Don't Waste Any More of Your Life Worrying About Death
“Now is the time to get serious living your ideals... How long can you afford to put off who you really want to be? Your nobler self cannot wait any longer”
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Sometimes human consciousness appears to be a miraculous curse. In exchange for an imagination capable of living in a symbolic world (of language and money and religion and civilization) within the physical world that all other living things call home we suffer from what Ernest Becker, in The Denial of Death, called the existential burden of living "not only on a tiny territory, nor even on an entire planet, but in a galaxy, in a universe, and in dimensions beyond visible universes."
This is the raw material of our anxiety: we worry about many things, most of which we don't control and far too many of which aren't even real.
We're very good at worrying, of course. We have a big brain, which is nimble and plastic for much of our life (assuming we take care of it). We can form new neurons and learn new things well into old age.
Which is good news if you want to remember which mushrooms you can eat without dying and which snakes are poisonous and which aren't, but it's not so good if you've habituated your brain to worrying about things that are largely outside of your control. Like death.
We humans seem to be unique among our fellow animals in anxiously pondering our own demise. Surely the gazelle knows dread when it feels the breath of the cheetah on its neck, and the frog is most certainly suffering unimaginable terror as it is being swallowed alive by the snake. But it's unlikely that the gazelle is wondering about the afterlife as it's grazing contentedly in the grass, or that the frog is obsessing about what happens after it dies while sunning itself on a rock.
Our particularly human brand of anxiety often feels endemic to the age in which we live.
We gorge ourselves at the always-on, all-you-can-eat information buffet. Yet we're starving for wisdom to guide us through an increasingly complex world.
We are connected, ubiquitously and ceaselessly, to more people than we could ever possibly hope to know. Yet what we really need is the life-affirming intimacy of true connection.
We long for immortality, an ever-lasting youth abetted by science and medicine. Yet we'd be better off finding the meaning and purpose in the life we already have.
But anxiety has been a feature (not a bug) of human consciousness ever since our ancestors first gathered around a fire, gazed up into the night sky and wondered, "Why?"
This existential curiosity has generated some ingenious answers, from the beautifully sublime to nightmares born of our worst instincts. But whether good or bad most answers to the Big Why lead to the same place: to distract us from The One Great Inevitable Thing.
Death.
In his book, Becker postulates that the fear of our own mortality -- the existential dread we feel at being alone in a cold, indifferent universe -- drives us to encase ourselves in "character armor," personality traits that enable us to feel that the world is manageable and that we're safe in it.
“Man is literally split in two: he has awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to have to live with.”
I'm still reckoning with the consequences of spending years trying to squeeze into character armor that didn't quite fit. Of contorting my body in ways that left me stunted, crippled, a stranger in my own skin.
But I didn't fully understand Becker's thesis -- couldn't put the pieces together -- until I was diagnosed with cancer. That's when things fell into perspective, when I realized what was essential and what I wouldn't spend even one more minute of my life doing. What was Me and what was Not-Me.
This came as quite a shock, naturally. Things that I had assumed were of life-and-death consequence -- part of the very definition of my Self -- became unimportant almost overnight. Things that I had spent years-- decades, even -- chasing no longer had any allure. Many of the "truths" upon which I had built a reasonable facsimile of a life evaporated like smoke.
This was a painful and confusing time. But I ultimately came to see it as a blessing. I'm glad I woke up when I did, before it was too late.
The thought of getting to the end of my life and realizing that I didn't live the life I could have lived fills me with fear and sadness. Because I've seen that happen and it's almost too unbearable to watch.
But even contemplating that we just may have spent our life serving false gods in order to slake our ego at the expense of our soul, or that we have been clinging desperately to insufficiently examined truths in order to avoid thoughts of our own mortality, these are not steps most of us are ready to take.
Fair enough. I get it. Why rock the boat, especially if things are going well.
Because: things aren't always going to go well. In fact, things are almost guaranteed to suck,eventually.
The Stoics understood this and practiced for the inevitable sucky parts. They made it a point to conjure worst-case scenarios to steel themselves against whatever could go wrong.
They meditated on death to, firstly, drain it of it's subconscious power by pulling it forward into consciousness and, secondly, to cultivate gratitude for every new day that we are fortunate to wake up to.
So, by all means, think about your death. Imagine the world without you. Call to mind all that you will miss when you're gone; the things you will regret not having the chance to do; the things you will regret having wasted your precious time doing; the smiling faces and loving arms you will no longer be able to reach out to touch.
But then get back to the important business of living.
"As the day arises," Seneca wrote, "welcome it as the very best day of all, and make it your own possession."
Then repeat, until you run out of sunrises.