What Makes a Good Life in the Face of Death

BJ Miller, a palliative care physician who lost three limbs in a college accident, offers a perspective on life shaped by his intimate familiarity with death and suffering. He speaks not from abstract philosophy but from years of sitting with dying patients and learning what they care about in their final days. The insights are simultaneously obvious and revolutionary: people care about connection, beauty, meaning, and small sensory pleasures far more than the medical interventions we often prioritize. Miller’s call is for all of us to design our lives and our healthcare systems around what actually matters to humans, not just biological survival.

Miller shares stories that stay with you: a patient who wanted to feel snow one last time, the importance of ice cream as more than nutrition, the difference between extending life and extending suffering. He challenges the medical system’s default toward aggressive intervention, arguing that we need to distinguish between necessary suffering and unnecessary suffering. Necessary suffering is inherent to being human and mortal; unnecessary suffering is what we add through poor design, lack of imagination, and failure to center human needs and dignity.

The talk transcends end-of-life care to offer a framework for living with fuller awareness of mortality and priority. Miller suggests that death is not the problem—our relationship with death is. By accepting our finite nature rather than fighting it with denial or panic, we can make better choices about how to spend our limited time and attention. For anyone feeling the creep of busyness, distraction, and misplaced priorities, Miller’s perspective offers a powerful recalibration toward what the dying teach us matters most: presence, connection, beauty, and love.