Tolstoy believed most men die without ever truly living.

He explains in his novella, "The Death of Ivan Ilyich." Protagonist Ivan spends his entire life doing what society told him was "proper":

Get a good career, model wife, follow aristocratic social practices.

To an outsider, he looks successful, but a closer look reveals that Ivan's soul is rotting from the inside out. He grows ill, and on his deathbed, becomes haunted by a horrifying realization:

"What if my entire life was a lie?"

Ivan's life of vanity and decadence led to emptiness and loneliness. Even his friends and family don't care for the dying man.

Tolstoy's insight is that the greatest human tragedy is not death itself, but reaching death only to discover that you never truly lived at all.

Modern people tend to think of death as a distant abstraction that applies to humanity in general, but somehow not to themselves personally. Tolstoy shatters this illusion:

He shows that most know intellectually they will die, yet they live as though they are immortal. They distract themselves with status, entertainment, careerism, and social approval, such that they never have to confront what mortality actually means. But the terrifying power of death is that it destroys one's illusions.

And in that moment, all the things society told you mattered suddenly reveal themselves to be hollow.

However, Tolstoy does not present this realization as nihilistic... in fact, quite the opposite.

He suggests that only by fully confronting death can man begin to live authentically. Only when you realize your time is finite do cowardice and conformity lose their grip over you. T

he fear of death, then, is not something to suppress, but something capable of awakening the soul. A man who learns how to die is finally capable of learning how to live…