If You Knew Today Is Going To Be Your Last Day, How Will You Spend It?

Somewhere in Lagos right now, a man is stuck in third mainland bridge traffic, horns blaring around him, his jaw tight with irritation, his mind already racing ahead to the meeting he is going to be late for, the client who will not understand, the boss who will not care about his explanation. He is furious about the traffic. He is stressed about the meeting. He is, in the fullest sense of the phrase, entirely consumed by the urgency of his ordinary Tuesday.

He does not know — cannot know — whether he will make it home tonight.

Somewhere in Enugu, a woman is arguing with her teenage daughter about something that felt enormously important this morning — a skirt that is too short, a curfew that was violated, words exchanged in the heat of adolescent rebellion that left both of them stinging. The daughter has locked herself in her room. The mother is in the sitting room, still angry, rehearsing what she should have said. Neither of them has any idea whether they will get the chance to unsay the harsh things and say the true things before one of them is gone.

Somewhere in Kano, an old man has not called his younger brother in three years. There was a misunderstanding about land. Money was involved. Words were said that drew blood. Both of them are waiting — each certain that the other should call first — for a reconciliation that has not come. He tells himself there is time. He has been telling himself this for three years.

Here is the question this article is asking — not academically, not as a philosophical exercise, but as a genuine, urgent, personal confrontation: if you knew, with absolute certainty, that today was your last day on this earth — that when the sun sets this evening, your chapter in this world closes permanently — how would you spend it? What would you do? Who would you call? What would you say? Where would you go? What would you finally, at last, stop pretending does not matter?

And perhaps more importantly: why are you not already living that way?

---

The Question That Changes Everything — If You Let It

Philosophers have been asking versions of this question for as long as human beings have been aware of their own mortality. The Stoic philosophers of ancient Rome — Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Epictetus — built entire frameworks for living well around the contemplation of death. Memento mori — “remember that you will die” — was not a morbid obsession but a clarifying discipline. The Stoics understood that the awareness of death, held honestly in the mind, strips away the trivial and illuminates the essential with a precision that nothing else can match.

In the Yoruba tradition, there is a deep understanding that life is a loan — “ayé l’ojà, ọ̀run n’ilé” — the world is a marketplace, heaven is home. The Igbo speak of Chi — the personal spirit that accompanies each person through their appointed time, an acknowledgement that the time is appointed, that it is finite, and that what one does with it carries permanent weight. The Hausa-Fulani concept of takobi, the double-edged nature of existence, reflects a similar wisdom — that life cuts both ways, that every day given is a day closer to its conclusion, and that this reality ought to shape how one lives.

These are not cultures that were comfortable with the illusion of unlimited time. They were cultures that looked mortality in the face and tried to extract wisdom from that confrontation.

We, in our modern Nigerian urgency — our hustle culture, our “no sleep till we make it” philosophy, our perpetual forward motion — have largely lost that wisdom. We have replaced the contemplation of death with the avoidance of it, and in doing so, we have also lost the clarity that contemplation provides. We are so busy chasing a future we cannot guarantee that we have stopped inhabiting the present we actually have.

This question — how would you spend your last day — is the crowbar that pries open that avoidance. It forces you, if you are willing to sit with it honestly, to confront what you actually value versus what you have been spending your actual life on. And the gap between those two things, for most people, is where the real conversation begins.

---

What Research and Experience Tell Us People Actually Regret

Before we imagine your last day forward, let us look backward — at what people who have faced the genuine proximity of death have reported regretting. Because this is not merely speculation. This is documented human testimony from people who had every reason to be honest.

Bronnie Ware, an Australian palliative care nurse who spent years working with people in their final weeks of life, recorded her patients’ most common regrets in a book that became internationally significant. The five regrets she documented were remarkably consistent across different backgrounds, cultures, and circumstances.

