How Many Twix Would You Eat Tonight, if You Were Going to Die Tomorrow?
Today we will be talking about the meaning of life, so if you don’t want spoilers, please come back after having discovered it yourself. If you already know the meaning of life, you may still discover new things about the meaning and purpose of your life in relation to being a biological machined formed from space dust over 6 billion years for the direct purpose of eating Twix. You may not, I’m not making any promises.
First thing is first, this doesn’t have to be Twix and you don’t need to buy it from Amazon. However, I do want you to imagined yourself in a locked room. It doesn’t matter how you got there. You are there. You know that in 24 hours you will die. This is certain. You are also given an unlimited supply of any food you would like. It could be $1000 steak with mouse ice cream. Yes, milked directly from the mouse themselves. It could be your weight in Twix. It could be more ethically sourced. It could be less ethically sourced. It doesn’t matter, what matters is you are sitting on a chair and a table is in front of you filled to your weight in any food you want. It could be a sexy Jello man. I’m not judging you, do your best.
The question is — Do you eat some of it? Do you try to eat all of it? Do you eat so much you die before 24 hours. Do you learn the limit of human and Twix that no one has dared to ever find out before? I want you to really think about this, because if you don’t, than nothing here actually matters. It’s just silly words. The real question you have to ask is if your behavior would change, given a timer ticking away the last 24 hours of your life?
Think about it! Haruki Murakami did.
In the book Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, the main character understands that they have a similar situation. Not that they are forced to eat their body weight in chocolate, ha ha, but that they will die. In the last 24 hours of their life they find themselves washing the clothes of a friend of theirs. It was a pink suit of some kind and they washed it in a laundry mat thinking about how to best spend the last day they have on earth. Given that laundry probably took two hours and they have 24 to live, that would be like spending 5.8 years doing nothing but laundry. (This isn’t totally accurate to the book, but like most of you have not read this nor will. It’s kappa sewer people and complicated neuro tech lingo style narrative devolving into a time distorted wonderland.)
Anyways, given you were going to die tomorrow, you’d probably eat more candy today than you normally would. You would likely try to find some meaning or purpose or reason for the years of cognition you had. You would question if you mattered, if you changed things, if you left a legacy. Maybe you wouldn’t, maybe you’d be content. None of this actually matters though and that is part of understanding the meaning of life.
What matters is knowing that your behavior would change given you are going to die tomorrow. However most of us are living in a perpetual trance of tomorrow. We live with the idea that tomorrow we will wake up and at the end of the day we’ll go to sleep to repeat the cycle. While exceptions exist to this, the majority of most of our lives is spent not knowing our expiration date. And given that we may die tomorrow and given that our behavior would definitely change, likely to find some greater meaning in our life, we don’t we use that information to inform our daily life? If we knew we had five years to live, that’d be significant time to paint that self-portrait or build a house or follow your dreams. And so many of us actually only have five more years or less of life, but we don’t know, and we’re not pursuing what we’d consider our dreams. We’re rationing out our days, surviving, and promising ourselves at some point we will try tomorrow. And the only consistent part of that mantra is that it is always perpetually tomorrow, until you don’t have one. Until someone locked you in a room and left you with a bunch of Twix and a whole lot of questions.
Understanding that we will die is incredibly important towards building our personal philosophy. It is an absolute truth of this world that we will cease and any understanding or philosophy that doesn’t consider this reality is fundamentally flawed. And if you never considered this before in any real tangible way, that isn’t your fault. In a industrialized society we are asked to never think about death. It is completely obfuscated from our lives. It is something to avoid or fear. We spend so much time think about immortality and basically none thinking about morality, until something scary happens.
We have a necromancers obsession with the desire to continually live and a capitalistic incentive to make end of life care as expensive as possible. This obsession is making it into the stories we tell like Altered Carbon or Jupiter Ascending. The new modern Frankenstein isn’t reanimating new life, it is postponing death forever. And we saw this with Vampires, but that’s purely fiction. You won’t become a sexy vampire, but prolonging life technology is very real and very gated off. Quantity of life is forever the winning contender over quality of life in this country and through our stories. And the meaning of life doesn’t come from living forever, it comes from understand that we won’t.
