Contemplations on Life and Death
Before I start, I have some EXTREMELY EXCITING NEWS—you can now GET NOTIFIED BY EMAIL when new posts come out! Just enter your email into the email notification box and you should be good to go. Still working on a way to not make the whole thing embed in the notification email, so stay tuned for updates!
Happy Fourth of July!
This is likely going to be my most personal post yet, and so I want to calibrate expectations.
I spent a lot of time considering whether or not I should include my thoughts on potentially inflammatory topics like politics and religion. I set myself that constraint in my first blog post, but if there were any post that was justified in breaking that rule, it would be this one. This post is inherently going to be philosophical, and that means that it's tied to my personal worldview, including my views on religion. However, I worry that I'll have to spend more time justifying my views than on the actual focus of this post, and I'm also not too keen on violating some of the basic principles of the blog. So to the best of my abilities, I'll try to avoid discussing my religious views.
With that out of the way, I thought I'd give some background for this post.
Death is an emotionally complex subject for me. Entire swathes of my life have been taken over by the emotional weight of inevitable death (and later parting in general). I never could get past the seeming permanence of death and being snatched away from other people. Even today, I wouldn't consider myself to have fully emotionally processed the significance of death. I just don't worry about it on a daily basis anymore, even if it logically should be at or near the top of my mind. That said, I do think I'm at a point in my life where I can reflect on death and what it means in a sufficiently rational, non-visceral way (even if emotions do still play a part).
I used to think death made life meaningless. I now believe the answer, and question, of the meaning of life is a lot more complicated.
On the one hand, it seems awfully self-centered to claim that just because I'll be out of the picture, life is meaningless. Other people will still be around, so shouldn't life still be meaningful?
But I think the premise itself is murky, because what does it mean for life to have "meaning" anyway? When faced with an abstract question, I like to try to break it down into definitions, but that just doesn't seem to work here. It's not like you can open a dictionary and find a "meaning" for life. Well, actually, you can, but I don't think that's what most people mean.
What I'm guessing people mean is more a question of "Why is life a thing at all?" Whether you interpret that as asking "What is the reason for consciousness?" or "What is the reason anything exists, as opposed to nothing at all existing?" or something else, I believe that's a great philosophical question! And... I don't know the answer. I wish I did, but it's certainly beyond my abstract thinking capabilities. I do have opinions on the nature of consciousness, but again, that becomes entangled with my views on religion and I would rather avoid that.
The other interesting way of considering the meaning of "the meaning of life" is the purpose of life, or more specifically, the fundamental goal a person should have when approaching life. The standard answer is usually along the lines of "love" or "happiness". I'm not sure I can get behind either. I often wonder why we value happiness so much and other emotions so little. Shouldn't disgust and sadness and fear and anger and all the other emotions also be part of the experience of life? And I don't just mean that in the sense of "well, happiness wouldn't feel so good if we were always happy". I want to separate it from happiness altogether. We take happiness as the highest good, but it seems like there's nothing that inherently makes a happy life superior to an emotionally balanced life. That's not to say that a happy life is inferior to an emotionally balanced life, but it seems so subjective.
Then again, so is the question of the purpose of life, which is not that far off from asking how a person should act, which is essentially the entire field of ethics in a nutshell. A person who has a duty-based ethical mindset would probably value fulfilling responsibilities, like telling the truth, not stealing, etc. A Utilitarian would value producing the most happiness for the most people. But anyone can come up with any ethical standpoint! Who's to say which is right?
I suppose the answer to that question depends on one's religious beliefs since that also encompasses belief about the ontology/basic structure of the world, including if/what ideas are embedded into the fabric of the world (so to speak). And I will once again have to abstain from commenting on that.
It's time to back out of this dead end, pun intended. Most people contemplate death in its sense of cutting the dead off from the living. This, of course, is not a universal belief and varies based on religious views, but let's roll with it for a second. If death's main perceived impact is separation from other people, is that even unique to death? Death may be the ultimate separation, but life seems to have plenty of separation too.
A few weeks ago, I flew across the country with a group of classmates for a one-week event. The time we had there was fantastic, but of course, time is always moving forward and the week eventually came to an end. A few hours and a flight later, we had landed back in our home city. While I was exiting the plane, one of the flight attendants said, "See you later!"
He was clearly just being polite, but my immediate mental reaction was No, you won't. It's extremely improbable that I'll ever see that particular flight attendant again. From my perspective, that flight attendant is essentially dead. I have no shared connection with him (even if our connection was never more than me receiving food and beverages from him when he rolled through the aisles with the food cart) and no way of communicating with him.
For that matter, what about my relationship with my travel buddies? We were never that close before the trip and it was likely that it would go downhill now that we didn't have the shared experience of the trip. Eventually, we would be done for good. Maybe there would be nothing to talk about, or maybe there would be other people in our lives occupying our limited mental bandwidth. In any event, that moment seemed like the high-water mark of my relationship with them, and it didn't take much effort to see how it would all end.
It's hard not to get fatalistic about our relationships with other people. It's taken me a while, but I think I've finally come to accept the turmoil of life on an intellectual level, if not an emotional level, and I'm trying to be more thoughtful about my present interactions with people.
I suppose that also makes it easier to accept death, the ultimate parting. If I'm able to move on from people I will likely never see again, I can accept the inevitability of death.
The truth is that I didn't really care if I never saw that flight attendant again because we never had any true connection with each other. But in our culture, we seem to love to gloss over the weight of parting. It's so much easier to pretend that parting is temporary and deny that the future will be radically different from the present. And for a more close-to-home example, it's so much easier for graduating students to assiduously wish people a great summer instead of confronting the reality of likely not getting to see someone again. That's because sadness is an unpleasant emotion to deal with. But sadness is just as innate to life as happiness is, so maybe we shouldn't be going out of our way to avoid it.
Ultimately, that's also my philosophy on how to emotionally approach (natural) death. It's going to happen whether we want it to or not, so the only difference is our attitude toward it—whether we struggle futilely against its inevitability or learn to accept and embrace it as an essential part of the experience of material existence.
Thanks for reading, and see you next month!
~ Coruscant
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