What are you good at?
I do not know.
I do not need to know.
I can think, and so I am.
Cogito Ergo Sum
Death on Your Shoulder — and What It Teaches
On Jordan Peterson, Paul of Tarsus, and the arithmetic of a finite life
There is a moment in Jordan Peterson’s lectures — if you have spent time with them, you know which one — when he says something so simple it stops you cold. He talks about imagining death sitting on your shoulder. Not as metaphor. As companion. As the one voice that will not flatter you, will not let you drift, will not permit the comfortable lie that there is always more time.
He is not the first. Moses said it differently, and more precisely:
“Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.”
(Psalm 90:12)
To number your days. Not to dread them. Not to deny them. To count them — which is to say: to take them seriously, one at a time, as the finite and irreplaceable things they are.
Peterson’s framing is clinical in the best sense. Someone receives a cancer diagnosis. The world does not change. The coffee still tastes the same. The morning light through the window is identical to yesterday’s. But something shifts in the person, irreversibly. Suddenly they know what they value. Suddenly the noise falls away. Suddenly — and this is the unbearable part — they begin to live.
Which raises the question that Paul of Tarsus was already asking two thousand years ago: what do you live for, when you know that the living is limited?
The Three That Remain
In the thirteenth chapter of his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul names three things that abide — πίστις, ἐλπίς, ἀγάπη. Faith, hope, love. The greatest, he says, is love.
The ordering matters less than the logic.
Faith is the affirmation of what has been given — the ground beneath you, the already, the foundation that holds even when you cannot see it. Peterson would recognise it: the axioms you act on, whether or not you can justify them philosophically. You wake up and assume the world will hold. That is faith, functional if not confessional.
Hope is not optimism. Optimism ignores the cancer on your shoulder. Hope knows it is there — knows about the numbered days, the closing distance — and chooses orientation anyway. In Romans 8:24, Paul writes: “Hope that is seen is not hope. Who hopes for what he already sees?” Hope lives precisely in the gap between what is and what is not yet. It is the last of the three to be exhausted, because it is defined by the future it leans toward. Die Hoffnung stirbt zuletzt. The folk saying is theologically exact: hope is structurally last because as long as we are in time, in the not-yet, hope still has work to do.
Love is the hardest to define, which is why Paul takes thirteen verses to circle it. He tells us what it is not — not envy, not performance, not the keeping of accounts. He tells us what it does — bears, believes, hopes, endures. But the deepest claim comes elsewhere, in the first letter of John: God is love. Not that God possesses love as one quality among others. God is love — which means love is not a virtue alongside faith and hope but the ground from which they draw their meaning.
You count your days because something makes the counting matter. That something is love.
What Peterson Gets Right
Peterson is not a theologian, and he would probably resist the label. But his insistence on confronting mortality — on letting death speak rather than silencing it with distraction — is recognisably Pauline in structure, if not in name.
The cancer on your shoulder is a teacher. It says: you are not here forever. It says: choose. It says: the people in front of you, this morning, the work that means something — these are not background. These are what you are here for.
That is what the numbered days teach. Not dread. Not despair. Precision. The kind of precision that comes only when you stop pretending the horizon is infinitely far away.
Faith holds the ground. Hope keeps you moving through the not-yet. And love — agape, not sentiment, not feeling, but the orientation of an entire life toward what is genuinely other and genuinely good — love is the reason the counting is worth doing at all.
“And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.”
Paul wrote that. Peterson, in his own way, is saying something similar: live as if it matters, because it does, because you will not pass this way again, because your days are numbered.
And that is not a curse.
It is the beginning of wisdom.
P.H. Blöcker writes from Burleigh Waters, Gold Coast, Queensland.
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