Death

It tops the list of things you're scared of.

There's insurance against it.

We have industries devoted to fending it off.

We have industries devoted to making sure it happens.

It sucks.

Ironically enough, death is an integral part of life. What goes up must come down. What has a beginning has an end. Every reaction has a... you get it. When we're young, we're immortal. Our entire lives are ahead of us and we hope to God and Lady Luck that our time is a long, long time from now. For those of us taking the more liberal stance, we act impulsively and do whatever our fickle hearts yearn for. If you read my post on happiness, you know that these kinds of people probably surround themselves with equally impulsive people and probably claim to be mostly happy. The more conservative of us will probably do things they consider safer and because of this will probably plan farther in advance, into a life that their more conservative lifestyle will hopefully grant. As the only animals capable of planning, we sure do a lot of hoping. We hope that despite doing a ton of dumb stuff, we'll wake up the next morning to do it all over. We hope that despite not doing anything crazy, we'll wake up the next morning to hopefully do something spontaneous one day... if we can get off work and don't have a dentist appointment.

The worst part is, it's inevitable. We're born carefree into a live we didn't choose and as soon as we learn about it, we hope to go out as carefree as possible. A pessimist says you're born alone and you die alone. Fact is you're born nowadays with a fistful of doctor around you and with any luck, you'll die the same way.

In my happiness post, I mentioned that we only do the things that make us "happy" in order to fend away sadness, to momentarily forget our meaningless existences and to hopefully justify this mysterious life that's been bestowed upon us. Well ladies and gentlemen, it's time to get morbid.

Look around you. Well, don't do it right now because you're probably sitting alone at your computer, you sad, sad person you. Why aren't you out enjoying life? It's precious and short. But if you look around when there are people around, what do you see? People! There are people out there and if you just take one minute out of your busy life and close your eyes (not when you're driving or operating heavy machinery) and try to imagine and conceptualize and spatially comprehend the idea that every single person you see or meet has a life of equal or greater size than you. Think back on your life and how massive it is. You've been to several states and several school and traveled to your grandparents and eaten a ton of food and met a lot of people and there's a lot of STUFF in your life. Well the person next to you has done all that too. The person next to you had a mom and a dad and a childhood and they learned to ride a bike and had a romantic relationship and found a job and lost a job and is now doing something they probably hate with their lives and may not be where they wanted to be and... and... their life is huge. Conceptually, it's about as big as yours and realistically, takes up about the same amount of space in the space-time continuum. That is, no space at all. The world has been around a long, long time and there have been a ton of people that have come and gone, each with full lives. For millennia people have watched the sun rise and set every day of their lives and they have all died and people are born to replace them and they have died as well. Your life is small and it is tiny and odds are, it won't really matter all that much. But if you literally took a moment to try and conceptualize that you'll know that it's a lot like literally trying to imagine infinity.

Here's a fun little exercise to help you do what I'm trying to get you to do. Close your eyes. Well... I know it's hard to read and close your eyes but... have a friend do it. I don't know. Just... close your eyes. Imagine a square. Easy. Four sides with 90 degree angles... no problem. Now imagine the number 1. Just the number. I just typed it, in case you forgot what it looks like. Now picture the number 2. See, I'm helping. Now picture the number 3 and then keep adding numbers in order. (4, 5, 6... etc.) If you're a good counter, you're getting pretty high up there... 100... 500... 823... but soon you're going to lose track of all the digits. Now you're a little overwhelmed because you can logically imagine a number with 30 digits, but you can't keep track of every single digit. A number like 5643482309482350948323 is really hard to keep in your head and even harder to figure out what number comes next. Now imagine your life is that number. Now imagine the person next to you (or the next person you see) is the next number sequentially. Now keep going. Your number is seeming less and less important. Sure, it's a long, beautiful number. It's your number. You're proud of your number. But there's going to be numbers after you. There's going to be numbers with twice as many digits as yours, with more exciting numbers like... 7's or... 1's. You never know.

That was fun, wasn't it? My point of interest here is why we do what we do. Why in the face of all things, we press on. We know it's coming so why do we do what we do? Why do we endure sadness and why do we do things that we hate? Why do we put up with people we don't like and why do we do things that we do like when we know they aren't going to last?

Imagine you're a serf in a medieval township. Your day consists of waking up at the crack of dawn and tilling and sewing the land all day. You might get some bread for breakfast and maybe some more bread for lunch. You'll till and you'll sew all day and you know you do it because if you don't, you'll die. You know this will be your life for as long as you live. You know that if you get sick, you won't be able to work the land and you'll die. Your family will die. So you keep working. Then one day, you die. Why did you do it? Why press on? Why accept this?

Everything we do is predetermined. I'm not talking about the concept of free will because I have different thoughts on that, but everything we do is predetermined. We went to elementary school, then middle school, then in high school they informed us that we have to go to college, then in college they reminded us that we have to become adults and get jobs and be functional adults. It's expected. Why do we do it? Why do we do anything?

