Life's reverse engineering

An obituary, barely 75 words, attempts to capture the vastness of a human life: their beginnings, their bonds, their triumphs, and their final rites. Sixty or seventy years distilled into a paragraph. Not the desires they chased or the routines they rushed through, but the essence they ultimately left behind.

Obituaries teach us something deeper: they are not a record of how we lived each day, but how we will be remembered. These words once echoed through a gathering of young professionals, CEOs and celebrities — people who had accumulated wealth and status yet felt an unsettling hollowness. They had all come seeking wisdom from an old monk known for helping people rediscover purpose. On the first morning, seated cross-legged on a stone bench beside an ancient temple, the monk began with a story that left everyone silent.

Years ago, he said, Alfred Nobel experienced something few people ever do: he read his own obituary. When Nobel's brother, Ludvig, died in 1888, a French newspaper mistakenly published Alfred's obituary instead. The headline read: "The Merchant of Death Is Dead." It condemned him as the man who enabled mass killing through his invention of dynamite.

Alfred Nobel — alive, successful and one of Europe's most influential industrialists — suddenly saw how the world would remember him. Not as a chemist, inventor or philanthropist, but as someone who profited from destruction. That moment shattered him. It forced an extraordinary confrontation with himself: Is this truly the legacy I want to leave?

Instead of dismissing the harsh words, Nobel treated them as a mirror. He rewrote his will, redirecting the majority of his fortune to establish five annual prizes for those who conferred the greatest benefit to humankind.

From physics and chemistry to literature and, most famously, peace, Nobel designed a pathway for future generations to celebrate human progress, not human harm.

A single obituary, accidental, premature and brutally honest, became the spark for one of the world's greatest institutions of honour and excellence. Nobel transformed personal shame into global good, proving that even the wrong words at the right time can change the course of history.

This reflection resurfaced for me recently while reading Tuesdays with Morrie, Mitch Albom's memoir of his meetings with his dying professor, Morrie Schwartz. Morrie, battling ALS, offers lessons not from podiums or classrooms but from a reclining chair in his living room — lessons on love, aging, forgiveness, relationships and the meaning of life. Mitch, a successful yet emotionally exhausted journalist, returns to his mentor after sixteen years, only to realise how far he had drifted from the things that matter.

Every Tuesday becomes a class: a class on how to live. Morrie, even as his body weakens, speaks with a clarity the healthy rarely possess. His message is simple yet profound: slow down, value human connections, detach from the illusions of material success, forgive generously, and live with purpose. Mitch records these conversations — what Morrie calls his "final thesis" — and later turns them into the book to honour him.

Morrie dies in the end. But Mitch emerges transformed, finally understanding the line Morrie repeats often: "Once you learn how to die, you learn how to live."

This is life's reverse engineering. We rush forward — careers, goals, deadlines, anxieties — yet we rarely pause to ask: What will my 75 words say? Obituaries and Morrie both remind us that the reverse is true. Life shrinks. Time contracts. And what remains is who we were to others.

Perhaps the real question is not how long we live, but how consciously we do so. Would reading our own obituary push us to recalibrate, as it did Nobel? Would it force us to rethink our priorities before it is too late?

And perhaps the simplest exercise is this: write your own 75 words today. Put them on a blank piece of paper — who you are, what you stood for, what you hope to leave behind. Those few lines will reveal more than any annual plan, career goal, or self-help manual. They will expose the gap between the life we are living and the life we want remembered. In life's reverse engineering, clarity begins.