How Accepting Your Death Will Help You Live a Better Life
“Death is not the opposite of life, but a part of it.” ― Haruki Murakami
It’s not something anyone likes to think about, but just in case you’ve conveniently forgotten: all of us are going to die. Every one of us, whether we have succeeded in our lives or failed in every endeavour, will eventually end up as ashes in the wind, or brittle bones beneath the dirt. The rich and the poor are buried next to each other in the graveyard.
This is a concern that is only brought to the forefront of our minds when we see a tragedy on the news about a plane that has crashed, or a train that has derailed, but in our daily lives, we ignore our inescapable end. Bringing up the topic of death is a taboo in our society. We like to pretend like we’re going to live forever, paying taxes until the universe fades away. But this pretension has the deleterious effect of thinking that our problems are more important than they really are. Acknowledging our inevitable fate shouldn’t make us depressed, it should make us driven to maximize the time that we have left. In the face of death, none of our trivial problems really matter.
The Overestimation of What Matters in Life
Let me illustrate why your problems really don’t matter as much as you think they do. Maybe you’re in thousands of dollars of student debt, behind on your mortgage, just lost your new job, and you’re dealing with relationship issues at the same time. That’s not an uncommon combination of problems. These are all issues that most of us will experience at some point in our lives. For some, these situations seem incredibly calamitous. But that feeling that your problems are a catastrophe is simply based on a perception.
There is a cognitive distortion called catastrophizing, which is believing that something is far worse than it really is. But the key word here is “belief” as opposed to “reality.” Something that appears on the surface to be a catastrophe, can eventually become a gift. For some people, a traumatic event happens to them, and it makes them a stronger and more resilient person. But another person without adequate perspective might have the same thing happen to them, and believe that an irresolvable calamity has occurred.
So what separates these two people? It’s the cognitive ability to put things in perspective.
One day in 1971 a guy named W Mitchell is riding his Honda motorcycle in San Fransisco, enjoying the peacefulness of the drive, when a laundry truck unexpectedly turns in front of him. To avoid the truck he tries to turn, and his bike ends up sliding on its side. The gas cap pops off his bike, and during the impact the fuel was ignited, immersing him in a deadly inferno.
He survived, but he was horribly maimed. The accident left him with severe burns on over 65% of his body. He lost most of his fingers. His face was left terribly disfigured, despite numerous surgeries to graft on new skin.
A little while later he was taking a fun little airplane ride with his friends, when a malfunction caused the airplane to crash. Everyone escaped without injuries, but he was left a paraplegic. That’s on top of his horrible burns.
You would expect any normal, sane person to see this as a calamity, right? Most of us would probably just give up on any hopes, goals, and dreams we previously had. But he didn’t. He wasn’t very successful before his first accident, but afterwards he started his own business.
But here’s what he has to say about your trivial problems:
“If only,” you might say, “If only I weren’t so old. So broke. So saddled by my mortgage. If only I had less pressure in my job. A family that understands me. There’s nothing I can do, Mitchell.” To which I simply say, “Look at me.” My face looks like a badly made leather quilt. It has literally made children chant, “Monster, monster,” as I pass by. I have no fingers. I cannot walk.”
Does that put things in perspective?
What I want, is to be a symbol for you. With my scarred face, my fingerless paws, my wheelchair, and real genuine happiness in my heart, I want to be your mental image of the power of the human mind to transcend circumstances. As I say in my speeches and my book, “It’s not what happens to you, it’s what you do about it.”
Sure, he went through hell, but now he’s an accomplished businessman, environmentalist, author, and public speaker. He’s a millionaire living in luxury in California, who regularly vacations to his second home in Hawaii. The man is a straight-up baller.
The following quote perfectly illustrates the attitude that propelled him to success following his accident.
Before my accidents, there were ten thousands things I could do. I could spend the rest of my life dwelling on the things that I had lost, but instead I chose to focus on the nine thousand I still had left.
It would have been easy to become depressed following his accidents, but he made a decision to focus on what he could do, instead of what he couldn’t. He changed his perspective, and chose to look at what happened not as calamities, but as an opportunity to rebuild himself.
So after reading about W Mitchell, can you really say that you have an honest perspective on your own problems? Can you look yourself in the mirror and say that you have an accurate view of how bad things really are?