I guess it's more of a theoretical question for nihilism or something. Why do we get up in the morning? Okay so maybe I'm advocating mass suicide... maybe I'm not. Just kidding... I'm not. But that's the most interesting thing about this: why don't we just do it? I posted a status the other day talking about happiness. I wrapped it up by saying if we had known this is what being an adult would be like, we would have offed ourselves a while ago. And part of me thinks that's true. If someone had sat us down when we were kids and earnestly got us to understand that we're going to be living on our own, doing things we don't like doing, and not having fun all the time... we might have seriously chosen the the red pill (Matrix reference--google it).

But I think that speaks heavily to the mystery of the human psyche... above all adversity, we strive for life. Despite knowing that life isn't going to be very fun and despite a ton of uncertainty about being able to attain this magical happiness we all hope for... we don't kill ourselves. In fact, we look down on suicide. In fact, if we commit suicide, there's something WRONG with us. While suicide seems like the next logical step to accepting our mortality, we consider those who do it the victim. Now maybe this attitude towards suicide is another survival instinct but maybe it's also a result of society telling us what's good for us. Either way, we're still alive but we're still suffering and we're still not willing to do anything about it. Go figure.

We even use death as punishment. Those who kill get the death penalty. We know that killing someone who killed someone else isn't going to bring the victim back, but for whatever reason it makes us feel better. The death penalty is supposed to be a deterrent. It's based on the idea that the worst thing that you can do to someone who breaks the law is kill them. That the worst wrong someone can endure is death. I don't understand this because it seems like the worst thing you can endure is life. Life is full of suffering and pain and death isn't full of anything. I would rather have an empty bucket then one full of rotten eggs.

Epicurus (who is the first incarnation of Ayn Rand, I think) says that life is the greatest good. He was what we call a hedonist but he would have probably just said he enjoys life to the fullest. And to be fair, life is something to enjoy. If we're going to be here, we might as well make the best of it (despite the pointless endeavor that may or may not be). Anyway, Epicurus says death isn't that big of a deal because if you can imagine a time when you didn't exist and be okay with it, you can imagine a time after you and also be okay with it. If a psychopath is an Epicurean (which would be HILARIOUS), I don't think the death penalty is going to be much of a deterrent. (Philosophy jokes are the best.) Thomas Nagel (when he isn't being a JERK and talking about philosophy of mind) takes Epicurus' view one step farther about 3000 years later and says, yes, death IS the greatest harm because imagining a time when you don't exist is freakin' awful. It's all about missing out on the future. I don't even think that really occurs to people--why death is such a harm--until they're staring it dead (see what I did there?) in the face. No one is concerned about the shortness of life until the end and I think that's part of the source of regret. But maybe that's also the reason people don't go around constant concerned about death. Maybe we shouldn't think about it. But it's such a huge deal, why shouldn't we?

Humans are the only things on this earth that can plan. I've talked about this before: we can plan, imagine a future, and it's even a unique ability to imagine a future without us. Animals don't fear death because they can imagine a future without them, a gazelle runs away because it knows death is inherently bad. It doesn't know why, it just knows. We would run away from a lion because we know that our loved ones would miss us and we wouldn't be able to learn to play piano or write a book or fall in love or crap like that. Also we don't want to be known as the idiot who got eaten by a lion. WE ARE HIGHER UP ON THE FOOD CHAIN. Not the point. We have the ability to know why we don't want to die which might be why we don't just kill ourselves. Again, I don't think that is sufficient evidence for why we don't. All we know is that being alive is better than the alternative.

This post is as much about life as it is about death. I've tread the thin line of optimism a couple times and hopefully it wasn't too obvious that I am a big fan of life. I mean I suppose if given the choice I would have still chosen life. I think of the people I've met and the things I've done and I can't help but think that none of it's permanent... but yeah I guess it's better than the alternative. Is is better to have loved and lost then to have never loved at all? Is having the heartbreak better than never knowing the love that heartbreak has to follow? I don't know. That's a logic problem I can't reason out. Things we humans do to ensure we continue to live is amazing. We will keep someone who is persistently unconscious with no hope of regaining functionality on a breathing machine even if means only prolonging what we think life should be. We will argue for centuries about what it means to be alive and what being alive even means. We are so concerned with mortality that when it comes to death, we fear nothing more. Yet as I have hopefully proven, doesn't the inevitability of death hopefully render all of that pointless?

So I guess through all the rambling... what you should take away from this discussion of death is not that persevering through the dark times is unnecessary, but that like a great party, life is short and is eventually going to end. If you can walk away from it with the best story, you win. And while the end is something you don't want to deal with, all you need to do is fill the time you have with the things you enjoy. Yeah, we rely on people for our happiness--people who can be mean, stupid, awful and selfish. And yeah, going to school so we can work til we die sucks a lot... but if life is so short and if the only thing that allows us to forget are the little moments of happiness, fill your life with those little moments. Proportionally, even the shortest moments of bliss are the biggest things anyone can do.