Letting Go of the Need to Live Forever
I grew up in rural England singing, very sweetly, Christian hymns in primary school. It was a carefree childhood filled with happiness, nature and friends. The culture and education system were steeped in Christianity. But my family were different. We also believed in a spiritual view of the world, but of a much more eclectic sort. At the time, I didn’t think too hard about it, but I was absorbing a Christian view of eternal life — a perfect peace and tranquility forever, in a city of gold with gates of pearl. At home, I was drinking deeply from more esoteric ideas about auras, tarot cards, energy, and mysterious unseen worlds. From what I learned both at home and in the wider world I came to believe wholeheartedly that I wasn’t material. I was more. I had a spirit. A soul. And that part of me would live on, forever.
The notion of Christian heaven seems paradoxical to me. Endless happiness in the clouds? It sounds so bland. So derelict of excitement, interest or growth. The struggle we encounter beforehand is what makes small successes joyous. The only reason laying down in bed is so delicious is that you’ve been on your feet all day. I don’t wish for such an unchallenging, peaceful existence. Eternal life in heaven obviously captures the imagination of many people. To be honest, though, I feel like they haven’t really thought through how boring it would be.
Our family were members of the Emin, a spiritual group founded in London in the 1970s. Emin members believe in a non-materialistic view of the world, in which human beings are connected to and influenced by an unseen world of energy. I grew up surrounded by and completely absorbed by the Emin and its beliefs.
Eternal life as defined in the Emin sounded like a lot more fun than the Christian one. In the Emin, we believed in having astral and mental bodies that could travel outside the physical body. These bodies were part of a whole vast unseen world that contained fairies, elementals, and vast energetic forces that could be connected to and channelled through hands, crystals and minds to heal and inspire. We believed we could develop spiritually so that after death, we could go on to higher realms or perhaps to reincarnate. I was earnest in developing myself. I practiced to try to project myself, to astral travel. I believed in it sincerely. But it wasn’t to last. Expanding my circle of friends outside the Emin started to challenge these beliefs. Gentle questions from new friends in my 30s began to open small cracks, which quickly deepened. Honest self-reflection and questioning made holes in my little bucket of faith, and gradually, it all drained away.
In the years since then, I have proven to myself beyond any doubt that fantasies of eternal life are untrue. That there is no spirit or soul to survive our death. There are, however, lots of reasons for us to dream of eternal life. To wish that it were true. These wishes and dreams are just wishes and dreams. Warm air in our minds. A balm against grief and against fear.
Discoveries
Three things came to constitute proof for me that life after death is not possible: evolution, physics, and the illusory self.
Evolution
Learning about evolution, really understanding it, was a major turning point for me. It changed everything.
I remember being in the car and listening to an audiobook by Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species. The simple insight that he had, realising characteristics were inherited through natural selection, was such a spark of genius.
“This preservation of favourable variations and the rejection of injurious variations, I call Natural Selection.”
- Charles Darwin
Following this, I listened to Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene. Dawkins’ brilliant book fills in the scientific observations and experiments that have followed to cement Darwin’s insight into our understanding of nature. The discovery of genes. The piecing together of the vast family tree of species. Huge scientific effort to find and establish the links and history of our own ancestry. Painstaking work has traced our history back through time to simple primates, mammals, reptiles, worms and ultimately to single cells.
When I fully understood this concept. Accepted it. Thought critically about it. It started a chain of events at the end of which all immaterial beliefs were unpicked. Faith in life after death evaporated under the blowlamp of this knowledge.
Why does understanding evolution preclude the idea of a spirit that can live on after death? Well, evolution shows that we evolved over millions of years from simple prototypes of life. From little single-celled organisms to more complex creatures and eventually to us humans. I do not believe that a single-celled organism has a spirit. That the trillions of them that lived and died went to single-celled heaven, or now haunt the living cells as ghosts. That their souls reincarnated into wiser little future cells. It’s preposterous.
And I believe that a direct, unbroken line of evolution leads from those simple life forms to us.
When I think of it in this way, the whole notion of spirits, heaven, and reincarnation appears to be a confection of human storytelling.
Evolution most strongly tells me the truth that when I die, I will be no more. The only living remains I will leave are in the echoes of my genes that continue in my children, cousins and extended family.