The truth is, our perception of having problems is relative. Even the poorest in North America have it better than most people slaving away in sweatshops. You don’t have to survive in the slums of Mumbai, walking miles every day for muddy water. Odds are, you didn’t lose three of your siblings at an early age because you didn’t have access to medical services.
We don’t like to hear about how good we have it, because we don’t like to feel guilty for our luck. None of us chose to be born in an area of the world that affords us opportunity and almost perfect insulation from war, famine, and deadly disease. But that’s still the reality.
So when you put these problems in true perspective, those student loans are not a calamity, they are simply an inconvenience. Losing your job is not a catastrophe, it’s an opportunity to find a better one. Having relationship issues is not a disaster, it’s a common problem that most people on the face of the planet have, and many of them have it worse than you.
So next time you think to complain that your body doesn’t look the way that you want, or someone cut you off in traffic, think of W Mitchell. When you put things in perspective, your “problems” don’t matter as much as you think they do.
The Problem of Perspective
In fact, I’d go as far to say that we lose perspective on how much our existence really matters. We get caught up in all of our everyday concerns on earth, but we never really consider how inconsequential our actions really are.
In the grand scheme of the universe, with the hundreds of billions of galaxies stretched across an unimaginable distance, our existence is incomprehensibly small. In our heads we can barely comprehend how large the Earth really is, never mind the distance to Jupiter, or the distance to the Andromeda galaxy. So let’s try to make sense of just how small we really are.
Distance to Jupiter: 588 million kilometres. While that’s a huge number, it’s still reasonable. If I’ve done my math correctly, we could stack 320 billion six foot tall human beings end to end in order to reach that planet. So if everyone on earth was six feet tall, it would take 46 times the world’s population in order to reach Jupiter. Feel insignificant yet? Just wait.
Distance to Andromeda: 2.537 million light years. Since a light year is 9.86 trillion kilometres, that means the distance to the nearest galaxy is a measly 24,000,000,000,000,000,000 km. The average football field is 109m long, so we would have to stack 220,000,000,000,000,000,000 of them together. That’s 220 quintillion football fields. Or 240 sextillion hamburger patties (a very valid unit of measurement that I only used because I haven’t eaten lunch yet).
The universe itself is 880,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 km across. Which means that to span the breadth of the observable universe, we would need 8.8 octillion hamburger patties.
I’m feeling queasy from doing math with such large numbers of delicious foods. But the point is, the universe is so incomprehensibly large that we can’t even make sense of how small we are in comparison to everything else in space.
In looking at these numbers, one instantly gets a sense of insignificance. Compared to the sheer size of the universe as a whole, and the hundreds of billions of galaxies that exist in space, we are but a speck of dust.
Carl Sagan knew this when he looked at a photo taken of Earth by Voyageur 1 from 6 billion kilometres away. He called our world the “Pale Blue Dot”:
“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
And he goes on to say:
“Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.” — Carl Sagan
But that shouldn’t be a depressing revelation that spins you into a nihilistic spiral that you cannot escape from. Rather, it should be a humbling fact that dissolves your inflated sense self-importance, and frees you from unnecessary concern. After all, if we are but a speck of dust that exists for barely a blink of an eye, what do our problems really affect in the universe? Why should I excessively worry about my car loan, when matter itself will expand to the point where all cars and people no longer exist? Why should I be worried about failure, when the whole structure of society will die with the universe? Why should I be ashamed to be myself, when all of the people judging me will turn into space dust in due time?
When we die, and the universe fades into nothingness, all of the pain, suffering, love, hate, worry, and beauty won’t matter anymore. There will be nothing, as there was in the beginning.
Why Death is the Master Fear
Fear is an evolutionary mechanism meant to keep us alive. Without it, our ancestors quickly would have been picked off by predators. But back in prehistoric times, it was logical to be afraid all the time, because there actually were animals that hunted us on a daily basis.
But now we live in a time when humans have no natural predators, and we sit in our box-like offices, eating out of a box, watching T.V. on a box, and coming home to sleep in another box. Our existence is about as safe as it has been at any time in human evolution. The rates of deaths from medical disease have drastically reduced compared to even a century ago. We have antibiotics to treat infections, antivirals to combat viruses, and doctors that can surgically remove cancerous tumours. In an earlier time, those issues would have almost certainly killed us. I mean shit, the 1918 flu epidemic killed 500 million people, which was a third of the world population at the time [1]. Yes, you read that correctly. A third of the population.
