A review of Ben Pronk's We're All Going to Die

Memento Mori, Now With Instructions

A review of Ben Pronk's We're All Going to Die

Some books promise happiness and deliver a greeting card in large print. Ben Pronk's We're All Going to Die aims higher, and in its best pages it gets there: it takes the most uncomfortable certainty of human life and turns it into a working tool. The premise comes from the Stoics and fits in a single line of the prologue. Never forget that you will die, and make the most of the time you have left. Pronk delivers it with the swagger of a writer who knows his reader has heard "carpe diem" far too many times.

The delivery is the tone. Pronk writes like an irreverent friend who happens to have read Aristotle, Epicurus and Camus, and who is unembarrassed to put Marcus Aurelius next to Alicia Keys, whose "28,000 days" appear beside Oliver Burkeman's "4,000 weeks" and the Australian life-expectancy tables. The device works: the arithmetic of finitude, served with a joke, persuades better than a sermon. But the humour that seduces early becomes a tic later. The gut-health puns, the toilet-adjacent asides and the mateship winks sometimes dilute the very gravity the book claims to restore.

The architecture is clean, almost classroom-neat. Part One surveys the philosophy of happiness, from Homeric luck and the virtue of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle through Stoicism, Hedonism, Epicureanism, Buddhism and Absurdism. Part Two translates the question into the language of the laboratory: dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, endorphins, then positive psychology, with hedonic adaptation as its recurring villain. Part Three is the workshop: connection, exercise, mindfulness, breathing, gratitude, awe. Threaded through the whole are twenty-nine "Imminent Death Toolkits," practical boxes that invite the reader to experiment on themselves.

Pronk's real strength is an unusual honesty about method. He warns early that no universal recipe exists, that happiness is no reproducible soufflé, and that readers must "do the work" as scientists of one: record, test, adjust. His conclusion is the best thing in the book. The aim, he argues, is not perpetual happiness but being happy a little more often than not, with peaks slightly higher and longer than the troughs. He also corrects the strictest Stoics: someone who flattens their emotions "clips the signal" of their own life. It is a sharp objection to the airport-bookshop Stoicism now sold by the crate.

The passage on serotonin is similarly judicious. Pronk notes that the "chemical imbalance" theory of depression was seriously challenged by a 2022 umbrella review, but he is careful to add that this does not discredit medication, and that medical advice belongs with medical teams. Many popularisers skip that caution, and its presence here is welcome.

The flaws are those of any book that tries to hold everything. Twenty-five centuries of thought compressed into short chapters demand simplifications: Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics march past at montage speed, and readers already familiar with these schools will find little that is new. The neuroscience, too, is delivered with an enthusiasm that occasionally flirts with the reductionism the author himself denounces. Advising readers to crack open a kombucha for their serotonin, or hopping from probiotics to faecal transplants, captures both the book's accessibility and its levity. Even the toolkits, for all their usefulness, begin to read like an existential shopping list, and the closing five-step plan has a hint of the motivational slide deck, despite the earlier warning against formulas.

And yet the book works, and it works through its own contradiction: it is a self-help manual that knows the limits of self-help. Pronk dedicates it to his wife, Karren, "who makes me incredibly happy," and that unironic tenderness, buried among the gags, is perhaps his strongest argument. Human connection, the research he cites insists, is the best predictor of wellbeing, and the book practises what it preaches by addressing the reader as an equal.

We're All Going to Die will not rewrite popular philosophy, and it does not pretend to. It is a warm, well-informed invitation to look at the inevitable and do something useful with it. For newcomers, it is a funny and honest doorway. For seasoned readers, a friendly reminder of what they already knew and keep postponing. In a genre crowded with impossible promises, that is no small achievement.

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Annex: The Toolkit Essentials

A study guide to the most useful "Imminent Death Toolkits"

Pronk insists that no tool works for everyone, so treat each one below as an experiment. Try it for a week, note what happens, keep what works.

1. Keep death in view (Toolkit #6, Memento Mori)
The idea: Remembering that time is finite makes you spend it better. Death cannot be avoided by ignoring it, so you may as well use it.
Try it: Pick one daily cue of passing time (a tree's changing leaves, a skull on your desk, fruit browning in the bowl). Each time you notice it, ask: "Am I using today the way I want to?"

