When I observe the common behaviors of those in professional life—the urgent emails sent at midnight, the fierce competitions for advancement, the obsessive accumulation of credentials and capital—I often wonder: do we conduct ourselves as if we shall never die? The physician hurries from patient to patient, forever postponing his own rest. The lawyer builds a practice of increasingly complex cases, speaking often of retirement but never quite arriving there. The executive expands her empire of responsibilities, as though the conquest of yet another market might somehow extend her allotted days. We rush about in our vocations with such fervor and constancy that a visitor from another world might conclude we believe ourselves immortal.

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