Death

In 1960, the average life span globally was 52.6 years. Today it’s  72 years. The reasons include improvements in child survival, expanded access to healthcare (including widespread vaccination), and people being lifted out of extreme poverty.

The death rate of babies under the age of one has fallen steeply in the last few decades. It's now probably at its lowest ever rate in human history. That’s thanks to many modern public health victories: better sanitation, more access to clean drinking water, enhanced nutrition, and the improved education of women.

Children’s book illustrator and Where the Wild Things Are author Maurice Sendak, in an NPR Fresh Air interview less than a year before his death in 2012, made a heartwarming call to "live your life, live your life, live your life".

Imagining, while still healthy, donating organs to total strangers without expecting anything in return. The BBC nterviewed a man who did just this after his wife committed suicide.

She had been suffering from progressive multiple sclerosis, and when the pain and suffering became too much for her to bear, she took her own life, leading him to a suspended prison sentence - for failing to stop her - and ultimately to the decision to help others to live by doing as much as he possibly could - by giving away one of his kidneys and part of his liver, and then waiting to become a bone marrow donor.

Alan Watts proposed that "the most real state is the state of nothing," Our current reality, argued ideapod, is just a small piece in the reality of what it means to exist, to be nothing. While many consider this current state of existence, of life, as the crux of reality, perhaps our real state occurs before and after our lives in the abyss of "nothingness".

See also:

• The Age of Nothing