Physics
There’s another simple proof too: atoms. We are made of them. Just like all other matter in the universe. Break down our bodies, and you’ll find a lot of Oxygen & Hydrogen atoms (water), a fair amount of Carbon, some Nitrogen and a little Calcium. A few other assorted atoms too. What won’t you find? Spirit. Soul. Or any other kind of woo. Granted, this atomic structure is pretty complex, but it is built out of very simple little pieces. When we die, the water will be turned back into vapour and drift into the sky, and the carbon fall to ashes and return to the earth, enriched with all the other assorted atoms you carried around while you lived.
If there is a spirit, where is it? No one can show it to you, for the very simple reason that it does not exist.
The Illusory Self
Another thing that came to help relieve me of my beliefs was an understanding of how we perceive ourselves.
Our ‘self’ishness.
We think about ourselves as though we were almost like a soul—an animator or driver of our body—steering from our pilot’s seat in the head. This is a naturally evolved way of thinking, and it's useful, too.
We think of the self as the director of our thoughts. It’s in charge of deciding what to do next and consciously planning and executing our lives. The self has free will and can choose any path that may be in front of us. Thinking of our selves as independent entities allows us to reason about why we do things. To blame ourselves for doing something we shouldn’t have. To reason about other people. Understand social situations. Navigate the world.
The truth is, though, that this perception of ‘self’ is just a useful fiction. There is no soul, no animator, no self. It’s just a way of thinking that helps us get by in the world.
I learned about this from a set of exercises recommended by Sam Harris and Richard Lang. These meditative exercises are designed to help you see first-hand that the idea of a self is illusory. They try to help you directly experience the world without the duality we normally feel — of ourselves and the world as separate. I was able to get a glimmer of this direct experience and to feel, briefly, that I am not in here looking out at the world. That I am not what I see in the mirror. To just experience the world without the need to be an outsider. To feel that the world is just unfolding like a flower from a bud, and witness the unfolding.
I’ve come to think that our religious beliefs about life after death stem from the need to conceive of the self as separate from our bodies and brains. Challenging this basic assumption by experiencing a kind of selflessness also helped to unseat the foundations of this belief for me. If there is no self, what would it be that lived eternally?
These three facts landed deeply in me: evolution, our wholly material existence, and our imperfect self-understanding. They have become fundamental underpinnings of my view of the world.
Letting Go
It’s one thing to logically know that you can’t live forever. That you are an animal, a material and physical creature. You can know it. But can you feel it? After a lifetime of belief?
Buddhism
When I left the Emin, I looked for alternative faiths. For a while, Buddhism really felt right for me. I studied and practised meditation and loved the philosophy and focus on presence.
I could never be a Buddhist. It is a religion just as filled with junk superstition and woo as all the others I have encountered. I love some parts of Buddhism though — meditation practice and some of their beautiful ideas.
I enjoyed meditation and found it helped to ground and deepen my thoughts. When I felt frustrated, it helped me to respond calmly. When I was anxious, it helped me to settle down and be more at peace.
I recited every day the beautiful speech blessing mantra, asking for my speech to become ‘soft, gentle and truthful’.
I loved the ideas about generosity and the precision with which they thought about how it works. They taught perfecting the art of giving without attachment and causing the most benefit to the recipient without their feeling any debt.
Buddhists practice being present now, and not letting yourself drift in thoughts of the past or the future. From Buddhism, I learned that happiness doesn’t accumulate like snow in a drift. You can’t put it in the bank. It won’t compound. It’s a fleeting state that either exists in this moment or does not. You can’t guarantee happiness in the future, nor can you change the happiness you had in the past.
happiness doesn’t accumulate like snow in a drift
An eternity of life, were it possible, could not build more or less contentment than we could have in the present moment. So why wish to live forever?
Epicurus
On my recent travels, I read a wonderful book about Epicurus, which covered how he thought about life after death.
From Epicurus I learned that eternal life, as well as being impossible, is also undesirable.
Epicurus was an incredible philosopher from ancient Greece (341 BCE). He based his ideas on a simple assumption: that all creatures on earth try to maximise pleasure and avoid pain and suffering. He also followed a materialistic view of the world. He believed nature worked without the intercession of gods, based on the movement of atoms. Based on this simple assumption, he built a philosophical and practical way of living, which proved very popular. He established a school and these schools carried on for many hundreds of years.
