The Great Equalizer We Pretend Not to See
Why a funeral in Finland, a song called “I Will Fail You,” and a TV host’s comment about air travel might hold the same lesson
There’s a line I remember Phil Keoghan saying on The Amazing Race—a small remark tucked into the chaos of a reality show where people sprint through airports like caffeinated hamsters. He called air travel “the great equalizer.” No matter how far ahead you were, the moment everyone hits the same gate waiting for the same delayed flight, the game resets. Your brilliance, your speed, your earlier mistakes—irrelevant. A steel tube in the sky puts everyone back at zero.
Strangely enough, I thought of that while reading a message from my old friend Anssi in Finland—a friend I haven’t seen in over a decade, yet one with whom conversations tend to immediately drop into the deep end of the pool. He had just buried a close friend, a man named Eero, someone woven into the very fibers of his life. The ceremony was full of laughter and warmth, the kind of funeral that doubles as a birthday party for someone who didn’t get the chance to turn 60. And yet beneath the joking, the hymns, and the stories, the same truth hummed quietly beneath it all:
Death—far more than flight schedules—resets the game.
We don’t like admitting it. But every graveside reveals how thin our armor really is, how flimsy our excuses sound, how unnecessary half our self-made dramas were. And oddly, how honest we become when the performance of everyday life finally drops away.
A Finnish Funeral and the Masks We Drop
When Anssi described the service, it didn’t sound tragic; it sounded true. It echoed something he said about liking funerals more than weddings—because weddings are all curated illusions while funerals pull the curtains back. People stop trying to be impressive. They stop being Instagram versions of themselves. They tell the truth. They hold each other’s hands without wondering if someone’s watching.
Eero had fought cancer for seven years. He was supposed to have only two. By every medical statistic, he “shouldn’t” have made it past 2020. But he kept living—long enough that Anssi jokingly told him to ask for a refund.
And yet there they were, one Sunday night in a hospice room. Eero unconscious. His family gathered. Anssi speaking quietly: “We will continue this talk on the other side. Thank you.” The next morning, Eero was gone.
You could feel in his message the strange combination that grief always seems to carry—love wrapped in regret, gratitude braided with the sense that no matter what we did, we somehow fell short. There’s always a final conversation we didn’t have, a call we didn’t make, a small kindness we forgot to give.
And that leads to something important.
The Failures We Collect—and the Ones That Shape Us
Anssi referenced a Demon Hunter song—I Will Fail You—a surprising choice for him, because apparently Eero hated anything “heavy.” But the title matters, because it’s painfully, universally accurate.
Every relationship is a slow-motion dance of failures.
Every friendship is a record of disappointments—small ones, big ones, the ones we forget, and the ones we don’t.
And yet here’s the elegant paradox:
We do not grow from the moments we flawlessly nail.
We grow from the ones where we get knocked flat, embarrassed, humbled, forced to confront some truth about ourselves we’d rather avoid.
As I replied to Anssi: without failures, we have nothing new to say.
It’s part of the equalization. Life levels us with mistakes long before death levels us in the ground. And the older we get, the more we realize how little we actually “knew” at twenty, and how embarrassingly little we truly know at fifty.
We learn painfully, slowly, and too often too late. But we learn.
Which brings us closer to the heart of the matter.
The Final Reset and the Life That Happens Before It
If air travel is a temporary equalizer, death is the permanent one.
It humbles the strong and softens the stubborn. It resets the scoreboard, erases the rankings, and dissolves the illusion that life is some ladder we’re climbing. When the casket lowers—and Anssi has lowered several—there is no elite lane, no VIP section, no inherited advantage. Just the quiet leveling of all things human.
But if that’s all it did, the story would feel bleak. It’s not.
The equalizer is also an invitation.
Just as the airport forces every team in The Amazing Race to rethink their strategy, death forces us to rethink our life.
It asks the questions we avoid:
What are we doing that matters?
Who are we still pretending for?
Why are we postponing the things we say we believe matter?
Why are we surprised that people disappear suddenly when we already know how this game works?
In a way, death is the equalizer that gives life its urgency.
The final reset is what makes the current moment worth anything at all.
And every funeral—whether in Finland, Florida, or anywhere in between—hands us the same quiet reminder:
We don’t get to control how long the race lasts.
We only get to decide how awake we are for the part we’re still running.
✨ Seed Thought: Life may not come with shortcuts, but it does come with a deadline—the equalizer that makes today the only place where meaning can actually be made.
