Emily Esfahani Smith

And so

if you're sitting on your deathbed reflecting back on your life, are you going to be happy with what you see there?

Are you going to be satisfied, I should say, with what you see reflecting back?

Are you going to feel like you did the things that were important to you, that you did your best to kind of live out your values, to love and be loved, those kinds of things?

Or are you going to feel despair that you didn't?

What regrets might you have?

And that can be a way that we can determine, okay, if I'm dying right now and sitting on my deathbed, maybe these are the changes that I need to make.

Mortality is one way that we can really kind of get into thinking about what makes our lives meaningful.

And then regret, I think actually

is another way regret can speak to us, too, because it tells us what's important to us, what we want our lives to be about.

So nobody feels comfortable.

Well, I shouldn't say nobody.

Maybe some people do.

But a lot of people don't feel comfortable thinking about their own deaths.

A lot of people don't feel comfortable

thinking about the things they regret.

These are really painful topics to sit with.

And yet they can be these, you know, they can give us hints and clues about how we can make our lives more meaningful.

In my book, I write specifically about

something called meaning centered psychotherapy developed by a psychiatrist, Dr. William Breitbart at Sloan Kettering in New York City.