Most of us know that we are going to die.

Martin Heidegger thought the problem was that we rarely live as if we truly understood it.

One of the twentieth century’s most influential — and controversial — philosophers, Heidegger asked a deceptively simple question: what does it mean to be?

His answer led him away from abstract philosophy and towards the strange experience of everyday human existence.

We find ourselves thrown into a world we did not choose, surrounded by expectations, routines and other people. It is remarkably easy to spend our lives doing what one is supposed to do: pursuing the right career, wanting the right things and adopting opinions that seem to belong to everyone and no one.

Heidegger believed that confronting our mortality can break this spell.

Death is not merely something that happens at the end of life. Awareness that our time is finite can transform how we understand the life we are living now.

In this concise introduction, The School of Life explores Heidegger’s difficult philosophy through some of its most human questions: authenticity, anxiety, conformity, mortality and our tendency to forget the sheer strangeness of being alive.

Why you’ve GOTTA.WATCH it

You’re going to die.

Heidegger thought you should think about that more often.

Not because he wanted us to become morbid, but because forgetting death makes it dangerously easy to forget life.

Much of our existence can disappear into routines, social expectations and what Heidegger called “the They” — the anonymous world of what people generally think, want and do.

Mortality changes the equation.

Once we genuinely recognize that our time is limited, choices acquire weight. The question stops being simply what people normally do with their lives and becomes something much more personal:

What am I going to do with mine?

Heidegger is notoriously difficult to read. His terminology can make even straightforward ideas feel almost impenetrable.

This short film provides another way in.

It doesn’t make Heidegger simple. But it reveals why questions buried beneath his intimidating language — death, anxiety, authenticity and the astonishing fact that anything exists at all — continue to matter.

After all, you have only one life in which to ask them.