The most common regret — stated by more patients than any other — was this: “I wish I had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.” In Nigerian terms, this translates with particular force. How many Nigerians are living the life their parents scripted for them — the course of study chosen by their father, the career approved by their mother, the marriage selected by the family — while the life they actually wanted exists only as a private, unvoiced dream they have learned to stop visiting?

The second most common regret, particularly among men: “I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.” Every single male patient Ware worked with expressed this. Every one. The missed childhoods of their children. The wives who eventually stopped waiting for them to come home present rather than merely physical. The years consumed by the pursuit of provision while presence was sacrificed on the altar of ambition.

The third: “I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.” The unspoken “I love you.” The apology that was never delivered. The appreciation that was felt but never voiced. The truth that was swallowed in the interest of peace and ended up becoming a permanent silence.

The fourth: “I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.” Not the acquaintances of professional networking, but the true friends — the ones who knew you before you became who you are, who loved you before you had anything to offer, who have been waiting on the periphery of your increasingly busy life for a call that keeps getting postponed.

The fifth: “I wish that I had let myself be happier.” The shocking recognition, at the end of life, that happiness was always available — that the permission to enjoy what one had was always present — and that one spent a lifetime waiting for conditions to be right before allowing oneself to fully live.

Now see this. Read those five regrets again, slowly. And ask yourself — honestly, without the comfortable distance of thinking this does not apply to you — which of them already apply to your life, right now, today, while you still have time to do something about them.

---

If Today Were Your Last: The Morning

Let us walk through the day. Not abstractly, but specifically — because specificity is where truth lives. Abstract contemplation of mortality is easy to avoid. Specific, detailed imagination of your last hours has a way of bypassing the intellectual defences and landing in the place where real reckoning happens.

You wake up. Let us say it is a Wednesday — an ordinary midweek morning, not a birthday or an anniversary or any day with pre-existing ceremonial weight. Just a Wednesday. But you know, with absolute certainty, that by midnight it will be over. How does the morning begin?

For most Nigerians who have thought honestly about this question, the morning does not begin with a scroll through social media. It does not begin with an anxious check of work emails. It does not begin with the calculation of what needs to be accomplished today to advance the career, the business, the financial plan. All of that — every bit of it — becomes instantly, obviously irrelevant in the light of what you know.

The morning begins with the people in the house with you.

You look at your spouse differently. Not with the eyes that have grown accustomed to them, that look without really seeing — but with fresh eyes. The eyes of someone who knows this is the last morning they will wake up beside this person. And what you see, with those eyes, is not the person who annoyed you last week, who left dishes in the sink, who said the wrong thing at the family gathering. You see the person you chose. The person who chose you back. The full weight of that mutual choosing, which you have been taking for granted for years, lands on you with the force of something experienced for the first time.

You hold them. Actually hold them — not the brief, functional embrace of people with a schedule to keep, but the real kind. The kind that communicates without words that this person matters to you beyond your ability to express it. You say things you have been meaning to say and have been putting off — because there is always tomorrow, there is always time, and now you know with certainty that there is not.

The children. If you have them, the morning with your children on your last day would look almost nothing like an ordinary morning. There would be no shouting about school uniforms or homework not done. There would be no distracted half-presence while you simultaneously check your phone. You would be completely, wholly, entirely with them — memorising the sound of their voices, the particular weight of their small bodies when they lean against you, the specific expressions that are uniquely, irreplaceably theirs. You would tell them things you have been assuming they know but have never actually said. Because you would understand, with terrible clarity, that assumed love is not the same as expressed love, and that the people who love us most need to hear it said, in words, by us.

---

The Calls You Would Make

After the morning with the people under your roof, most people — when they sit honestly with this question — know exactly who they need to call. And the consistency of the answer across different people, different ages, different backgrounds, is itself a kind of revelation.

They would call the parent they have been too busy to visit. The one who has been calling every Sunday and getting a brief, distracted conversation before you rush back to whatever was more pressing. The one who has gotten older in ways you have stopped noticing because you are not around enough to track the changes. The one who will not be here forever — and who you have been behaving toward as though they will.