In Fight Club, Tyler Durden asked Tyler Durden what Tyler Durden wanted to do before Tyler Durden died. Tyler Durden didn’t have an answer for Tyler Durden, so Tyler Duren tried to crash a car into a semi-truck. How much do you really know about yourself if you haven’t considered your death? These ideas have made it into our stories too and these ideas usually serve as a reactionary philosophy to the disconnected spiritual apathy we find within industrial societies in which bodies are labor and men are denied emotional connection therefor creating the space for toxic masculinity. The Matrix envisioned all of us living in a simulation, while our real bodies existed as batteries for the machine. Fun story or capitalism? I’ll let you sit what that for a second.
But let’s do some work — if you were going to die in a year, how would you live your life different? And if you believe that you would act different, why aren’t you acting like that now?
This question isn’t easy to answer. We think we have years, maybe decades to answer it. Yet time is an arrow ever moving forward and while we often have more than 24 hours, we blink twice and there goes twenty years. Life has a way of getting away from us given the daily grind for wages and disassociated coping to deal with insecurity, depression, and aimlessness. There is a limit for how many Twix we can possibly consume in a life time, no matter how many you shove in your mouth every minute of every day. And yes, there are significant health concerns for a solid 2500 calories of Twix, so to really min max your Twix eating life you have to exercise, drink water, etc. If you run ten miles a day, just think about how many more Twix you could eat? And believe it or not, this consideration has its own meaning to examine.
Okay, so Faye, I get it. I need to find the purpose of my life and live towards that purpose! And this is the meaning of life! Actually, no, that isn’t it either.
Knowing you’re going to die and finding something you want to do before dying isn’t your purpose nor is it the meaning of life. We don’t just spring up as sentient beings with a quest log and story line and blamo. The only important thing you need to understand is that you are going to die and anything that you do in your life needs to consider this fact. The fact is you will die, but also you probably won’t die tomorrow (unless you’ve taken the Twix Challenge).
The next thing to understand is nothing has any intrinsic meaning. Let’s say that you realized you were going to die in five years. So, it was time to stop wasting your life. It is time to draw as many erotic Papa Smurf pictures as possible. That’s completely valid. We need that. NEED THAT. However that isn’t the meaning of life, it isn’t more meaningful than drawing erotic pictures of the Hulk. And it isn’t more meaningful or a better use of your time than whatever you were doing before. When looking at the question of purpose or meaning, people often conflate that with a grandiose picture of being a world changing entity or the best at something or vaguely gestures at art. If you looked at this question and thought that smoking weed and playing video games was absolutely what you wanted to do for the next five years, damn the worlds supply of Papa Smurf erotica to hell, that’s fine too. So, when you consider what you want to be doing with your life, it can be anything. What is important is just that you’ve chosen it rather than you’re just water falling down the causality cliffs.
In one of the great philosophical text books, season three of Angel, we get the line, “If nothing we do matters, the only thing that matters is what we do.” And that may seem as asinine as the Sphinx from Mystery Men telling our main guy that he needs to master his rage or his rage will become his master, but I assure you it’s deeper, it’s even sociological.
If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequence
If we look at the philosophy of Arthur in The Once and Future King, we get a similar conceit. Specifically, if we don’t believe that humans are better than they are worse, there is no point in even trying to be good or just or ideal.
So, what are we doing here? Are we getting into Nihilism or the lesser schools of thoughts like Ancient Greek Philosophy? As if any truth could really exist outside of primetime television. No, we don’t have to ask Plato, because the answer is already there from an immortal sexy vampire who could theoretically eat infinite Twix. Nothing has any inherent meaning. As Terry Pratchett said in Hogfather:
“All right,” said Susan. “I’m not stupid. You’re saying humans need… fantasies to make life bearable.”
REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.
“Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little — “
YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.
“So we can believe the big ones?”
YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.
“They’re not the same at all!”
YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET — Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME…SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.
“Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what’s the point — “
MY POINT EXACTLY.”
So, there is no objective meaning to life and even if there was we are subjective creatures limited by our biology. Our experience of reality isn’t much more than a brain floating in the ether given electrical signals by our nerves to understand the world outside of the skull. If there was some divine meaning our fleshy electrical skeleton isn’t figuring it out. And on a long enough timeline there isn’t more meaning in being an activist than there is in eating as much Twix as possible in 24 hours.
