, so having more than you need for that last day ends up being a waste, relative to your requirements. The catch, of course, is that you do not know which day is going to be your last day, and so you accumulate money because of 3 emotional states – being optimistic, being realistic, and being fearful. Optimism that you will live for a long time, being realistic that you will be struck by illness and disease, and being afraid that you will need a lot of money for sickcare expenses. Note how the feelings of optimism and the attempt to be realistic are not harmonised for maximising Net Pleasure, which is why we end up with the real fear that our sickcare expenses will be high. Is there another possibility where you do not give up good health to accumulate money that you think you will need in order to live with bad health for many years? Of course there is. But we remain blind, perhaps wilfully blind, to that possibility of good health until death.

What about that inheritance that you want to leave for your children? Many give up living a long and healthy life because of the foolishness around leaving an inheritance or legacy behind, something that I will address another day.

Internal Wealth [top]

Your internal wealth comprises your physical wealth, mental wealth, emotional wealth and spiritual wealth. Before we describe their ideal levels at death, let us first describe an ideal death.

The Ideal Method for Death [top]

The ideal death is to pass away in your sleep at 100+ because your heart muscles that served you beautifully for over a century are now naturally weaker after a fortunately slow age-related decline. The senescence of cells is a natural process. Those who live their lives wisely face this problem at a very late age. Those who do not live their lives well die because of the failure of diseased organs or organ systems, and much earlier than death driven by senescent cells. Death because of the senescence of heart muscle cells is the ideal death.

To define this ideal death, I have specifically said that the following most common causes of death will not be yours:

• cancer
• death-by-accident
• respiratory failure
• complications caused by severe brain deterioration in the final stages of Alzheimer’s
• other causes related to poor metabolic health, e.g. stroke, kidney failure

The Ideal Death Day [top]

You may have planned many birthdays. Now, picture this ideal death day. You have had yet another fantastic day without dependence on anyone, surrounded by nature, conversations with loved ones, food and drink that you love, activities for the benefit of society and have retired to your bed with the same sense of fulfilment that you have been feeling every night for over a century. Then, you do not wake up ever again. When your loved ones find you in that bed, they notice a peaceful face, glowing skin and an expression that almost looks like you were smiling during the transition from Pre-Death to Post-Death.

Physical Wealth at Death [top]

You died in the best way possible, and although your heart muscles became the weakest link in the end, your heart had no blockages. Your arteries were in no way on the verge of clogging up. At the 2 ends furthest from your heart, the capillaries in your brain and your toes were functioning beautifully. That allowed you to have a sharp brain with excellent memory, and the ability to move around your neighbourhood every day on foot, even barefoot, or on a bicycle.

Whether you did it yourself or had hired help for it, you were capable of performing all household tasks without mechanical devices. Sweeping and mopping your floors, washing your clothes by hand, grocery shopping to prepare your meals, chopping, cooking, and washing dishes – these activities were not a problem during those periods when your household help were away visiting their village.

Mental Wealth at Death [top]

Your cognitive abilities are as sharp as when you were in your twenties. Even if some calculations take a few milliseconds longer, there are some complex, higher-level tasks that your brain performs more efficiently than when you were a graduate student, thanks to the accumulation of useful knowledge over a century and a refinement of neuronal networks over many decades of active daily use.

Emotional Wealth at Death [top]

Whether you suddenly hear catastrophic or celebratory news, your heart rate does not race out of control. You are in control of your emotions rather than the other way around. Stressful events occur on the outside, but your response that originates from deep inside you is like that of a monk who has just emerged from a state of meditation.

Spiritual Wealth at Death [top]

Unlike external wealth, your spiritual wealth has no upper bound and can, potentially, reach infinity. That infinity is where you would like to be when you make that transition from this side to that other side of death. Even if you find out that Post-Death ends up being a void of nothingness, achieving that infinity Pre-Death would be ideal.

In this ideal Pre-Death phase, you will exist in a state free from chronic anxiety, greed, or dissatisfaction, grounded in the ability to be fully present and to appreciate life just as it is. With a sense of alignment to a higher purpose (not necessarily religious), you will live guided by values such as compassion, integrity, and service, rather than seeking external validation. Your connections with others will be deep, sincere, and free from attachment or manipulation, and you will feel a profound sense of interconnection with nature, humanity, or the divine. You will know your true self beyond the ego, having integrated the lessons of suffering without allowing them to define you. Free from attachment to material possessions or fixed outcomes, you will have cultivated the grace to release grudges, past wounds, and the weight of societal expectations. In this space, you will find awe in the simple, see abundance even in adversity, and give freely — your time, your energy, your kindness — without expectation. The only legacy you will leave is a quiet but meaningful ripple of positive impact.

Reaching Our Ideal Wealth Pre-Death [top]

You probably guessed that reaching the ideal external wealth Pre-Death seems ridiculously easy if you knew your Date of Death, mostly because you realise you don’t need to save as much money as you would have otherwise. The typical person who reads this article will die having left behind a lot more external wealth than they needed for themselves. The target is over-achieved.

On the other side of the Internal-External Divide, reaching the ideal Pre-Death internal wealth seems like an impossible target – a dream that cannot be realised. But what within us prevents us from achieving the greatest values possible for internal wealth?

What is the connection between the observed reality of most people wildly surpassing the external wealth target while concurrently wildly underperforming the internal wealth target? Is it possible to be very close to the external wealth target and very close to the internal wealth target in practice? What stops us?  What if there was a really easy method for maximising internal wealth Pre-Death while ensuring that the Pre-Death external wealth was appropriate and not a hindrance for maximising the internal wealth target?

I like to believe I have the answers, both in theory and the steps one can follow to close the Implementation Gap in practice. However, today’s conversation was about defining that ideal Pre-Death wealth, not about closing that Implementation Gap – an important topic for another day.

Take-Home Message [top]
Focusing on your “Pre-Death Duration” by defining an ideal state of external and internal wealth (physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual) allows you to maximise lifetime Net-Pleasure and live a long, fulfilling life. By planning for a balanced wealth state at death, you can make intentional choices today to ensure a joyful journey, free from excessive material accumulation and rich in health, wisdom, and purpose.

Parting Message [top]

If you do not define where you want to get to in the end, you might go where you want to today, but quite likely be disappointed with where you will reach tomorrow. If everything you do is consistent with your core beliefs and desires, then a long and healthy life of joy is pretty much guaranteed to be yours. If you want to be guided in detail, you know how to reach me, and if you found this useful, please do share it with others.

Puru

Dr Purnendu Nath spends his waking hours focusing on helping individuals and organizations reach their goals, to make the world a better place. He speaks, writes and advises on topics such as finance, investment management, discipline, education, self-improvement, exercise, nutrition, health and fitness, leadership and parenting.