Marcus Aurelius asks suppose you lived for a thousand…
Marcus Aurelius asks suppose you lived for a thousand years or 10,000 years would you have any more life than you have now? When you finally died, would you lose any more life than you'd lose if you died today? The present moment is all the life we ever have. We do not have a future, nor do we have a past.
— from The Landing (Death)
In the book
Notice what rushes forward as urgent and what quietly falls off the manifest as the baggage it always was. Marcus Aurelius ran a version of this calculation and concluded that a man who lives a thousand years loses, at his death, exactly what the man who dies today loses — the present moment, and only the present moment, because now is the only thing any of us ever actually has to lose. Death is the great teacher of proportion. — The Landing (Death)