However, what we choose to believe matters and impacts us. A person’s belief in a god has a meaningful impact on their life regardless if there is object reality behind that belief. Beliefs are powerful and do shape our world and how we view it. What be believe to be real is real in its consequence. So, what we have is the ability to decide what we want to believe. Who we want to be. What matters to us. What we want to work for. What legacy we want to leave. You have to both consider that you will die one day and that it is up to you to determine what you want to do with your life until that point.
And maybe you’re starting to get it. You’re thinking that if you start now, you could probably work your way up to 20 to 30 Twix a day no prob. That’s nearly a thousand a year. You’ll be remembered forever, a fucking hero.
When asking this question with any level of actual seriousness people will often cleverly respond with “42”. It’s a non-answer built into the Hitchhiker's Guide. However, a quick Google search will reveal the TRUTH:
And while I’ve asked this question legitimately in my younger years as I tried to make sense of the world and everything in it, I always felt frustration when getting this as a response. But as I mentioned before and throughout this advertisement for Twix, the question and the answer being 42 are equivalent to eating as much candy as you can. The reason people are disappointed or frustrated with this is because a lot of people have no idea what to do with their life. They want some concrete, easy objective that will be spiritually and meaningfully rewarding. They want the answer to a question that doesn’t exist, because here is the thing — the answer to the meaning of life doesn’t exist as a static concept. The answer exists within the journey in the same way that a river cannot exist without the concept of time.
So, this becomes less about having answers about life, those don’t exist. What does exist is having beliefs about life and desires about what you want out of it. You create your own meaning by continuing to put effort into an otherwise meaningless system. What this changes into then is how do you get the most out of your time here. That is a much more relevant, personal, and impactful question to ask. The answer is esoteric and created through the effort of finding it rather than something any single person can tell you.
I’m not the wise woman with all of the answers here, I’m just the lady who seriously framed this entire thought exercise into a Saw-like Twix situation. That’s the only new thing happening here. But it’s a curious thing where elders truly do have the answers and we live in a forever cycle of thinking we know more than they do and just suffering through same life experiences to come to the same conclusions. These are stories told forever about the human experience. What has changed however is, again, the industrialization of the world. We used to be connected to the land and the crops and the cycle of life in real ways. We used to understand, celebrate, and honor death in such a way all philosophy included and recognized it as an intrinsic part of life, instead of this boring ass ontological framework that decided philosophy was better served as abstract linguistic logic rather than dick and fart jokes. (With the exception of Abagail Thorn)
And why does this matter for you? I’ve asked you to effectively consider two things
- You will die tomorrow
- You decide what you want to believe and you create meaning through that belief
- Twix, just like generally, you’ve had to think about it a lot.
The reason is that we spend so much of our life chasing our tomorrow. I count calories all of the time because I believe that the number on my scale being lower is better. This is a meaningless belief that has a very real impact on my behavior. I often look at the calories of candy and don’t by them. I would enjoy them, I would enjoy eating them, but I don’t want to gain any weight. However, if I were to die tomorrow, none of that matters at all. I could eat my death of Twix. But more practically, if I gained five pounds from an over consumption of Twix — would that really matter that much? Would even having a Twix a day really dramatically change my life? And if I died in a year, then none of this would really matter at all. All those years I spent worrying about my weight and appearance wouldn’t matter. I do it because of insecurity, because women (and men too) are told that if we don’t look beautiful we don’t deserve love. We’re told weight is unattractive and this internalized belief translates into a desire for numbers to be smaller.
But imagine how many more ways this can play out. People work internships or in very shitty positions for the possibility to climb the corporate ladder. I’ve seen folks have mental breakdowns trying to keep up with the demands of graduate student life, because if they get a degree they can get a job that will make them tons of money. However, most of them have to spend six to eight years in school, take on a hundred thousand dollars of debt, and won’t see any benefit until late thirties or early forties. And if I or they die tomorrow, that could be an entire life completely wasted to struggle and no reward. And when we really consider that, deeply understand that we’re taking stock bonds out on our future in hopes there will be a return on investment, why the fuck are we doing that?
This is the actual heart of what you need to consider in my Life or Death game of Twix. However, there is one more cookie crunch layer to all of this.