Epicurus laid out a philosophical framework of needs:
- Essential needs, like food, water, friendship and community. Needs that we cannot live without
- Extravagant needs, like a luxury meal, a holiday or a view of the sea. Nice things which we can enjoy when they come, so long as they do not threaten the availability of the Essential needs.
- Corrosive needs, like the need for more money, more power, more sex, more drugs. These needs have no bottom, and are consumptive, often causing a person to risk their Essential needs and leading to harm to themselves and others.
I find this simple breakdown of life so lovely. So simple. So perfect.
His recommendation was to focus on satisfying your essential needs and to build a life that has a richness of friendship as its highest aim. He saw extravagant needs as nice to have so long as we don’t obsess over them. Corrosive needs were to be avoided completely.
Many aspects of life, such as food, can be on a spectrum of needs. Food is essential in its barest aspect. It’s extravagant when we spend a week's wages on a meal. It’s corrosive when we overeat to the point of self-harm and obesity.
In Epicurean terms, the desire to live also falls on this spectrum. Tomorrow can be thought of as an Extravagant desire. We would welcome it and enjoy it if it comes, but it’s not Essential. All our tomorrows are extravagances. It tips into the corrosive to obsess over these extravagances at the expense of necessary things like the simple needs of food, shelter and warmth. For example, there are tech-billionaires out there right now investing in companies to solve the ‘problem’ of death. Pouring resources that could feed the essential needs of their communities into the selfish and corrosive desire to live forever. I have to admit that I was having similar thoughts not too long ago. But those dreams don’t carry so much weight with me any more.
There is nothing to fear in death, according to the Epicureans. Once we are dead, we will not feel any pain, regret, or suffer at all in any way. It will be just like it was before we were born. An absence of us altogether. This makes a lot of logical sense to me, even if it does not land emotionally or rid me of my actual fears.
The last 15 years or so have been a story of unpicking the threads one by one of the beliefs I held in the Emin. The spiritual, moral and philosophical framework that I grew up with and lived by.
My recent discovery of Epicurus has been wonderful. I think that the Greeks had it right all that time ago. We, and all other creatures, run a very simple algorithm: we avoid pain and suffering and try to maximise pleasure and joy. They assert that our bodies give us these signals, guiding us to the behaviours that help us live well and succeed. Beyond those basic internal drivers, Epicurus makes only the simplest further logical moves to build a set of ethics:
Firstly, to avoid suffering and seek pleasure for our friends and local community.
This brings in our natural empathy in order to understand and try to accomodate others in the same way as we look after ourselves.
Secondly, to avoid suffering and seek pleasure for ourselves in the future.
This means balancing things that might be enjoyable in the moment with the suffering that might bring down the line. You can almost think of your future self like a friend, and think of how your actions might affect them.
These simple ideas are easy to reason about and have found a home in the way I think and live.
Accepting that we will all die, being at peace with that, and focusing on the basics — good friends, a home, food and family. This simple philosophy feels like such a good way to live.
Dying Well
As I get older, I realise that living indefinitely wouldn’t necessarily be great. My body starts to give me pain that seems like an inevitable part of aging. My senses will dull someday. My mind won’t be as sharp.
Once, I dreamed of ‘uploading’ and living forever in a digital world. The more I understand my own mind, though, and see what happens to others who have few limits on indulging themselves, the more I think this would not be a good idea. I no longer relish the idea of living in a virtual world when my body gives out. I think it would be very difficult to live a psychologically healthy life without the constraints of the real world. I’m becoming more comfortable with the idea of dying when my time comes. I don’t want to be a brain in a jar hoarding infinite wealth through compound interest forever and ever. What would be the point?
I’d like to die cheaply. Don’t spend good money and time trying to prolong the life of an old man. Use that money to improve the lives of my beautiful boys. My friends. The local community I live in here in Sydney.
If I get the chance to say goodbye to my boys and to my partner in my last days, I’ll be happy. But if that doesn’t turn out to be possible they’ll know I love them and how I would have liked to say goodbye (with a hug and a kiss!).
I hope I get to leave them a little bit of money. Maybe a house. Something for the family to inherit and help them along.
I do not know, and cannot know, when my time will be up. In the meantime, I’ll take pleasure in the moments of peace and happiness with friends along the way.
Written whilst visiting Melbourne for the Comedy Festival in April 2024, hanging about the central business district of the city and reading Living for Pleasure, An Epicurean Guide to Life by Emily Austin.
Images were generated by ChatGPT.
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