How a Funeral Made Me Rethink My Netflix Queue

I was at Jerry’s funeral when it hit me: I’d been hoarding TV shows like I was going to live forever. There I was, staring at a casket and also wondering when I’d get around to Season 3 of “Breaking Bad.” Dark? Maybe. But true.

The chapel was cold and smelled like eucalyptus and regret. Soft organ music hummed in the background while people whispered about how Jerry was always “so full of life.” My mind, however, was performing acrobatics between grief and my unfinished streaming queue. It felt absurd, borderline disrespectful—but it was also painfully honest.

The Funeral Fog

I hadn’t seen Jerry in years. We used to work together at a digital marketing agency, back when hashtags were still ironic. Jerry had a laugh that made people turn around in cafes. He always said he wanted to hike the Annapurna Circuit or open a jazz bar in Goa. Instead, he died of a heart attack at 38. No jazz bar. No Annapurna. Just… gone.

At the reception, I drifted between polite condolences and strange conversations.

“Such a shock, huh?”

“Did you hear he was watching ‘Ozark’ the night before he died?”

That last one did me in. I stared at my plastic plate of dry mini-sandwiches and thought: Is that how they’ll remember me too? Died halfway through season four of a show I barely liked?

I went home that night and opened Netflix. Rows of unfinished series glared back at me like judgmental ghosts. “Continue Watching,” it said. But what if there isn’t time to continue?

The Someday Lie

That night, I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking about Jerry and the illusion of “someday.”

Someday I’ll travel.

Someday I’ll write that book.

Someday I’ll forgive my dad.

But “someday” is a sneaky little lie we tell ourselves to delay living. Jerry had a dozen “somedays” that never came. And I was piling mine up like dirty laundry.

I thought back to times when I wasted entire weekends watching shows I didn’t even enjoy. It wasn’t about entertainment; it was about escape. A way to avoid uncomfortable truths. A form of death denial, really. I wasn’t living with urgency—I was coasting.

The Death Meditation Disaster

The next morning, I googled “death awareness exercises.”

Big mistake.

I found a video titled: “Confront Your Mortality: A Guided Death Meditation.”

Perfect, I thought. Let’s lean in.

I lit a candle, lay on my yoga mat, and followed the voice of a serene woman named Moonstar as she gently instructed me to “imagine your body slowly decaying into the earth.”

Midway through, I started laughing uncontrollably. Not because death is funny, but because I realized how ridiculous it all was. I was trying to intellectualize the one thing you can’t out-think: dying.

But once the laughter died down, I felt something shift. For the first time in a long while, I wasn’t afraid of death. I was afraid of not having lived.

Cutting the Fluff

I opened my laptop and made a bold move: I deleted half my Netflix queue.

Gone were the shows I felt I “should” watch.

Gone were the half-finished crime dramas and overhyped reality series.

Gone was the guilt.

Instead, I made a new kind of list: things I actually wanted to do before my own funeral.

• Get in touch to people I love
• Learn to play one entire Beatles song on the guitar
• Spend a day offline once a week
• Take my mom to that art exhibit she keeps mentioning
• Start a personal growth blog about embracing mortality (you’re reading it!)

Living with Urgency

This isn’t a story about quitting technology or canceling subscriptions. It’s about waking up.

Jerry’s death cracked something open in me. It reminded me that the meaning of life isn’t buried in the next episode, or the next distraction. It’s in the awkward conversations, the silent sunsets, the scary confessions, the risks. I didn’t quit my job to backpack across Asia or start a pottery business. But I did:

• Call my mom just to chat. (She cried. Moms are dramatic.)
• Finally booked that weekend trip with friends. (Turns out, they can coordinate schedules.)
• Wrote the first chapter of my book. (It was terrible. But it existed.)

We avoid thinking about death because we think it will make us morbid. But, in truth, death awareness is the antidote to numbness. Embracing mortality doesn’t kill joy—it fertilizes it.

So no, I haven’t watched Season 3 of “Breaking Bad” yet. And maybe I never will. But I did call my sister last week, and we laughed until one of us snorted tea.

And if that’s not purposeful living, I don’t know what is.

“It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.” – Marcus Aurelius