They would call the sibling with whom there is an unresolved conflict. The one whose wedding you attended without really being present. The one who said something at a difficult moment that you have held against them ever since. The one you love, underneath the grievance, with the deep, animal love of shared origin — the love of people who came from the same place, who shared a childhood, who know each other’s earliest stories. On the last day, the grievance would evaporate. The love would remain. You would call.

They would call the friend who has been waiting. The one from secondary school, from university, from the early years of the career — the one who knew you before you became this version of yourself, who loved you when you had nothing to offer but your company and your honesty. The one whose calls you have been meaning to return. The one you think about sometimes and feel a pang of something you cannot quite name — the pang of a connection that has been neglected but not severed, that could still be restored if either of you would simply make the call.

They would call the person they wronged and never apologised to. This one is harder. Because apologising to someone you have wronged — really apologising, without qualification or self-justification — requires a humility that is genuinely costly. But on the last day, the cost of not apologising would be obviously higher. The pride that has been protecting you from that conversation would become, in the light of everything, absurdly small.

Here is the gist: every call you would make on your last day is a call you could make today. The person is still there. The phone works. The words are available. What is missing is not access — it is the urgency that only the contemplation of mortality provides. This article is trying to give you that urgency without requiring you to wait for the actual crisis.

---

The Places You Would Go — And What That Tells You

Think about where you would want to be on your last day. Not the places on your aspirational bucket list — the international destinations you have been planning to visit when the money is right and the timing is good. Not those. I mean the places that carry meaning. The places that are, in some way, part of the architecture of who you are.

Many Nigerians, when they truly sit with this question, find that they want to go home. Not the current address — the original home. The compound in the village, the neighbourhood in the town where they grew up, the specific geography of their earliest years. There is something about the proximity of death that makes the earliest places feel suddenly, urgently important — as though the beginning and the end of a life want to be near each other.

Some want to go to a place of worship. Not from fear — not rushing to make last-minute arrangements with the divine — but from genuine desire for the kind of quiet, the kind of presence, the kind of perspective that sacred spaces provide. To sit in a church or a mosque or simply under an open sky and acknowledge, in whatever language feels truest, that this life was a gift and the Giver is greater than anything the life contained.

Some want to go somewhere in nature. A beach. A hillside. A river. Somewhere that reminds them that the world is larger than their problems, older than their ambitions, and will continue its beauty long after they are no longer here to witness it. There is a profound comfort in the continuity of the natural world for those who are contemplating their own discontinuity.

What does your answer tell you? Because where you want to be on your last day is where you actually belong — in the sense that matters most, in the sense of the places and experiences that nourish your deepest self. And if you have been spending very little time in those places and with those experiences, that is information worth acting on.

---

What You Would Stop Doing — And Why You Are Still Doing It

Here is perhaps the most uncomfortable part of this entire conversation. Because alongside everything you would do on your last day, there is an equally revealing list of everything you would stop doing. And that list has things on it that you are currently spending enormous amounts of your actual life on.

You would stop worrying about what people think of you. On the last day, the opinions of neighbours, colleagues, social media followers, and distant relatives would reveal themselves to be precisely what they always were — irrelevant to anything that actually matters. The energy spent managing perceptions, maintaining appearances, performing a version of your life for an audience that is not paying as much attention as you fear — all of that would instantly become available for reallocation to things that are real.

You would stop the grudges. Not because you suddenly become a saint, but because on the last day the arithmetic of grudges becomes nakedly clear. The grudge costs you, daily, in mental energy, in emotional constriction, in the warmth that you have withheld from a relationship that could have been good. What it costs the person you hold it against is unclear and variable. What is certain is what it has cost you — and on the last day, you would not be willing to spend your remaining hours paying that cost. The grudge would go.

