Before we get into how you might convert to Thantatism, I want to first discuss more generally what “conversion” means. First and foremost, conversion is the most magical and powerful thing a human being can experience. Let me repeat that–conversion is the most magical and powerful thing a human being can experience! Although it can happen in a myriad of ways, fundamentally, when a person converts, they replace a long-held core belief with another that is so alien to their previously held core belief, that often instantaneously, it changes how they perceive themselves, others, and their entire world.
Given its power and magic, it may seem somewhat surprising and confusing that it is also one of the rarest human experiences. To understand why conversion is so rare, it helps to understand why most of us believe what we do. First, we don’t choose what we believe. By the time we even understand what a belief is, we’ve already had most of our beliefs laid out for us by our parents and society. Further, unless we encounter another society or something else in the world that fundamentally and radically challenges our originally held beliefs, we’ll never change them.
Additionally, our original beliefs are incredibly powerful. The reason for this, is that these beliefs are so fundamental that they actually affect how we see things. What may appear to be an ordinary act of nature to someone with one set of beliefs, will appear to be nothing short of an act of God to another person with a different set of beliefs. In other words, we don’t understand the world in a vacuum. Rather, we tend to use what we already believe to even understand what we experience, so experience itself is in some ways subservient to those beliefs.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, building a reality that is survivable, nonetheless one that is meaningful and enjoyable, is incredibly hard. Once we achieve this, it’s terrifying to even consider giving up a long-standing and comfortable worldview for one that has yet to be experienced. Worse, since our original beliefs are often shaped by and shared with our families and society, changing a core belief often feels like a betrayal of those people and institutions that define our identity as humans.
Given the difficulty of even seeing the world outside of the frame of our original beliefs and the perceived risks to both ourselves and our community, it’s no surprise how rare conversion is. Unfortunately, Thanatism also has perhaps the greatest barrier to acceptance that any belief can have–namely, we don’t want to believe it. Given how deeply our beliefs are affected by what we want to believe, it’s a miracle that anyone could ever convert to Thanatism.
[Are these two paragraphs too “evangelical”?] Because of Thanatism’s simplicity though, and I hope, perhaps, because of some of the power and benefits I’ve endeavored to convey through these writings, your core beliefs about death may be subtly changing already. There are a myriad of reasons why you might convert to a traditional faith–they offer community, support, and most importantly, the assurance that you matter and that what you build now will have everlasting consequences, but that can’t be why Thantism may be leaking into your life.
Thanatism makes no such promises–just the opposite–it requires us to accept that we are temporary and that ultimately, we are the only ones who care about our personal human project. There is in fact only one reason that anyone would ever convert to Thanatism–because it’s true. If you’re beginning to feel the tug of this truth and if you’re beginning to feel comfortable with living with the tragedy it insists we accept, it may already be too late for you.
At some point soon, you may wake up and realize that you’re no longer the person you used to be. You may find that what you used to care about no longer matters, that your previous fears have vanished, and that you’re seeing yourself, others, and this world with a clarity and consistency that you’ve never felt before. Should that be the case, I want to welcome you to Thanatism, for you are already here.
Before we discuss what it might mean to adopt Thanatism as your personal faith, I think we must first address a key question–why adopt a faith at all? I mean, traditional faiths have had a somewhat mixed record throughout history, and people are leaving them in droves. Perhaps the idea of any faith, even one grounded as firmly in reality as Thanatism, is but a quaint idea from a bygone era.
I’m actually hugely sympathetic to this line of thinking, and I suspect it’s probably the biggest reason someone would decline to join us. The biggest problem I see with this line of thought, however, is that without considering these matters deeply, you’ll end up participating in the default faith of your society. Those of us who have grown up in the increasingly secular societies of the world might challenge this notion, but I would argue that there is actually an incredibly strong, yet seldom discussed faith that has gained a massive foothold in societies both religious and secular. If we were to create a Greek labeling for this faith as I’ve done with Thanatism, I believe we might rightly call it “Ergonism” or in English, “Workism”.
