Hey there,

In the last issue, I talked about my (non-)lonely experience of going to the cinema alone. Today's piece is going to be about the movie I watched that day. Or rather, the movie's core theme: death.

Hooray!

Honestly, even long before the movie, the thought of death had been lingering in my mind like spiders in a basement: sneaky and, upon discovery, scary. But the thing is, I find it impossible to think too little about death. Most of the time, we're merely thinking about it in the wrong way. Funnily enough, the more I engage with my own mortality, the more bearable it gets. Sometimes, believe it or not, it's even uplifting.

So, let's have a relaxed conversation about death.

(Note: This is a long piece, about seven to eight minutes of reading time. But if you are a finite human being, which I hope you are, I'm confident it'll be time well spent.)

How to think more about death

The first time I actually realized I was going to die was at age sixteen, during a family holiday in central California. One morning, I woke up, looked in the bathroom mirror, and realized that slight wrinkles had formed on my forehead. They looked like the fine cracks on the dry Californian soil I had walked the day before.

Wrinkles? That's something for old people, I thought. You know, people who age, people who are at the mercy of time and cells. People who die. But me? Wrinkles?

Get outta here.

I quickly tried to exile the thought of death by watching Shark Week on the Discovery Channel. But it was too late. Suddenly, death and decay were all around me. The teeth-clenching sharks on the screen. The patties on the burgers served in the restaurant next door. My brother sitting beside me on the couch, me, finite beings –

OH GOD...

***

Today, I surprisingly often forget about the fact that I – just like every human I know – must die one day. I think that's the default mode for most people. And it's probably better this way. If we truly grasped that we could leave life at any given instance, the world as we know it would cease to function because – well, WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE! When you really start thinking about what this means, the ensuing existential dread should cause a fair share of panic. Or indifference. Or both.

I like how Oliver Burkeman puts it in his book The Antidote:

But despite this (or rather because of it), we all seem to have implicitly decided that life is worth living anyway. On most days, I agree. Life is much like coffee, wine, or dark chocolate: it's quite enjoyable once you develop an acquired taste for it.

One of the best parts about life? It offers us this concept we call ✨possibilities✨. (If you're feeling particularly adventurous, you might also call it dreams, goals, or visions.)

"But what's so great about possibilities?" I hear you ask. "Isn't the best part about life that it's pleasurable? What about drugs, sex, and rock 'n' roll?"

Fair point. But the great thing about possibilities is that they allow us to envision a better future – heck, they enable us to see the future in the first place. Thanks to possibilities, we can not just enjoy something but also look forward to enjoying that thing again. What's more, possibilities keep us curious about life's multifarious ice cream flavors. Conversely, when we're not feeling particularly jolly, we can use possibilities to realize that life needn't stay gloomy forever. If there's a panacea to life's challenges, it's possibilities.

The only problem with possibilities is that they transform death into something terrifying. Death is the thief of possibilities. (Of course, some people even use the possibility of life after death to eliminate their fear of death. If that's you, you probably stopped reading by now. After all, death loses much of its terror when it provides even more possibilities.)

Assuming, though, that death kills our state of consciousness forever, there's a genuine reason to fear death: we and everyone else will be robbed of our possibilities.

The ultimate question is, how legitimate is this fear? And perhaps more importantly, how can we deal with it?

***

Let's go through a few reasons why we shouldn't fear death.

1. Death is nothing to us

The ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus argues that the fear of death is irrational because it's literally "nothing to us."

See, fearing death is unlike other fears in that we won't be there to experience the consequences of that fear. I might fear terrible pain. I might fear losing loved ones and the grief that ensues. I might fear torture. But fearing my own death doesn't really make sense because I won't be there to experience the misery or bliss of my non-existence, of my death.

Here's how Epicurus puts it:

I think the fact that his argument survived roughly 2,300 years speaks for itself.

2. Blissful unconsciousness

"People who are averse to death," writes the contemporary philosopher Thomas Nagel, "are not usually averse to unconsciousness."

In other words, the thought of death seems far more terrifying than the thought of fainting, falling asleep, or being hypnotized.

But why?

Sure, we might say that we don't fear unconscious states as much as death because we sort of know how it works. We got used to it, got the hang of it.

But still. It's worth stressing what an enormous leap of faith it is to go to bed every night, knowing that we'll be unconscious. We have no idea where our mind is going during this time. We don't even know if we'll wake up the next morning!