You would stop deferring joy. All the things you have been saving for when conditions are right — the celebration that is waiting for the promotion, the holiday that is waiting for the financial season to change, the experience that is waiting for when the children are older, when the mortgage is smaller, when life is less complicated — all of that deferral would be exposed as what it actually is: the sacrifice of guaranteed present happiness on the altar of a hypothetical future convenience.

You would stop being less than honest. The relationship where you have been performing rather than being real. The professional context where you have been saying what is expected rather than what you actually think. The friendship where you have been agreeable rather than truthful. On the last day, the performance would feel like an unbearable waste of the last hours of your one life.

Now — and this is the question that genuinely matters — why are you still doing these things? If you would stop them on the last day, what exactly are you waiting for?

---

The Nigerian Context: Why We Find This Question Particularly Hard

Truth be told, sitting honestly with the question of your last day is difficult for everyone, everywhere. But there are particular features of the Nigerian cultural landscape that make it especially difficult for us, and naming them is important.

We are a culture with an extraordinarily strong present-tense orientation toward achievement. The hustle is not merely economic — it is identity-forming. What you are pursuing, what you are building, how hard you are working — these are the primary currencies of social worth in modern Nigeria. To stop, to reflect, to contemplate mortality, to ask what really matters — this feels, in the Nigerian context, dangerously close to laziness. Like you have lost the hunger. Like you are getting soft.

This orientation has produced extraordinary things. The Nigerian work ethic that is admired across the world. The resilience in the face of systemic failure that borders on supernatural. The sheer driven-ness of a people who have decided, collectively, that circumstances will not define their destination. These are genuine achievements of the Nigerian spirit, and they deserve their full respect.

But the same orientation has also produced a generation of Nigerians who are building impressive external structures while their interior lives — their relationships, their wellbeing, their genuine happiness, their rootedness in what actually matters — are neglected, deferred, or simply absent. Who are running so fast toward a future they desire that they are not present in the life they actually have. Who will arrive — if they are lucky enough to arrive — at the end of their working years and discover that the destination does not feel the way they imagined it would, because the journey consumed everything that was supposed to make the destination meaningful.

There is also the religious dimension. In Nigeria, death is not typically spoken of speculatively or philosophically — it is either a subject for formal religious context or a topic avoided entirely in ordinary conversation, because naming it casually is considered, in many communities, to be an invitation to it. “God forbid,” people say, when the topic approaches too closely. And while faith is a genuine source of courage and comfort in the face of mortality, the superstitious avoidance of the topic is something different — it is a refusal to integrate the reality of death into the living of life, and it is precisely this refusal that produces the regrets Bronnie Ware documented in her patients.

---

What Would You Create or Leave Behind?

There is a dimension of the last day question that goes beyond relationships and experiences — it is the question of legacy. What would you want to leave behind? Not in the material sense — though that matters too — but in the sense of what mark your presence in the world would have made.

Most people, when they sit with this question honestly, discover that the legacy they would want is not the one they have been working hardest to build. The career achievement, the financial accumulation, the professional recognition — these are not nothing, and they can certainly be expressions of genuine service. But they are rarely, on honest reflection, the primary legacy anyone desires.

What people want to leave behind is the knowledge that they mattered to specific people. That their presence made particular lives better, warmer, richer, more possible. That their children are stronger for having been raised by them. That their friends are better for having known them. That the people who shared the journey with them were genuinely glad of the company.

They want to leave behind something that carries their values forward — not necessarily a monument, not necessarily a famous name, but a continuity of something true. A child who understood what integrity looks like because they watched it. A community that was a little better served because someone showed up consistently. A body of work — in whatever domain — that reflected genuine effort and genuine care.

Here is the gist: the legacy you will leave is being written right now. Not in the future, not when you finally have the time to focus on the things that matter — right now, today, in how you speak to the people in your life, in what you prioritise, in what you choose to show up for and what you allow to pass unremarked.

What is your legacy saying right now?

