We begin as bodies, but we end as selves. The difference matters.
At physical birth, there is no self in the sense of a coherent, self-aware agent. What emerges is an organism—biologically complete enough to survive outside the womb, yet void of a personal narrative. Cognitive science reminds us that selfhood arises slowly, in stages, from primitive sensory integration to a socially embedded identity (Gallagher, 2013; Rochat, 2003). It is only months and years later that the child can point inward and say, with comprehension, “I am.”
Death, by contrast, is abrupt. It is the full stop to the continuity of experience. Whatever stream of consciousness existed—whether turbulent or serene—terminates without sequel. In this sense, death is not merely the end of biological processes; it is the extinction of the personal world, the collapse of the vantage point from which all things were once observed (Nagel, 1970).
The imbalance is striking: the beginning of selfhood is slow, hesitant, and piecemeal; the end is instantaneous. This is why death carries a unique philosophical weight. We may debate the meaning of life, but there is no mistaking the finality of its cessation. The moment of death is singular because it severs the only perspective from which events, including birth, ever mattered.
To treat birth as the “start” of a life is to privilege the biological over the experiential. A more accurate frame is that life, in the lived sense, begins sometime after birth—when the self emerges—and ends definitively at death. Birth is the ignition of the body; death is the extinction of the self’s light. And the latter, for all its inevitability, remains the more existentially decisive event.