Ergonism tells us that we must find our meaning as humans through our work. It is espoused by parents and governments of all faiths and dispositions and implicitly adopted (or at least attempted) by most all of us. Although there is no doubt that humans derive a great deal of meaning from work, I believe that we’ve developed a culture where we actually invent work that doesn’t really need to be done for the sake of perpetuating the faith of Ergonism. Given how valuable meaning is to us as humans, there is little doubt that this unreflective pursuit of meaningless work has resulted in a great deal of human unhappiness, and as such, might merit some reevaluation.
To begin to understand how Ergonism has developed, I’d like to look briefly at how work has changed throughout history. When we, as humans, lived in the fertile tropics of this world as hunter gatherers, depending on what you classify as work, we worked about 20-40 hours a week. As we settled down into agrarian societies, the resultant population explosion resulted in us working more and in more specialized ways. And during our rapid industrialization and colonization of the world, our population growth and insatiable love of property and material wealth led to near limitless work.
What about the 21st Century though? Populations throughout industrialized economies are actually shrinking. We have conquered and inhabited nearly every habitable place on earth. Advances in technology have radically increased our productivity and in fact increasingly render entire swaths of our economies functional with minimal human effort. In response to this, surely humans have learned to relax and enjoy our newly built technological paradise?
One would think so, but one would be wrong. Most humans work as much now, if not more, than they ever have. The question is why? Although there are no doubt many reasons, I believe one of the most important is that our social and personal values are still determined by our level of productivity. In other words, we’ve worked to create work, so that we may each justify our existence to others and ourselves.
This is Ergonism left unchecked, and although it may or may not be a good faith, I would argue that in general, we haven’t chosen it, but rather have inherited it unthinkingly. And that’s the point. No one is without the core beliefs that act as a faith in their lives. We don’t get the option to be faithless. The only question is whether we’ve ever stepped far enough outside ourselves to recognize our current faith for what it is and to weigh it against the alternatives.
So as you get up this morning, and you ship your children off to be raised by state-funded institutions, while you and your partner go on your separate ways for the majority of your day to accomplish tasks that are ever less relevant to our collective survival, I might ask you to consider what faith drives your life and whether you might want to consider an alternative. I certainly wouldn’t claim that Thanatism will free you from this somewhat inhuman existence, but I will tell you that it will create the spiritual space for you to consider what you’re doing and why. And perhaps in that space, you individually, and perhaps should enough of us look frankly at our own mortality, we collectively, will at least be able to consider our alternatives.
We’ve spent the last few posts learning how Thanatism can help us in our personal lives, but I don’t want to give a false impression–Thanatism can create spiritual problems for us as well as resolve them. The ever-me, although born from the error of self-centeredness, is a sophisticated mental construct. It not only protects us, but also conditions us to think in certain ways. Once we begin to understand and dismantle it, we will naturally experience new conflicts that before were hidden. To get a sense of some of these new conflicts, I’d like to explain how Thanatism can create new difficulties for each of our three temporal modes of existence.
As humans, our pasts can be difficult for us to accept. Because of this, many of us have developed fantasies that help us deal with past failures. The most obvious of these coping mechanisms that Thanatism makes untenable is the idea that we might get to redo our lives in some way. Unfortunately, we as Thanatists understand that life is a one-way street and that we can’t change what has already happened. Learning to accept and even appreciate this fact of life isn’t easy, and as a Thanatist, there is nowhere to hide.
Another favorite belief of the ever-me about the past is “I don’t have any regrets because everything I’ve done has made me who I am today.” The ever-me is never wrong and likes to see its past as an uninterrupted march toward the perfect being that it currently is. Once we discard this fantasy, although we can still appreciate the series of decisions that have made us who we are, we can in no way harbor any fantasies that we haven’t made mistakes. Learning to accept regret is in some ways hugely liberating. It can also, however, be difficult and painful.
