I’m telling you now: consider this a warning for all things. Hopefully it’s prevented with occasional levity and a positive conclusion in my classic brand of unyielding charm and wit, but yes, all things: death, suffering, futility, you get the jist.
A fear of death is pretty common amongst the human population. Personally, I don’t consider it a fear of mine. I think where people do develop that fear is when they enjoy life so much they finally feel as if they actually have something to lose. And while death is a sharp pang of a fear, it goes hand in hand with suffering (which life has), but maybe this one is more of a dull thud.
The time before dying seems more unfair than death itself. How can something that is able to predict its own demise even be able to exist? How can anyone live a happy, unfettered life knowing what is to come or really knowing what’s to come but then not knowing what’s to come or simply knowing what they’re already an unwilling participant in? I think we can’t actually keep ourselves from thinking about it in any meaningful way on purpose because we can’t stomach it. Sometimes I think about this stuff for too long and it’s like a dam breaks except instead of releasing water it’s like a terrible black sludge.
I had my first experience with disassociation about a year ago, which was the worst thing ever, and lasted for maybe two weeks. It seemed to be triggered by nothing more than just thinking too hard. It was fully self induced trauma (I’m sorry to myself in hindsight). I was somewhere in the back of my head and then there was like a thick glass handle and then something that was not me controlling me and I would be like looking at my hands and telling myself that those were not my hands. It was crazy. It was like proper existential horror. And that changed me. It’s the opposite feeling of relief you get when you wake up from a nightmare. It was like I was waking up back into the nightmare.
Obviously, the phenomenon of not existing is a fear. Arguably the scariest thing of all, existing is all we know how to do. The actual process of dying doesn’t appeal to me. I don’t love that I will almost definitely die having experienced more suffering than joy. I don’t think that’s me being pessimistic; I think it just might be true. You can take the stance that “there is a positive in every opportunity,” but that doesn’t cancel out the suffering. At that point, you’re just changing the way you think about things and not being upfront about reality. If you do take that mentality, however, I think you’re just lying to yourself.
I’m also struggling with the idea of fairness, by which I mean there is none. I don’t know why I get to live such a good life. I surely don’t deserve it more than anyone else in this world. I haven’t earned it. I’ve earned some of the good things in my life, but I didn’t earn being born somewhere peaceful and safe to a middle-class family who loves me. I didn’t earn being born generally healthy. In fact, most everything about me that is unhealthy is a direct result of choices I’ve made. Honestly, the fact that I have the time to reflect on any of this nonsense at all means I’ve got it made for me. Sometimes, I’m not even sure if I’m a good person. Sometimes, I feel like I don’t deserve anything that was given to me.
Nothing changes the fact that I have a comparatively good life. Life (even in its best iteration) necessitates us watching the people we love die or leave before that. All of us are rooted to share nostalgia and childhoods, which become shared by fewer people to someday become alienated by a world that rapidly changes around us. And we will watch this happen. No matter how wonderful my life is, this life demands that I watch myself and everyone I love decay. If I’m lucky enough to live a long life, the normalized dramatic spoiler of an utterly regular existence is this: you will lose everything.
If I had been asked before I was born whether or not I would like to be alive, I’m not sure I would have said yes. That doesn’t mean I would have said no; I just haven’t decided yet, which by the way, is not a question of if I would like to keep living. I would very much like to keep living. The question is if I would like to have existed in the first place, which is a vastly different question.
I used to think of myself as something of a Nihilist primarily. I think at the time I wanted to make myself feel that way because I was overcompensating for a lot of things. But I thought and still think that most things matter a lot. Most things are actually really profound and special. But that was exactly the thought that scared me. It’s scary to assert in the face of meaningless that something means something to you. As much as I hate this place, I worry that it might be too good. Being alive feels like being forced to watch some show and then you get really into it and deem it the best show ever, but then you’re never allowed to find out how it ends. There is just so much to lose. Sometimes, for no apparent reason, I become suddenly and profoundly sad, but someday I’ll never be able to look at something so significant like trees or sunsets or the stars or the ocean. My end’s fixation sometimes borders on debilitating.
I find it hard to enjoy things without reservation sometimes. Because I’m thinking that if I enjoy whatever it is too much—which I’m entirely capable of doing—experience will ultimately lead to more pain and joy because it will end. The pain I’ll feel to lose whatever it was will have a more lasting effect than the joy I felt. I’d like to stop doing that, because that is no way to live. I’m trying to exist in the space between letting myself freely enjoy being alive while still finding peace in the certainty of its end or amongst the small ends that make up a lot. Basically, I hate being alive but I love living. I don’t like the conditions of life. I don’t like that I know I’m going to die and I have some obligation until then (I think I’ll never know exactly what that obligation is). But I love living; I really do. Most days I’m very happy to wake up in the morning and I get excited about a lot of stuff. It hasn’t always been like that.