Our existence is unbelievably safe, and yet we are still afraid of dying. I’m still afraid of flying in a plane, even though the chance of it going down in a flaming wreck is about 1 in 11 million.
Why are we afraid of death, despite it being so unlikely to happen on any given day? It’s because evolutionary mechanisms that were meant to keep you alive thousands of years ago are still functioning in largely the same way.
We have an aversion to things that cause us pain, because if an animal didn’t run when he got bit by a predator, he’d probably be dead. If a single bee sting wasn’t painful, then you wouldn’t run away, and the rest of the beehive will swarm your face. If 1500 of them attack you at once, the toxin in their stingers will cause you to promptly die. So feeling pain is essentially a mechanism that exists to prevent outright death, or serious injury that will lead to starvation, and an inability to procreate.
But the fear of death is simply a trick by the unit of heredity, the gene, to allow us to pass on our genetic information to the next generation. What your genes fail to tell you in their inherent instructions is that you’ll die anyway, whether or not you run from the predator. What is not advertised is that even if you live long enough to procreate, and give birth to the next generation of offspring, they will eventually die. In fact, everything and everyone will eventually die. There will be no more rocks. No more plants. And certainly no more asshole predators trying to eat you alive.
So our desire not to die is all but a trick to get us out of bed in the morning, trying to pay the rent, consuming delicious hamburgers, and finding potential partners.
Most of our fears come back to the fact that we haven’t yet accepted that we will die. Any fear, at its core, is a concern for our survival. Or rather, on a deeper level, a concern for gene propagation.
If you’re afraid of rejection from your social group when you give a presentation, that makes sense, because ostracized humans likely wouldn’t survive on their own as hunter-gatherers, and they certainly won’t reproduce. Afraid of spiders? Well that makes sense, because some of those gangly bastards can actually kill you. Terrified that some horrible disease is going to afflict you? That makes sense, because epidemics have killed untold swathes of the human population in the past.
The thing about fear is that it is often based on a logical premise. It has some element of truth to it.
But fear is only logical for someone who has not accepted their death. If you have truly accepted the fact that you’re going to die, would you really be afraid of feeling uncomfortable in front of a class of people who are also going to die? Would you really be afraid of horrible diseases, if you knew that you have a 1 in 3 chance of dying from cardiovascular disease and a 1 in 5 chance of dying from cancer? It’s probably going to happen from one of those two anyways.
That’s not to say that we shouldn’t be afraid. Because if we weren’t afraid of death, we wouldn’t exercise or eat healthy, and our chances of dying from CVD or cancer skyrocket. We should do all that we can to improve the quality of our short time on this earth.
Accepting that you’ve only got a limited amount of time left should make life more precious, rather than driving you to an existential crisis. It should make you more appreciative of this transient gift that you’ve been given, and motivate you not to waste this one chance you have to contribute in some way.
Because while our existence might not objectively have a purpose, we can create a sense of meaning for ourselves. From a subjective perspective, consciousness is the only variable that really matters. If we can improve the conscious experience of others during this brief blink in time, then our existence will mean something.
It’s essentially like we’re all playing a video game, and we’ve only been given a certain amount of time to play. We know that the game will eventually come to an end, so it really doesn’t matter whether or not we win or lose. But if we’re playing the game anyway, why not make it fun, rather than a shitty time? Why not make it the most entertaining gaming experience ever, while it lasts? That feeling we experience while playing is what matters, not necessarily the outcome.
As soon as we accept that the game of life will come to an end, the pressure is relieved from our shoulders to constantly perform. We no longer live in a state of denial, convincing ourselves that this life will last forever. And in this way, we begin to see life as more precious than it seemed before.
We often see death as the antithesis of meaning, this dark and cold spectre that looms over our life. But without it, life could not have existed. We never would have evolved if generations of organisms hadn’t sacrificed themselves for the propagation of our genes. So in this way, death is the eternal partner of life, and we cannot divorce the two.
Even if I had the chance to live forever, I don’t think that I would take it. In the context of infinite time, life would lose its meaning. Death gives life its meaning, in the same way that loss informs us of our love. Always remember that you will die, so that you can truly live.
“The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.” ― Mark Twain
Sources:
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/features/1918-flu-pandemic/index.html
