Let's talk about death, baby.

Let's talk about you and me and that one inevitable event that makes us all equal: death. I can almost hear you thinking “Wow, that’s a bit dark, isn’t it?”, which is exactly the motivation behind my attempt to address a topic that concerns us all. It doesn’t matter whether you like me or despise me, whether you agree with me or think I must’ve been indoctrinated by some sect to be of an opinion you disagree with. You could be Obama, I could be Stalin, and neither of our actions or beliefs would ever influence the pure fact that death will come for us all. Good faith or bad faith, sacrifice or selfishness, solidarity or indifference - none of these things prevent us from having to face the ultimate ending, and we still prefer to discuss trivial topics such as the weather and some deceptively important person’s weight loss instead.

If there is one absolute truth, then it must be death, which I was very aware of from a young age. I can remember what it felt like when my younger self would lie in bed and make herself experience the most unpleasant feelings thinking about the inevitable ending, mostly because I still carry big parts of that self with me today. Thinking about what it would be like to cease to exist is obviously as ironic as it is impossible, since the atheistic standpoint which I’ve always taken is that death is nothingness, and can therefore not be experienced. The search for an answer to the question of what death would feel like has therefore made it onto the same list as all the other futile tasks in life, keeping the desire to find objective meaning in this world company.

Even if there would be something left of us, such as an essence or the energy we leave behind (or in some cases poop, since some corpses turn into post-human tubes of toothpaste when the bowels are compressed and let out whatever was left in there), it doesn’t change the belief of mine that you are just being thrown out into nothingness. You need your material body in order to experience, and since I don’t believe in dualism, I have to come to terms with the idea that we are unable to be conscious without the machine that used to enable it. So far, I haven’t found a way to make peace with this thought yet, as every attempt ends in me placing a metaphorical and significantly weak black hole in my chest, absorbing me from the inside out. It’s like we’re all trapped in the inescapable and awkward situation that is life, and its absurdity and futility that the upcoming end brings with it.

During my short lifetime of 19 years on this earth, there’s been a couple of times where the existence of death (what an ironic and paradoxical joke of life) felt like a punch in my face. I’ve seen family members die, and I had friends, some of which I knew very well and others only heard about or met briefly, who decided to speed up the process and face the end way too early. In the most tragic cases, life was taken away from them in the blink of an eye without any signs or warnings. They were torn from life through an incredibly inconvenient and sad coincidence, because life or fate or the natural Good doesn’t care about anything we find significant. It has never and will never take any of us into consideration, and why should it?

Having experienced all of this doesn’t make me special, and neither does it make them special. There’s no glory in death. There’s no glory in pain or suffering. Life is full of both of them, and we’ve just got to accept it, move on, and perhaps rebel against it if we’re brave enough. We’re in control of a ridiculously limited amount of things, but whatever we can control should be seen as our responsibilities, something we can change and transform. We can have the power to stop thinking life is something that simply happens to us, and start acting according to the belief that it’s a combination of coincidences and things we can make happen ourselves. Feeling defeated by the fact that death will take everything that we’ve built and maintained away from us is more than understandable, however, it is more helpful to rebel against death’s inevitability and aim to live in spite of life’s futility and meaninglessness. There is no doubt that the end will come around eventually, so we might as well have a good time as long as it’s not here yet.

But why do some of us feel so strongly about a fact we can’t ignore? Why is it so hard to accept something that will force us to face it in complete disregard of our wishes and desires? Especially when being dead in itself, and the state of being unconscious, is not intrinsically bad anyway? One of the reasons why thinking about death is so uncomfortable is first of all because of our instinctive desire to stay alive. If we weren’t programmed to aim for survival, even more of us would’ve killed ourselves long ago, and our species would’ve never survived for this long. The other self-explanatory reason is that we are too busy to simply let go of everything. We have goals to reach, family and friends to see, and so many more pleasant experiences to have, that thinking about not ever getting the opportunity to fulfill all these wishes seems cruel and unfair. Not existing or being stuck in an unconscious state for all eternity, which is a hell of a long time, is therefore understandably frustrating and disappointing.

The main reason why we struggle to make friends with death is therefore because it’s synonymous with the deprivation of all good things in life. Just like we hated having to go to bed early when we were kids, when we could’ve watched another cartoon or played one more game instead, being forced to stop doing all things that bring us pleasure, is an extremely uncomfortable thought. We will never get the chance to read again, go to the bar with our friends, see the sun go down on a Summer’s day, feel the crisp Winter air brush against our cheeks, and neither will we ever put our feet in the sand again and let it hug us with its warmth. There is so much to do and so little time, how can we possibly still our hunger for experiences in just one lifetime?

Perhaps I will one day find consolation in the fact that death is not intrinsically evil or bad, but rather unfortunate and the only certain thing in our life. As much as we struggle, as much as we suffer and experience hardships, there is always the opportunity to rebel against life’s absurdities and keep moving on, until death takes all our chances for continuous attempts away anyway. We can use death as a motivator, a reminder that if we don’t try now, there will possibly be no more opportunities later on, knowing that if you let go of that one chance, you might deprive yourself of something good that you were, for once, actually in control of. It can be liberating to know that no matter how much we mess up, there is no point in giving it too much significance since it doesn’t have any intrinsic value anyway. It might be uncomfortable in the moment that feels like it’ll never end, but this is also exactly where we don’t have to worry, because at least there’s certainty in knowing that death will come for everything anyway.

#death #life #time #consciousness