someone very important to someone very important to me died this morning.

One of 150,000 people, on average, dead today.

Not dead of anything flashy, mind you — nothing dramatic, nothing particularly unexpected. There was a serious illness. The timing is still shocking. A rarer form of a common cause of death; the black box of time left didn’t seem good, but not this not good. This person died of the vicissitudes of life, of bad timing, of the failure of modern science.

Because, why? Why do we accept death blindly? Why are we still fine with people dying? Why do we consistently send our brightest young things to work on high frequency trading algorithms, on competitive analyses of generic pharmaceuticals’ marketing strategies, on optimizing photo posts of One Thousand Adorable Cats for advertising spend? Why do we incentivize solving for time-wasters rather than solving for death?

Questions much more complex and much more trivial have been solved than the question of “why do we die, literally, what is death about? Why must our bodies break down and living cease?”

We have domesticated the entire planet to our whim. We have supercomputers that fit in our pockets, multiple on your person right now. We make space probes, engineered down to the micron, to send as far as Jupiter. We can make atomic bombs that can kill a great many of us at once.

When I read the message from my person this morning, I was in shock. Stunned, in bed. But this is not my first exposure to the bloodless aftermath of death. The vigilant hope for more time which marks the time before turns more practical, less ambitious. It’s the proverbial “trading in the tap shoes for Microsoft Excel” equivalent of love and loss. Officials are talked to; loved ones notified; arrangements are made. Decisions are decided. It is finished. They are gone.

And a few hours later, another message.

“This is probably the biggest problem facing humans. And everyone is kind of cool with it. As if we couldn’t solve it. If there was a mysterious force going around robbing people of years of productivity and knowledge you would say that thing needs to be stopped.”

This person was too young to go. This person was well-loved with many friends and family. This person had much material, spiritual, intellectual wealth. This person changed the world. This person was special, yet not.

This person was partially responsible for the infrastructure of the internet you’re reading this fucking Medium post on. With this morning’s death, humanity’s lost 40 years of academic research. We’ve lost the only person in the world who knew some of the intricacies of the field. We’ve lost a genius.

Another expert in the field will come up eventually, but in what time? How much human knowledge has evaporated just like that because of the frailty of the human body? How many human minds, defeated, by the fact that sometimes we get unlucky, fall sick, and die? Like Turing? Like Tesla? How many stories like this one partially or never told at all? How many people, less lucky, who die without love, without recognition, who die all alone?

Why do we think this is immutable fact? Why do we not see that death belies our existence? Why don’t we have the technology to do something about it? When bored and in need of wasting time, we idly calculate the degrees of separation between us and others. Erdős. Any given user on Facebook. Kevin Bacon. The fact is, these others are desirable; we want to feel close to them, even if they will always remain strangers.

I’m two degrees of separation from this loss. I’m one degree of separation from my mother’s loss.

We are all ZERO degrees of separation from our own impending death, if we remain complacent and subjugated by this question.

We don’t want to think about it because death is abstract, especially for those of us who are young and “hungry” and bright enough to potentially answer the question, even partially answer the question. We all will die. Right now, though, let’s travel the world, let’s party, let’s #yolofuckingswag.

You imagine dying and you see yourself ripe, past ripe, wrinkly, a stinky mouldering prune person, a piece of fruit dropped and forgotten underneath the counter, swept away by housecleaning. You see your great-grandkids sobbing at your deathbed. You feel the nostalgia of a life well-lived and the satisfaction that you’re finally done, that you can go in peace, that you’ve completed all the things on your list.

Your time is too short to waste like that, imagining the ways you may die fulfilled and happy. You have no idea when it will end for you. People die at 60, at 48, at 17. I’m 22. I know people who have died. I know people my age who are dead. You may have reasonable expectations based on the ways you are privileged. But death will still come when it does, with no stop. No bargaining. No extension. No do-over. Nothing.

The sheer experience of being loved does not save you. Money does not save you. Intelligence does not save you. Higher education does not save you. A strict exercise regimen, avoiding drugs and alcohol, donating your time to charity and mind to science does not save you. Lamentations to a god or gods or God do not save you. At this juncture, nothing can save you.

Maybe we all still die because it is the only thing that is equal and fair in the world. Nothing prevents it; we all will die. And it is equally the most unfair fact of life.

If this resonated with you, please read these grey days, my experimental longform memoir on grief! Let me know how it goes.

I’d appreciate recommending and sharing if you liked it.

1. Please consider donating to my American Foundation for Suicide Prevention fundraising page. We have raised $550 so far! Donations are accepted until the end of 2015 and are fully tax-deductible.
2. If you are looking for suicide (survivor) support, The Samaritans (in NYC, but around the world) are literal lifesavers.
3. If you are looking for social support and badass friends after losing someone too early, I am a host for The Dinner Party — let me know and we can connect you with a table, or you can start one yourself, anywhere.
4. If you want to support pediatric cancer patients whilst getting daydrunk in Manhattan, The Valerie Fund is throwing a Fall Open Bar benefit on Sat 11/21 in NYC. The Valerie Fund took care of my friends referenced in TGD.