Dale Carnegie, in his seminal work, How to Make Friends and Influence People, discusses how it would be easier to meet new people if we only knew what they were thinking about. Fortunately, he tells us, we actually do know what other people are thinking about, for other people are thinking about the exact same thing that we’re thinking about–themselves.
This is the key to understanding humans–we’re always thinking about ourselves. No matter how smart or how dumb we might be, we are all experts in this one domain. Our expertise in this realm is vast too. We’re not only the sole authorities on larger topics like our beliefs and ambitions, we also spend a nearly inconceivable amount of mental energy on such riveting topics as, what do I want to eat this morning, what does my stool say about me, and why am I so tired right now?
This is one of the things that makes death so tragic for us. What we would quickly find out were we able to find out anything after death, is that even for those who have risen to public prominence, no one else cares about these topics of utmost importance to us quite like we do. Once we pass, we may get a day where friends and family come together to think about us. We may get a toast at holidays. We may even become the subject of a popular book or movie. Nonetheless, the days of any human spending even a fraction of their mental energy concerned about that crick in our neck, are gone forever.
Not only are we fantastic scholars of us, we are also unflinching advocates for ourselves. We are always at the ready to articulate how stupid other drivers are when compared with our own expertise behind the wheel. Nary a moment goes by while washing the dishes, that we don’t pause mentally to admire the way we so logically organize the dish rack. It’s hard to even imagine how others survive without our keen sense of how stupid the shit coming out of their mouths sounds.
Others are also wholly incapable of appreciating how hard we work and how selflessly we toil for the good of others. Worse, those we are closest to find it nigh impossible to understand how our thoughtless actions that cause them immense pain are actually fully justified under the circumstances, if they could only see things from our proper and just perspective. These all are the perfect machinations of the ego, and death, particularly the take on death we practice as Thanatists, has the uncanny ability to destroy this machinery at its lowest levels.
The faiths of old tended to prop up our egos not only with claims that our day-to-day concerns about our own well-being are of keen interest to the creator of a universe with billions of galaxies, each with billions of solar systems, many with planets situated in just about the same way that has enabled our own planet to generate billions of people just like us, but also, that that same creator desperately wants a relationship with us and upon supplication will gladly alter the otherwise intractable workings of this universe in our favor. Thanatism, on the other hand, teaches us that death doesn’t care about us at all.
In fact, death has some entirely other things to say about us. It tells us that everything we care about and everything that we are will soon be obliterated from this universe forever. Not only will we and our actions soon cease to exist, but any memory or thought another human being may have had about us, even those who are closest to us, our friends and our kin, will be wiped out in a matter of a few generations and mostly forgotten the moment we stop our daily advocation for ourselves.
In destroying our fantasies of immortality and self-importance, death gives us the opportunity to see that there is a world beyond us, full of billions of people whose lives are just as important as our own, and whose well-being will be impacted now and after we no longer exist by what we choose to do now. This moment of respite that death gives us from our incessant plotting about our own immediate material well-being and our strident justification of our own nearly spastic words and actions creates a space where we can actually pause and notice just how much our self-serving thoughts and actions themselves sow the seeds of everything we hate about ourselves, others, and the world we share.
I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that this kind of reflection on the lack of importance our daily concerns have for the other 8 billion inhabitants of the world and how destructive our myopic focus on our personal immortality project might be, is a perspective each of us could stand to spend a little more time meditating on. It’s a perspective that will help us better understand ourselves, open us up to our own failings, and is another way that embracing the teachings of death can make us into better people.