Book Summary — The Subtle Art of not Giving a Fuck (9)
Chapter 9: … And Then You Die
First, read these to give you some context
Chapter 1: Don’t Try,
Chapter 2: Happiness is a Problem,
Chapter 3: You are not Special,
Chapter 4: The Value of Suffering,
Chapter 5: You Are Always Choosing,
Chapter 6: You’re Wrong about Everything (But so am I),
Chapter 7: Failure is the Way Forward, and
Chapter 8: The Importance of Saying No
Finally, the last chapter!!! This last chapter is about death and suicide attempt from Mark. Well, I don’t think I can relate with this chapter that much. But I will try to convey it to you as much as I can. Maybe there will be a lot of quotation. But, I don’t know. We’ll see about that :)
Death scares us. And because it scares us, we avoid thinking about it, sometimes even acknowledging it, even when it’s happening to someone close to us. Yet, in a bizarre, backwards way, death is the light by which the shadow of all of life’s meaning is measured. Without death, everything would feel inconsequential, all experience arbitrary, all metrics and values suddenly zero.
^ Okay, this is the longest quote. And I don’t know what else I could tell you. But I think I can relate with the last sentence. Life is worth it, is meaningful, because we have limitation. Our life.
With our limited time, we choose. And just like you knew from Chapter 8, what we chose, what we reject, determine our value. If we have all the time in world. We wouldn’t have to choose, and because we don’t have to choose, we become a yes man, who doesn’t have any value.
Actually, I don’t know whether I’m afraid of death or not. Of course, I think what will happen if I’m dead, quite often TBH. “Will people be sad?”, “Will they remember me?”, “What will their lives be without me?”, “Will I be missed?”, etc. But, the thought of death itself never occurs to me. Maybe that’s why I’m not afraid of death.
And actually, I don’t think I have big regret. My regrets is something like, “I wish I could have met him/her sooner.”. I don’t think I have a big, sad, meaningful regret :p
A lot of people, they seem to regret things, many things in their life. And this is just my thoughts, maybe they are afraid of death because they haven’t set things right? I dunno. It’s just a wild guess.
People are so hard at letting things go. Yeah, well me too sometimes. Like, “I wish I could’ve done better on that test.” ← sudden realization after comparing answers with friends. Just me? No? Too shallow for you guys? Hahahaha.
Well, I don’t think I can give you advice at letting go and moving on. You just have to slowly accept the fact, without falling in to the feedback loop from hell. Do not try to deny it, because it will trigger the backward law.
Something Beyond Our Selves
There’s a book, made by a person who changed jobs four times in six years (yes, he got fired, multiple times), and before he could get fired from the fifth, he got colon cancer :<
He spend the next few years bedridden, and while doing so, he wrote a book. The Denial of Death. This book won the Pulitzer Prize and is one of the most influential intellectual works of the 20th century.
This book has 2 points, which are.
The first point. Because we can think abstractly and are able to conceptualize, we are, at some point become aware of death. We are the only animal capable of imagining a reality without ourselves in it.
Look at dogs, cats. They are not even able to feel miserable because of their looks. And look at us. That’s one of our biggest insecurities, because we don’t look good. Dogs and cats don’t have to worry if they don’t have a career. But, we are. Dogs and cats don’t have to worry if they are single for the rest of their lives. But we are. Yeah, we are such miserable creatures, but that’s what makes us human.
The second point. The physical self is the one that’s doing all the physical activities. Duh. Eating, sleeping, take a bath, pooping, working, etc. The conceptual self, is our identity, how we see ourselves.
We, are aware our physical self will die at some point. And to compensate this, we, the conceptual self try to construct a scenario, a thing, that will make us live forever. For examples, name on buildings, graveyard, statue, pictures, etc. We long to be remembered and revered and idolized long after the demise of our physical self. This effort are called immortality projects.
And what we fear is that our immortality projects will cease to exist one day. Why are we afraid? Because this immortality projects is basically our values. And when our values fail, so do we, it means we don’t have any meaning.
But, Becker realize that immortality projects are not the solution, rather they are the problem. We need an antidote, “the bitter antidote”, to be able to come into terms with death as best as we can.
Once we’ve come into terms with our own death, we can then choose our values more freely, unrestrained by the illogical quest for immortality, and freed from dangerous dogmatic views.
The Sunny Side of Death
The Stoics of ancient Greece and Rome implored people to keep death in mind at all times, in order to appreciate life more and remain humble in the face of its adversities. In various form of Buddhism, the practice of meditation is often taught as means of preparing oneself for death while still remaining alive.
Confronting reality of our mortality is important. It obliterates the thoughts of how crappy and miserable our lives are. The guy with colon cancer, BTW his name is Becker, told us that we are supposed to live while asking what will our legacy be?
Note to readers: I don’t understand this part well, but I will still try to convey it to you guys. Bear with me.
We are afraid that we will live and then die leaving no legacy. We try to avoid this question, “What our legacy will be?”. Whereas, that is the most important thing because death is the only thing we know with certainty. It should be the compass of how we live.
To be able to be comfortable with death, we should be able to choose our values with death as our base. And basically we’re going back to good values, the basic root of all happiness, which surprisingly, is taught anywhere. Because the good value is caring about something greater than yourself, believing that we are a contributing component in some much larger entity.
But, we are bombarded with the same message everyday. To be great, to achieve more and more and more. Our culture today confuses great attention and great success, assuming them to be the same thing. But they are not.
We are great. Not because we have great career, great life, nor all of the superficial things. We are great, because in the face of certain death, and also with the confusion of our daily lives we still live. We are choosing what should we give a fuck about, we still value our lives. And that’s what makes us great.
Sounds too cliche, but that’s the honest truth. Nothing less and nothing more.
Well that’s it folks. That’s the end of this book. Hope you can understand what this chapter is about. If you’re not, then I accept that I am to blame and at fault and responsible. Because I still think I can’t relate that much with this chapter.
I think I’m gonna write an overall review about this book, but who knows. Don’t expect it that much :p
See you at another series. When I’ve found another good book that is worth writing and sharing :)