---

The Spiritual Dimension: What Nigerian Faith Traditions Say About This Day

It would be impossible to write this article for a Nigerian audience without acknowledging the spiritual dimension — because for the overwhelming majority of Nigerians, across the religious spectrum, the question of the last day is inseparable from the question of what comes after.

For the Nigerian Christian, the last day carries the weight of accountability — the understanding, rooted in scripture and lived faith, that this life is a stewardship and that the steward will one day give account. Hebrews 9:27 is a text most Nigerian Christians know: “it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgement.” This is not meant to produce terror — it is meant to produce purposefulness. The knowledge that life is appointed and accountable is meant to be the discipline that shapes how one lives it.

For the Nigerian Muslim, Yawm al-Qiyamah — the Day of Resurrection — is a foundational reality that the faith does not allow its adherents to ignore. Every daily prayer is, among other things, a practice in remembering that time is moving, that the soul has a destination beyond this world, and that the choices made in this world carry weight in the next. The discipline of the five daily prayers is partly a discipline of mortality awareness — a five-times-daily reminder that something greater than the immediate is always present.

For those whose spirituality is rooted in African traditional frameworks, the relationship between the living and the ancestors — the egungun of Yoruba tradition, the masquerade that mediates between worlds — reflects a deep cultural acknowledgement that death is not a wall but a doorway, and that those who have gone before remain connected to those who are still here. The last day, in this framework, is not an ending but a transition — a homecoming to a community of ancestors who have been waiting.

What unites these traditions — despite their significant theological differences — is a common insistence that this life is not all there is, and that its temporary nature is not a reason for despair but for purposefulness. The faith tells you that the last day matters. This article is asking you to live as though you believe that — right now, before the last day arrives.

---

The Practical Reckoning: What This Question Asks You to Actually Do

This is where we move from contemplation to action. Because the question of the last day is only useful if it produces change in the present day. Emotional insight without behavioural change is, ultimately, a pleasant feeling in the short term and a waste in the long term.

Write the letter you have been meaning to write. To the parent. To the child. To the old friend. To the person you wronged. You do not have to send it today — though sending it today would be better than not sending it. But write it. The act of writing forces the clarity that casual thinking avoids.

Make the call today. Not tomorrow. Not when things calm down. Today. The person you have been meaning to call has been waiting in the background of your life for longer than either of you would be comfortable admitting. Call them. The conversation will be easier than you are afraid it will be, and what it repairs or restores will be worth every awkward second.

Say the thing directly. Whatever it is you have been meaning to say — to your spouse, your child, your parent, your friend, your colleague — say it in words. Today. Not in gestures that might be misread, not in assumptions that the other person should already know, not in the perpetual tomorrow of emotional deferral. Say it in words, today, while you still can.

Review your actual schedule. Look at what your time is actually going to this week. Meetings, deadlines, obligations, distractions, screens. Now ask yourself honestly: if this were your last week, which of these would survive the review? Which of them would evaporate immediately? Now ask the harder question: could some of the ones that would evaporate actually be reduced or eliminated even without the crisis? Are you spending your irreplaceable time on things that cannot withstand the scrutiny of your own last-day values?

Do one thing today that is purely present. Not productive, not strategic, not building toward a future outcome — simply present. A walk in the evening light. A meal eaten slowly, with full attention. A conversation with someone you love where your phone stays in your pocket and your eyes stay on them. A moment of genuine gratitude for something specific in your life right now. One moment of being fully alive to your actual life, as it actually is, today.

---

A Word to Those Who Are Afraid of the Question

Dear reader — and I say this with genuine care — some of you reading this are afraid of this question. Not intellectually afraid, but viscerally, quietly afraid. Because sitting with the question of the last day forces a confrontation with the gap between how you are living and how you know, in your deepest self, you should be living. And that gap, when you actually look at it, can be painful.

