Steve Jobs' Comments on Death: Uplifting or Cruel?

When Steve Jobs died of pancreatic cancer, it seemed as if every word he had uttered was reprinted, as people tried to understand this gifted but enigmatic man. Was he a bully or a saint? An inventor or a copycat? An ascetic or a materialist? Like everyone else, I was looking for the truth behind the contradictions. And like many cancer patients, I was looking in particular for what Jobs had to say about having cancer.

A year after he was diagnosed, Jobs gave a speech at Stanford in which he said, "Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent … Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition."

Like much about Jobs, this exhortation struck me as both uplifting and cruel. Why cruel? Though the speech was given in an academic setting, I heard in his words an echo of a widely held but seldom explicitly stated expectation that people with life-threatening diseases should be better than their healthy counterparts: wiser, more heroic, more focused, more adventurous.

That expectation imposes a burden on people already overwhelmed by a devastating illness, who may also be struggling with life's other challenges — work stresses, child and elder care, financial strains. We would never expect people with a cold or the flu to be smarter or more courageous or just plain better because of their stuffy nose or their fever. And yet society seems to implicitly expect people with cancer to rise above their illness, to make meaning out of their suffering, to serve as an inspiration to others.

Great, if you can do it. But I think it's also great if you simply put one foot in front of the other, get yourself to appointments more or less on time, and endure the fear and nausea — even if you whine about it.

Do you agree with me on this?