My current philosophy is to keep finding that balanced good. So what exactly is preventing me from spiraling into a mindless pleasure-seeking board? At the moment, nothing. Obviously the straight definition of hedonism isn’t super flattering, but I think most people can relate in the sense of maximizing long-term pleasures instead of immediate short-term ones: not just doing stuff because it feels good right now, but thinking about what will make you feel the best for the greatest amount of time. Is it possible to want to live the most pleasurable life I can, preferably ethically and not at the expense of others, so that at the end, the good can be more prevailing than the bad? Probably not, but who cares? I’m just here to have a good time and that’s the mission statement I found the most comfort in.
But, it’s more complicated than that. There’s a lot left after to account for. What about the melancholy and boredom and envy and rage? Where do I put any of that? Why do I have it? What about all of the lives that have more important and pressing concerns? Real suffering. No freedom, no peace, despair, hopelessness, hunger sickness, torture. There are entire nations or things less than nations built on top of graveyards or things worse than graveyards. People can be monsters, people are being monsters right now and have been since the dawn of time. Sometimes humanity’s evil is the universe’s indifference. There is so much pain everywhere for no good reason. If you could see it all at once, you’d lose your mind.
So what do we do with that? The first thing that made me feel better about dying was thinking about nature’s eternal return. But how can I, in good conscience, entertain an idea that although offers a pleasant alternative to an ending nothing-less for me creates a perpetual cyclical hell for somebody else? I can say all of this low and somber, but sometimes I feel like if any of it really mattered to me, then I already would have dropped everything and just have gone out and done something. Realistically, probably the most proactive way you and I could help people in the second is to give away all of our organs to strangers effective immediately. Correct me if I’m wrong but I don’t think either of us want to do that. Is it selfish? I don’t know. I like my life and I don’t want to give it up. Whether that’s in the literal example of parting with my corporeal machinery or more abstractly all of my time and comfort and honestly my desire to not be exposed to the worst of all things for the rest of my days. I don’t think that makes me a bad person, though. I don’t think it makes me a good person. I think it might just make me a person. I think mainly I just don’t want to make things worse or do what I can to make things better. I’m trying to contribute a verse and impact others while still keeping myself alive. Not just alive, but living; doing the things that make me happy. But none of it is really enough is it?
Despite everything I just said and indeed have ever said, these days I’m not satisfied with unnecessarily miserable conclusions. Once you find yourself in the midst of them, they sort of start to color everything in some sort of black-and-white hue and then there’s sometimes a tendency to think that the more grim something sounds, the truer it is, which I don’t think is right. There are terrible things about the world (of course there are) but we are the only things that we know of who can hope and find or create and catalyze meaning where there isn't any. I think by being really cynical and dour about the state of things in ourselves, we do it the service to the infinitesimal chance that any of us are even here at all. Even if we make the meaning, truth is subjective, and we’re provided with two entirely artificial options. It makes more sense to me to hone in on the one of the two man-made truths that is quiet and peaceful, this occasionally and fleetingly and then next did moments truly joyful but really you can’t have one without the other so it’s not a matter of deciding between them or reconciling the two we’re pinning down a point on the middle of a spectrum. It’s not a spectrum, it’s just both things at once. Everything is beautiful and everything’s terrible. Everything is chaos and order. Everything is nothing and nothing is everything. Everything is life and death.
Maybe it all exists or maybe it doesn’t exist, but it’s notable and important because we can experience it, articulate it, and share it. We’re acutely aware of future death in a way that is not solely governed by biological animal instinct, but by ethics, morality, and philosophy. We aren’t just wired to survive. We know intimately what it means to live and what it means to suffer and what it means to die. In the face of that cosmic slight, isn’t there something special in arranging the resulting turmoil that we’re even alive to think about how bad it is to be alive? We’re aware of all this and still choose to in our own pockets of time and space seek happiness and keep easing the burden for others to whatever degree we can and keep loving.
I think one of the best things you can tell yourself or what someone else can tell you is that everything “is going to be fine.” Even if it’s not, I think that might be one of the best lies you can tell yourself or be told. But I don’t think it’s a lie. I just think it’s how it’ll be at the end. Even though “fine” might end up being less of a resolution of feeling and more of an absence of it, everything is going to be fine. No matter how this plays out, this moment won’t kill us. Everything is impossibly strange and nothing is sacred and everything is holy. We’re going to be fine even if it’s not. Nothing is fair. Nothing is good. And it’s all worth it. I know this whole post seems like a big scheme to convince everyone who’s reading it that I’m not afraid of death. I’m not justifying whether that’s correct or incorrect; judge me to whatever extent you want to. I’m not afraid of death; I just think too hard about it.
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