As an entrepreneur I’ve built a number of companies. One thing I always tell prospective employees and investors is that I can’t ensure the success of the business we’re building, but I can assure them that we will build a place where everyone will be fully empowered to develop and express their individual gifts as they work together toward a common cause. The reason I focus first on building a great team is because no matter what we do in life, a huge part of what ultimately matters is the people we do it with.
In life, most of us tend to underappreciate the people around us. Often we put things and our personal goals before the people we spend our days with. Thanatism obliterates these warped values. Things are nice, but they will die with us. Our personal goals are hugely important, but everything we build will one day be destroyed. Thanatism is ultimately a bleak faith. Nothing we do has any ultimate value. Nothing we do will ultimately survive. These are hard truths to live with. So what’s left? If your most inspired creations last only for the blink of an eye, where is the meaning in life?
I remember reading Rollo May’s Love and Will in the late nineties. I was in my 20s, and struggling with the realization of my own mortality. I’d checked out a number of books on death and dying from the library and was blown away by Love and Will. I’d always listed five thinkers as my biggest influences: Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein. Rollo May was a practicing psychoanalyst who was strongly influenced by exactly those same guys. Reading his book was like having a conversation about death with an older, wiser me. I’d never felt such kinship with an author before.
I don’t remember much of the book, but throughout it he was referring to conversations he had with a patient who was talented, but unable to create. At the very end of the book, after countless years of therapy, when talking about the meaning of life, the patient said, “I guess all that really matters in life is that we do it together.”. If Thanatism has any defined answer to the meaning of life, it is exactly that–being with one another.
After finishing the book, I did something I had never done before. I went to my computer, found out where Rollo May lived, and wrote him an actual physical letter. In it I described how much his book had meant to me. Most importantly, I wrote that I wanted him to know that no matter how his writings were currently perceived, that I understood him. I wanted him to know that there was at least one other person in the world who really got what he was trying to say. I finished my letter with the line, “I just want you to know that there is someone else out there who will carry on this message.”
I got a reply in a few weeks. It was my letter, unopened, with the words “DECEASED” stamped across the front of it. The point being, nothing will ever “get” you more than another human being. There is nothing that will ever understand what it means to be a human besides the other humans whom we meet every day. Being with each other, even just sitting together in quiet understanding, is the only way to know and be known, and that mutual understanding is the closest thing to “meaning” we will ever know.