Life can be full of petty annoyances. You know that coworker who always turns down the temperature on the AC, freezing everyone else in the office? Or the driver, who insists on driving just a mile or two slower than your cruise control is set at? How about the spouse who refuses to clean up as you see fit? Although we can usually get over any one of these disagreements, if they continue throughout the day, they can in sum, ruin our mental attitude. Worse, if they are continued over the years, they can lead to real resentment and conflict in our most important relationships.
Thanatism can actually be a powerful tool to help us notice and overcome these conflicts before they destroy our happiness or our relationships with others. The first way it does this is by destroying the ego. When we still believe we are the immortal stars of this universe’s show, we tend to conflate our personal story (and our personal preferences) with truth. This can transform the thought that a particular person simply has their cruise control set at a different speed than we do into one where the other driver is almost morally deficient for not synchronizing their driving tempo with our own.
Another way that Thanatism helps us avoid these conflicts is by reminding us of our own and other’s contingent nature. When we’ve accepted our corporality and the historicity of our thoughts and beliefs that goes along with it, we can easily see how our biology (hot-bloodedness) or our upbringing (in the great white north) might affect which temperature we’re comfortable at. Once accepted, what temperature the AC should be set at becomes a matter of negotiating preferences, rather than a battle between right and wrong.
Another way that the acceptance of our bodies helps us better understand these conflicts, is by helping us understand how our minds are a product of evolution. As beings whose very propagation depends on our ability to mate, it’s easy to see how all of us are programmed to control our environments, even at the expense of others. In a pack or tribe, there can be only one alpha, and being the one in control clearly provides a reproductive advantage. Knowing this, it should hardly surprise us that we often find ourselves in conflict with others regarding matters of preference both large and small.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, when we strip away our personal immortality project and the meaning it provides, what we see more clearly in the vacuum that remains, is that others, those we are so often in conflict with, nonetheless are also our greatest remaining source of meaning. When we consider how important and how fragile these relationships are and how unimportant and illusory our own egotistical desires are, we naturally see how much more important being together is than controlling every detail of our environment.
Eliminating these petty conflicts may seem like a small gain in our relationships with others. I would argue, however, that these seemingly insignificant conflicts do more to rob our day-to-day existence of joy than almost any other thing. Not only that, but it is exactly our weariness of compromising (or not compromising) in these small daily conflicts that leads us to lose interest, and dare I say love, for those closest to us.
So the next time you feel that sense of disgust at how your spouse eats her food, or the videos he chooses to watch, just remember that she, just like you, has a unique history that has brought her to this place, and that he will be the only other who will ever know you. In so doing, perhaps you’ll find the fortitude to reach out and find a compromise–again and again–until the love that you have lost has been found again.