Thanatism can also negatively affect the way we think about the present. As a Thanatist, it’s clear that this life is our one opportunity to live and that it is in fact an extremely small moment in time. Because of this, Thanatism tends to produce what I call “hyper-gravity”–that is the urge to maximize every moment. Once again, although it’s important to realize that we have but one life to live, trying to pack every moment with meaning is exhausting. We humans aren’t built for that. We need our downtime. We need to “waste” time. As Thanatists, particularly new ones, our desire to live each moment to its fullest can turn into pathological restlessness where we never allow ourselves to relax, and as Thanatists, we need to guard against this.
Finally, understanding that we have but one life to live can lead to decision paralysis when we try to plan for our future. Once we’ve accepted that decisions have consequences and that poor decisions can lead to real regret, it tends to make us a little more careful about making them. In general, this is a good thing, but we may find ourselves going through a phase where we’re so aware of the consequences of our actions, that we lose our ability to act altogether. As Thanatists, we need to develop the courage to act fully knowing that our actions have radical and often irreversible consequences for our lives.
Obviously, in sum, I believe Thanatism has made me a stronger and better person. I wouldn’t be writing this otherwise. Having said that, as you can see from the above, Thanatism isn’t a panacea. It creates tensions as well as resolving them. The question that you now have to ask yourself is, given what you now know about the good and the bad of Thanatism, is this something that might be right for you?
You don’t have to decide now. We’ll be spending some time looking at how Thanatism can transform our relationships with others as well as society as a whole. However, for those of you who’ve seen enough, and are ready for a new, more certain, and less afraid you, I want to spend the next few posts exploring what conversion means, and specifically, how you can join those of us who have already taken the first step into the darkest contours of the real.
Do you ever feel like you’re in a constant battle with yourself? It’s like you have this vision of yourself and you’re always trying to be that vision, but no matter how hard you try (or don’t try as is often the case), you fail to be the person you expect yourself to be? If you answered yes to this question, the good news is that this means that you’re a human being because we all struggle with these internal conflicts. As such, you shouldn’t be concerned that you have conflicting impulses. The real problem is that most people don’t accept why they experience these different voices.
One of the main reasons we experience these conflicting impulses is because we are bodies whose brains have developed over millions of years. The reason this has led to conflict is that when we add a new function to our brain, the old functions don’t just disappear. This means that if a new mental construct contradicts a more ancient one, we can feel both impulses simultaneously.
This view of a brain divided is anathema to the ever-me. The ever-me likes to see itself as constant, consistent spiritual entity. The ever-me hates that it’s a body. Bodies are subject to change, decay, and ultimately death. This undermines everything the ever-me thinks about itself. It would rather deny our corporality and view these conflicting brain functions as part of a much bigger and much more important cosmic struggle between good and evil, which of course, the ever-me is a major player in.
Traditional faiths, which by and large support and protect the ever-me, provide us with spiritual practices to empower the “good” forces, while diminishing the power of the “evil” forces. Although these mental models and spiritual practices may help us navigate these conflicts, they do so at a cost. Most deleteriously, these models require us to believe that part of who we are as humans is evil, which leads to a great deal of self-loathing and even worse, judgement of others.
In contrast, Thanatism helps us accept our evolutionary brain by teaching us to accept our corporeality. Through Thanatism, we explicitly learn to accept the most frightening consequence of being a body–death. Once we overcome this fear, we can explore openly everything we’ve learned about how our bodies (and in particular our brains) have developed. More specifically, we can learn about and accept the fact that “we” are a juxtaposition of mental impulses that have developed to survive different environments, and as such, will naturally at times be in conflict with each other.
Once these conflicts are reframed as the unavoidable tensions between historically diverse brain functions, we don’t have to see them as a source for self-hate. Even better, by getting into the details, we can develop a more sophisticated model of these competing urges than the binary of “good” versus “evil”. It’s been my experience, that although understanding these conflicts in greater detail doesn’t eliminate them, it does provide the insight to recognize them for what they are, and through this, to better adjudicate between them.
