Lying in a hospital bed, a time-traveling computer program asks a dying man, who abandoned his family to live his life to the fullest, if it was all worth it in the end.

A research psychologist visits a peculiar asylum patient who recounts his life story. The patient warns the researcher about how obsession with the pursuit of knowledge can make one lose sight of their humanity until it is unsalvageable.

Eventually it came to pass that no one ever had to die, unless they ran out of money. Then, unless they were so horrible that society had to dispose of them. Then, unless wanted to or could be talked into it. Then, no one would die so long as they had just one person who loved them.

In this metafiction, the many lives of an unnamed man are scrutinized as he passes through millennia.

Faced with cancer, Mrs. Wilson confronts her impending death. She finds new strength fight her prognosis with a book, The Will to Live, by the philosopher Schopenhauer.

In limbo between life and death after falling five hundred feet into a cement mixer, a construction worker reflects on the nature of love.

In a world where immortality has become the norm for humans, two men attempt to introduce an old-fashioned tribe to eternal life.

A man wakes up one day and realizes the world has ended, and he is the only survivor. He wanders aimlessly and crashes at another house before encountering a woman, who seems to be the only other survivor.

A graduate student, on a trip in the Sonoran Desert, contemplates quitting her PhD program and moving on with life.

After being laid off from his job, a man struggles to find meaning in a utopian world where all of his basic needs are already met for him.