What if you did eat all of the Twix or at least a reasonable 20 pounds or whatever. And then you didn’t die tomorrow. You instead had to live with the consequence of what 20 pounds of chocolate and caramel will do to your bowels. Really this is a fate worse than death.
There is a philosophy of Yolo(You Only Live Once) which is often shouted before doing really dangerous or smooth brain shit. This could be over drinking, doing some physical stunt, or otherwise being reckless. This in many ways is the philosophy of the Twix Room. (That’s how you can cite my work btw, when you’re citing this in academic literature. Faye Seidler, intellectual charlatan, coined the concept of the Twix Room in her 2021 Essay.)
But this is as foolish as never considering that you may die. Adam Sandler, yes, sigh, I’m talking about Adam Sandler now. Adam Sandler’s comedy special 100% Fresh was a tribute with Chris Farley. It was to me a very heartful tribute where I cried to hear the story. I knew Chris Farley growing up (not personally). He was maybe one of my favorite actors when I was ten years old. I remember fondly watching his movies and when he died I only vaguely understood what that meant. His fame happened as I grew up into a person and in many ways his absence was the first I felt. He was only an actor in a movie and not someone I knew, but it just felt weird that my life continued without any more new content from him. I didn’t really know what happened and at some point I understood he overdosed, because some neurons made some connections, but never really felt the need to verbalize them to my active thought process.
Sandler describe Farley as wanting to live in the shoes of the comedians before him. The hard party guys who died young and he fucking did. In the scope of the philosophy I’m talking about here he honestly lived his best life it seems. But there are so many folks who die young, who die recklessly, or who micro-dose suicide in continually unhealthy life choices.
If you never put money in the bank account, you take full advantage of every cent that you have, but you also never create an investment that pays out more than you put in. And if you want to live that life, that’s fine. However in that instance you’re short-selling your future for the moment. You can eat 10 pounds of Twix, but your tomorrow is going to fucking miserable.
One thing I’d like to address before coming to the conclusion here, where you’ll have the answers to everything you need in life, is that this is really just a thought experiment. A lot of us don’t get agency over our lives. We don’t get to choose what happens to us. A lot of us have to deal with things like classism, racism, sexisms, queerphobia, ableism, and so much more. A lot of us have two tons of rocks over us and deciding to stand is definitely what we want to do, but currently we are in crushed town, population us and our friends.
So, as I write this, it really is intended to exist within the framework that makes sense to you. I know the world is shitty, really fucking awful to so many people, and some bitch online talking about meaning isn’t going to strike the cord of helpful. Some people YOLO because they have no reasonable means of building any kind of equity. But equity doesn’t need to just be financial. The investment can be in friendships, it can be in making that appointment for a therapist, drinking that glass of water, and being kind to yourself for a few hours. The meaning and purpose of life aren’t static, because life isn’t. Sometimes we’re just surviving and that’s fine too. The first thirty years of my life was pretty much a complete write-off because I was trying to survive. You do what you need to do to make it to tomorrow.
And that’s where I’m ending here. You need to find something for each day that gives you joy. In Twin Peaks the main character said, “Each day, once a day, give yourself a surprise.” Belief is something you build, something you work on, and maintain. Treating yourself kindly, giving yourself a gift, letting yourself eat a Twix — these are all just little investments in yourself and your worth that lead to bigger beliefs about deserving love. Looking at what you want out of life and taking small direction towards it allows investment in bigger things. This can be a hobby, it can be an art, it can be writing weird shit on Medium, it can be building a relationship or friendship, learning something, playing world of war craft, counting beans, its what you want. There is no meaning or purpose, so what’s ultimately important is simply being consciously intentional about your actions and investments between your present and your future.
We may die tomorrow and we can’t change that. But we can live a life where dying tomorrow is part of the process. And this doesn’t trivialize that loss, but recognizes, honors, grieves, and celebrates it. I don’t want people to be sad over my death. I’m not going to be and fate willing that’s still far off. And, I guess while we’re here, I may as well spoil happiness for you — that’s something you build too. It isn’t a conclusion or static element of experience, but something you build over time by your investment and belief. Yeah, it’s all a bunch of work. It’s basically just like spiritual dentistry if you really really really think about it. And if you’re too greedy with the Twix without brushing your teeth than you’re gonna get a cavity.