"Sleep is just death being shy," as one of my favorite videos on the internet puts it. So, could it be that we practice small doses of death every single night? If we accept that sleep and death are subjectively indistinguishable states of unconsciousness, we'll have died tens of thousands of little deaths until we actually leave life.

In this sense, death isn't as mysterious as we might think. We're preparing for it daily and, until it arrives, we'll be well-equipped for the task. Just like giving presentations for small crowds reduces the fear of a TedTalk, sleep can reduce the fear of death.

3. Postponed funerals

Here's a short list of a few fun things we won't get to experience in our lifetimes:

• Visiting the finished time pyramid in Wemding, Germany. It'll be completed 1160 years from now, in 3183.
• Walking through the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone without radiation hazards. It won't be safe until the year 22,000.
• Marveling at supernovas of stars like Betelgeuse that'll be visible from Earth in bright daylight. The explosion is still 100,000 years away.

(For more things we'll miss, I recommend this video titled "What Will We Miss?")

Of course, we have genuine reasons to believe that the human species will have gone extinct until these events occur. But that's beside the point. The point is that we generally yearn to experience the future. More future is better than less future.

If someone asked you if you wanted to live an extra twenty years without hidden side effects, there's a good chance you'd say "Yes." And intuitively, I also would. But that's a knee-jerk reaction, just like I would immediately say "Yes" to a mountain of candy (and perhaps regret it afterward).

On second thought, the idea of an extended lifetime is just another attempt at denying death. In fact, you could repeat the question infinitely, and – since more future is better than less future – you'd never really know when to stop.

So, is there such a thing as an ideal lifetime for humans?

Two centuries ago, the average life expectancy was 40 years. One hundred years later, it increased to 60. Today, it's at 80 in many countries. But at what point can you genuinely say you've lived enough?

The point remains: no matter how long life would get, it will always feel too short. And that's the beauty of it! The impermanence of life and all it entails is the very thing that makes everything we do meaningful.

It adds passion. It adds urgency. It adds life.

Why fear death when it's the prerequisite for a meaningful life?

***

There's a crucial distinction we need to make here. Just because fearing death is irrational doesn't mean death is a good thing. No – since death is a possibility-denier and possibilities are something nice, death is like an annoying bully: inherently mean and worst encountered in childhood.

But again, this doesn't mean we need to fear it.

And yet, if you're anything like me, you might have noticed a problem. Namely: rationality can't always cure fear. For instance, I might rationally know that spiders at my latitude aren't harmful. But this knowledge doesn't eliminate my emotional panic when I stumble upon these hairy, eight-legged spawns of the devil. Similarly, knowing that fearing death is illogical doesn't automatically eliminate my fear of it.

The real antidote, I suppose, is exposure therapy. That is, engaging with our mortality rather than running away from it. Sure, this might not eliminate all the funky dread of death, just as I won't fall in love with spiders after observing them for hours. But at the very least, it might help us accept that death is real – and that we should design life accordingly.

This brings us finally back to the movie I watched.

***

The name of the film was Tótem. It's about this 30-something Mexican painter and father who is terminally ill. Throughout the movie, we get to watch his very last birthday party and how his loved ones deal with this strange brew of grief and celebration. That's it. The entire plot of the movie plays out on this one special day. The final birthday.

In one of the most poignant scenes, the painter's daughter piggybacks on her mom to perform a lip-synced opera piece. Occasionally, the camera cuts back to the painter, who watches from the couch, sponging it all in. He never breaks eye contact with his daughter. He's completely present.

Of course, I couldn't help but wonder what my birthday party would look like, knowing it would be my last. Part of me thinks that I would simply resign, throw my hands in the air, and tell everyone that none of it matters anyway. But watching this scene reminded me that nihilism is just as irrational as fearing death. If nothing matters, the fact that nothing matters also doesn't matter. It's quite the opposite, then: the more transient our experience, the more it matters. That's why the last time of doing something often feels the most meaningful.

Walking home from the cinema among dark streetlights, I felt a strong punch of mono no aware – the Japanese emotion that describes the beauty of things passing. I zipped up my jacket, pulled the hood over my head, and felt warm tears running down my cheeks.

It wasn't until a few minutes later that I realized they weren't tears of sorrow. Nor tears of joy. They were something in between. Something bittersweet. "If sleep is death being shy," I thought, "waking up is life being bold. Death may rob us of possibilities, but life preaches opportunities. What is death, then, if not the ultimate reminder to live?"

I cherished every step of my walk home.

Until next time,

Stephan

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