2. Rehearse bad days (Toolkit #8, Premeditatio Malorum)
The idea: Imagining what could go wrong softens the blow when it does. Pronk borrows Marcus Aurelius's morning habit of expecting difficult people.
Try it: Before a stressful meeting or errand, name the likely irritation ("the colleague who interrupts") and decide in advance how you will respond. You are not being pessimistic; you are being prepared.

3. Audit your "nice-to-haves" (Toolkit #9, Preferred Indifferents)
The idea: Health, wealth, status and comfort are good to have, but suffering starts when you treat them as necessary for happiness.
Try it: List your top five externals. For each, ask: "If this vanished, could I still live well?" If the answer is no, you have mistaken a preference for a need.

4. Turn "It's not fair!" into a plan (Toolkit #7)
The idea: Unfairness is real, but complaining about it changes nothing.
Try it: When the complaint arises, restate it as a neutral observation ("I was passed over"), then ask what part you can actually influence.

5. Surf the urge (Toolkit #15)
The idea: Cravings behave like waves: they rise, peak and fall, often within twenty to thirty minutes, if you do not feed or fight them.
Try it: When an urge hits (sugar, scrolling, alcohol), observe it without acting and let it pass. Better still, avoid the trigger entirely: change your route, move your phone out of reach.

6. Invest in people (Toolkit #23, Harvard Happiness Hacks)
The idea: The best-supported finding in happiness research is that relationships matter most, and in modern life they need deliberate maintenance.
Try it: Chart the ten people you spend most time with by how energising or draining they are. See less of the draining ones where you can, and reach out to the loving friends you keep postponing. As Pronk puts it, you never find time; you make it.

7. Beat the hedonic treadmill (Toolkit #21)
The idea: We adapt quickly to good things, so pleasure fades. Research on preventing this points to two levers: variety and appreciation.
Try it: Rotate your pleasures instead of repeating them, and pause regularly to savour what you already have.

8. Move your body (Toolkits #18 and #24)
The idea: Exercise supports almost every chemical Pronk describes: dopamine, serotonin, endorphins. Moderate effort seems to be the sweet spot, and exercise combined with other treatments tends to work better than any single one.
Try it: Choose an activity you do not dread and do it consistently. Consistency beats intensity.

9. Train your attention (Toolkits #25 and #26, Mindfulness and Meditation)
The idea: Presence quiets the mind's habit of rehearsing catastrophes. If sitting meditation feels hard, start with "grounding": anchor yourself in your senses.
Try it: In a tense moment, name five things you can see, four you can hear, three you can touch. Later, work up to short seated sessions, ideally with a teacher.

10. Use your breath (Toolkit #27)
The idea: Slow breathing is the one immediate lever you have over a fight-or-flight response, it occupies your attention, and it gives you something to control.
Try it: When anxiety spikes, lengthen your exhale and count a few slow breaths before reacting.

11. Gratitude, but small (Toolkit #28)
The idea: Gratitude and happiness are strongly correlated. Pronk found that reflecting on big blessings grows stale, so he switched to noticing tiny good moments.
Try it: Each evening, write down the smallest pleasant thing that happened that day: a shared joke, a held door, light on a wall.

12. Look for awe (Toolkit #29)
The idea: Awe lifts us out of self-absorption. Dacher Keltner's "wonders of life" include moral beauty, collective effervescence (concerts, crowds) and nature.
Try it: Seek one awe experience a week, and remember it needn't be a Grand Canyon: a local park or a quiet act of generosity counts.

13. Be your own philosopher (Toolkits #2 and #13)
The idea: No single school has the answer, so borrow from several. Pronk's own blend, which he calls "hedaimonia," mixes Stoic purpose, Epicurean pleasure and an Absurdist shrug.
Try it: Read one short introduction to a school that appeals to you, test one idea for two weeks, and keep a short journal of the results.

Closing note: Pronk's own summary is a loop: remember you will die, choose a philosophical framework, mind your brain chemistry, apply psychology, and then use the power tools. Revisit the cycle regularly, because the aim is not constant happiness but a richer, more resilient life.