Most of us picture time as something that flows: the present is where everything real is happening, the past has slipped away, and the future is rushing toward us. That picture shapes how we feel about dying. Our time is running out, our death will wipe us from the world, and everything we loved will be gone for good. But physicists and philosophers have long defended a different picture — the "B-theory" — on which time doesn't really pass at all, and every moment is equally real. On this view you aren't a small self sliding along a timeline; you're a four-dimensional thing stretched across your whole life, the way a road is stretched across a landscape. Daniel Story argues that if this stranger picture is true, it should change how we feel about our own mortality: our time never actually grows short, death isn't quite annihilation, and the good things we've lost are still, in a real sense, out there. He's careful about how much comfort this buys. And he admits the same view has a darker edge, since our worst moments are just as permanent as our best. Newcomers always welcome; no philosophy background required.

Terms:

A-theory — time really passes; the present moment is metaphysically special. Presentism is the version on which only present things exist.

B-theory — no moment is objectively "the present"; times are only earlier or later than each other, and all are equally real.

Growing block / moving spotlight — in-between views: the past is real too, but the present still has some special status.

Spacetime worm — you, understood as a thing with temporal parts spread across your whole life, not a self that's wholly present at each instant.