You may realise that you have been absent from your children’s actual childhood while physically present in their lives. You may realise that you have been maintaining a relationship — with a spouse, a parent, a friend — at a level of surface function while the real connection has quietly eroded. You may realise that the career you have sacrificed so much for does not, on honest examination, reflect your genuine values or your deepest capacities. You may realise that you have been living someone else’s life — shaped by their expectations, their definitions of success, their vision of who you should be.

These realisations hurt. I will not pretend otherwise. But they hurt in the way that diagnosis hurts — productively. The pain of recognising the gap is the beginning of closing it. The only version of this discovery that is truly tragic is the one that comes too late for anything to be done.

You are reading this. Which means it is not too late.

---

For the Students Reading This: Your Time Has Its Own Urgency

If you are a young Nigerian — a student, a school leaver, someone at the beginning of the road — this question carries a particular kind of urgency for you. Because you are at precisely the stage of life where the choices you make determine the range of choices available to you later. The last day, for you, is not an immediate practical concern — God willing, you have decades ahead. But the discipline of living purposefully, of aligning your actions with your genuine values, of not drifting through the years when your direction is being set — that discipline must begin now.

And one of the most important purposeful choices you can make right now is to take your education with the seriousness it deserves. If you are preparing for Post UTME, WAEC, NECO, GCE, JUPEB, Pre-degree, or School of Nursing entrance examinations — and your ambition includes admission into Obafemi Awolowo University Ile-Ife, University of Ibadan, University of Nigeria, University of Lagos, University of Calabar, University of Ilorin, or any other leading Nigerian institution — treat that preparation as the serious investment it is. Akahi Tutors, based in Ile-Ife, brings structure, experience, and genuine commitment to the preparation of serious students. Their record speaks for them. Call 08038644328 or WhatsApp wa.me/2348038644328 today. Do not leave your future to chance when expert help is available.

---

The Final Word: Live It Forwards

Here is the truth that this entire article has been building toward. You already know how you would spend your last day. You have always known — not in the intellectual sense of having thought it through, but in the deeper sense of what your gut, your heart, and your conscience have always understood about what matters.

You know that you would spend it with the people you love, saying the things that are true and important and long overdue. You know that you would release the grudges and the performances and the comparisons and the worry about what people think. You know that you would be present — fully, completely, without distraction — in the hours available to you. You know that you would be grateful. You know that you would be generous. You know that you would be honest.

The question is not whether you know this. The question is whether you will choose to live it — not just on the last day, but on this day. Today. The ordinary, unglamorous, unsentimental today that is, in fact, the only day you are guaranteed.

Marcus Aurelius — who was both a Roman emperor and a philosopher who thought deeply about mortality — wrote this in his private journal, never intending it to be read: “Confine yourself to the present.” Not because the future is unimportant, but because the present is the only place where life is actually happening. The future is a plan. The past is a memory. The present is the life itself.

Confine yourself to the present. To this morning. To this conversation. To this person in front of you. To this meal, this sunset, this breath.

Live today as though it matters — because it does. Live it as though the people in it matter — because they do. Live it as though what you do with these hours will contribute to something larger than your own comfort and ambition — because it will.

You do not need to know it is your last day for it to deserve to be lived fully. Every day deserves that. Every day is, in the deepest sense, unrepeatable — a specific configuration of people, circumstances, opportunities, and moments that will never exist in precisely this form again.

Do not waste it.

---

If this article has stirred something in you — a memory, a realisation, a name you need to call, a conversation you need to have, a hug you need to give — do not let the feeling pass unused. Act on it today. Share this article with someone who needs to read it. Send it to the person you have been meaning to call. Let it be the reason you go home a little earlier tonight.

Follow Akahi News every day for content that goes beyond the surface — journalism that speaks to the full depth of the Nigerian experience, in all its beauty, its complexity, its struggle, and its extraordinary resilience. We write because these conversations matter. We write for you.

---

Written by Joseph Iyaji, Senior Journalist, Akahi News