Death gives meaning to our lives. It gives importance and value to time. Time would become meaningless if there were too much of it.

Kurzweil’s remark frames mortality as a structuring condition of human meaning: because life is finite, choices carry weight, priorities sharpen, and time is experienced as scarce and therefore valuable. The quote also implies a critique of unlimited longevity—if time were effectively boundless, urgency and narrative shape could dissolve, making projects, commitments, and even identity feel less consequential. In the background is a classic philosophical tension between finitude (which intensifies significance) and the transhumanist aspiration to radically extend life (which Kurzweil elsewhere advocates). The line can be read less as an endorsement of death than as an acknowledgment that any future of extreme longevity would need new sources of purpose to replace the motivational pressure mortality currently supplies.