The ever-me doesn’t just wrestle with the acceptance of the fact that our brains, and subsequently, our minds have developed over time. The fact is, our brain chemistry is ever changing, and these changes in who we are manifest themselves not only throughout our lives, but daily. We, as humans, are remarkably moody. We can go from joy, to sadness, to anger in the course of a day. Because the ever-me likes to believe, however, that it’s a consistent spiritual entity, rather than accepting these day-to-day fluctuations in our internal chemical states, it seeks to blame the outside world, and in particular, other people, for these changes.
Once we accept that we are chemical beings, we don’t have to blame others. It’s hard to explain how empowering this acceptance of our vagariousness is. When we’re in a bad mood, we don’t have to pretend it’s other people who are the problem. Mood swings don’t catch us off guard, because, by accepting them, we can recognize them before they cloud our vision. Once accepted, we can anticipate how we’ll react and in doing so, if not lessen the impact of our internal change on those around us, at least warn them of the pending storm.
As humans, we don’t like that we’re bodies. We much prefer the myth of the “ever-me”–that me who is important and eternal. As Thanatists, we develop the practices to accept our corporeal nature and its most tragic consequence. In so doing, we can fully accept what we’ve learned about our brains as a species, and though accepting these truths may not set us fully free, it does allow us to understand these conflicts in greater detail, and in so doing, helps us to better manage them for our long-term happiness.
As humans, we have been given a fantastic gift–that of time travel. Our minds can wander back through our pasts, recounting what has brought us to this current place. We can contemplate the vast expanse of the future and how our actions might change its course. We can also exist in a simple state of being, where we allow what is directly present wash over us.
As Thanatists, we don’t privilege any one of these ways of thinking over another. They all have their purpose, and in fact, Thanatism, though not without creating some difficulties in each of them, overall helps us to be our better selves in all three of these temporal modes. Having said that, in our modern world, we seem to have a particular difficulty with being present. Whereas we seem to have no issues wallowing in the slights of the past or endlessly worrying about what the future may bring, simply sitting and being in the moment can prove elusive.
We tend to lose ourselves in the present. Sometimes we enjoy this, like when we’re fully engaged in an interesting problem and it results in a state of “flow”. The most common of these present states of lostness, however, is what I call “mindlessness”. This is where we flit about our day, doing our daily routine almost unconsciously. We wake up and just start doing without even processing what is happening, and before we know it, our day is done.
I don’t mean to denigrate this mode of present being by calling it “mindless”. We humans need these moments of thoughtless action to get through our days. Having said that, it can be very easy as a human for this mindlessness to become our only mode of present being. And in this case, life can pass us by without us taking the occasional moment to fully experience the now.
I noticed the impoverished nature of this mode of mindlessness most profoundly when I had children. I found myself constantly rushing through our daily routines. Throwing in a little unhelpful futural thinking, my wife and I would always fantasize about the next stage–I can’t wait until they can sleep through the night, I can’t wait until they don’t need a stroller, I can’t wait until they start school. What I realized about losing myself in the mindless routines of raising children, however, was that at sometime in the future, as if I almost never existed with them, I would be saying to myself, “I can’t believe they’re already gone.”
The opposite of “mindlessness” is of course “mindfulness”. This is when we take a moment to stop doing and actually fully participate in the present moment. We’ll discuss later some specific practices where Thanatism can help us spend a few moments just being present with what is before us, but even without these, I think you’ll find that Thanatism, as a belief alone, will occasionally wrench you from your everydayness and help you find the moments to appreciate your life and be more present.
The reason for this is that, as Thanatists, we fully accept that the end, which we are all ineluctably rushing towards, is our own eventual non-existence. There is no post-game, where we get to sit and reflect on the life that we have just led. There is no instant replay, where we get to relive what we missed the first time. Just the opposite in fact–every moment, once passed, is lost to us forever.
So the next time you’re rushing your children off to school or mindlessly driving to work, I encourage you to remember that these moments, the unexceptional moments of your day-to-day routine, are in fact the majority of your life, and that they don’t have to disappear without a trace. If instead, we choose, even during the most mundane times of our lives, to take a moment to consider how short our time as living, breathing, experiencing creatures is, we can almost experience eternity in the space of a breath.
