Will having a death line ever work?

I’m wondering this since quite sometime, will having a death line work? I’ve heard so many stories of people living more for more than 2 years even when their doctor says “ You have got 6 months max”. Is it possible that a person start living and enjoying every moment when they know that they only have so much of time to live? Is it possible that this happiness and this living from moment to moment makes the person live more happily and that fuels into that extended time? I would like to think that it is possible and it all makes sense for me. Imagine, you have 6 months to live, you might drop half the things you are doing, If I have kept stocks in my account, I would transfer them to a loved one and ask them to worry about it, I would stop worrying about things that don’t matter, I will drop that fight or the cold war I was having with someone close. I will not dream about buying a house on EMI that might keep me working against my will for coming 30 years. I will instead want to spend the time with family, friends, meet everyone who are at a far distance and whom I’ve not been able to meet because all these years I thought, I will go there next year for sure.

The other day in my office I was working on 2 projects, one had a deadline and another did not. 3 weeks later, I realized I was paying really less attention to the project that did not have deadline, because in my head I thought I have less time to do the current project as it had an end date coming and the other one automatically got postponed. I then thought, may be this is what happens to life, I don’t know when am I going to die and my brain gets fooled into keeping everything else a top priority and in this situation when get to know that I’m going die tomorrow, everything feels incomplete and haphazard. I’m wondering, if I have a death-line, I could back calculate and really think what I need to do today or may be do what steve jobs did, look in the mirror and ask myself “If this was the last day I lived, would I still do what I’m doing?” and if the answer is “No” for a series of day, I could change the course of what I’m doing.

Intellectually, having a death-line is tricky and trippy approach because in your head you have a death-line 20 years from today and you might die just tomorrow. In this case, all of your plans come crashing down and still I would argue that its better than not having a dead line and fooling the brain into procrastinating the dear-er things as if there’s forever to live and all the time in the world to do that

So, are you ready to face the death ? If so, do you have a death line? (Oops, I skipped a beat when I wrote this very line)