Smectics are systems that are crystalline in some directions, but liquid-like in others. They can occur in both equilibrium contexts (e.g., liquid-crystals), and non-equilibrium ones, like the pattern of convective rolls that forms when a fluid in a gravitational field is heated from below (the Rayleigh-Benard instability). In this talk, I discuss the similarities and differences between these two cases; the latter are very dramatic, and make a "dead" (i.e., equilibrium) smectic behave very differently from a "live" (i.e., non-equilibrium) one like the Rayleigh-Benard instability.