As I’ve tried to make clear, when we strip away the delusions of our own personal immortality project, much of what’s left in this world that continues to provide meaning are our relationships with others. What about that highest form of human connection though? How does death affect our ability to love? This isn’t an easy question, as I’m not sure I really understand love that well, but when I think of love in Thanatism, I see it as a web anchored between two sets of opposites.
The first set of opposites the web of Thanatist love connects is acceptance and honesty. On the side of acceptance, Thanatist love isn’t controlling. It doesn’t define what a person must be and then attempt to mold every human being into that predefined vision of humanity. Just the opposite in fact. As I’ve said before, as Thanatists, we deeply understand that each of us has been thrown into a being not of our own choosing. Because of this, we have a deep and abiding respect for the uniqueness of each of us.
Further rooting Thanatist love in acceptance is that foundational to Thanatism is a moment of choice. When we first fully realize and accept our own mortality, we experience a moment of rebirth. In this foundational moment, and throughout life, as we learn to bring forth the power of death daily, we have a profound ability and responsibility to choose ourselves. This choice is sacred and deeply individual, and as such due the utmost respect.
Having said that, Thanatism is equally a faith of radical honesty. Our foundational belief revolves around the destruction of self-delusion and the power of honest self-reflection. Because of this, Thanatist love is deeply committed to speaking the truth regardless of the consequences. Thanatist love does not accept others unconditionally, rather it challenges others to become their truer selves.
This creates a relational tension born of love that’s difficult to navigate. On one hand, we don’t want to control or possess the other person. We respect their uniqueness and right to choose their life. On the other hand, we also know the keen ability that each of us possesses to deceive ourselves, so we also have an obligation to honestly and fearlessly help those we love see their own resistances. Navigating these two poles while simultaneously guarding against our own tendencies towards control and self-deception make this first tension in Thanatist love no easy task.
The second set of tensions the web of Thanatist love anchors itself between is that of change and commitment. As I said above, as Thanatists we understand that who we currently are is not the only person we can be. Every day presents an opportunity for self-discovery and reinvention. Because of that, Thanatist love understands that people are a continuum of change throughout their lives, and as such, it to some degree encourages regular self-transformation.
On the other hand, we also understand how important it is to know another and to be fully known. We understand that no one will ever truly know the person we are without having lived through most of our lives with us. In a real sense, we understand that once the relationships of our pasts are severed, the person who we once were, has already died. Those who have known us longest, no matter how flawed, are the only candidates for lifelong knowing. This makes those relationships uniquely precious and worthy of preservation in spite of the challenges they bring. In other words, Thanatist love values commitment as much as it respects change.
As Thanatists, others matter more than anything else in this world, and as such, so does love. Love is never easy though. For Thanatists, it requires living in a delicate web, one that binds together acceptance with honesty and change to commitment. Spanning such extremes of existence will always require constant vigilance and a great deal of compassion to withstand the vicissitudes of life. If maintained, however, each of us has the profound opportunity to build with another that most wondrous of all human patterns–the one we call love.
Life presents us with no shortage of opportunities for fear–small things (If I don’t catch that bus I’ll be late for work), typical things (I would be mortified if I asked her out and she said no), and major things (I can’t believe I just lost my job). In general, fear itself isn’t a bad thing. It’s a warning signal from our possibility calculator that an action may have painful consequences. Having said that, we’ve become so comfortable in our modern society that our fear inhibits us from living our fullest lives.
In particular, we tend to let fear prevent us from connecting with each other. Do you remember your first love? I do. She was a beautiful girl of ten. Her dark brown bangs were cut straight across her forehead. I think she often dressed like a boy in slacks with a little polo to match (it was the 80s after all). She had brown eyes to match her brown hair and a perfect button nose. Most importantly, she was just like me. She was smart and shy. She was kind and insecure. She liked me, but at the time I didn’t believe it was true.
For the next several years I did whatever I could to impress her, but I could never bring myself to tell her how much I cared. My heart physically ached for even just a glimpse of her more than it’s ever ached since. Then she moved away. She came back once for one of those awkward jr. high dances. I was pursuing another girl by then, and I was still too shy to talk to her anyway. Toward the end of the dance, though, a mutual friend of ours told me that she wanted to dance with me. I didn’t know what to think as we slowly circled, hands on shoulders and waists, as far away from each other as our arms would allow. I think I was trying to be aloof and cool. When the dance ended, we barely said goodbye. I never saw her again.
I still think about her sometimes. I’ve even tried hunting her down on the Internet. None of that matters now though. Our time together is gone. If only I could be that awkward thirteen-year-old boy again, I would wrap my arms around her and hold her close. I would tell her that I’d loved her since I knew what love feels like. I’d tell her that she was the most beautiful, smartest, kindest person I’d ever known and that there was no one else on the planet who understood my thirteen-year-old me like she did.
The point being, as humans, we face moments like this daily, where if we could just fear a little less, we could live so much more. Once again, I can’t tell you that by accepting your own death, you’ll suddenly lose your inhibitions; I can say however, that it certainly helps. There are numerous reasons for this.
For one, when you’ve accepted that you’re going to die, the simple, daily fears of life recede into the background. They’re just not that scary when compared to your own eventual non-being. Death also sets a backstop. Often when confronted with a scary situation, I ask myself, what’s the worst that could happen? The answer is usually that I could die. Having already accepted this inevitability though, and seeing that the likelihood of my action resulting in death is quite low, it makes me unafraid to move forward.
Additionally, much of the fear we experience when considering interactions with others revolves around protecting ourselves. We’re afraid of what the other person will think of us for exposing how we feel. When we replace our core need for self-preservation with that of our own eventual non-being, we free ourselves from our need to constantly protect that which we’ve already given up. In losing ourselves, we gain the ability to simply speak what we feel from our core. Finally, as I’ve expressed before, by accepting our own deaths, not just casually, but purposefully and daily, we develop the habit of courage. When we fixate on the negative possibilities of our actions, we fail to consider the absolute assurance that inaction will lead to a life less lived. Thanatism, by forcing us to daily and purposefully look into the void of our own non-existence, helps open up the space to see that all hurt is but temporary, but that a life unlived is irredeemable.
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.
In relationships, particularly long-standing ones, we tend to fall into patterns of communication with each other. Some of these patterns are playful and part of what helps us bring joy to each other. Often, however, we get stuck in negative rituals of communication that become the source of great pain. These patterns repeat themselves because they are based on deeply rooted psychological traits in ourselves and equally ingrained views we hold of our partners. Unless we learn to overcome both our own traits and our conceptions of other people, we are doomed to repeat the same arguments again and again.
My wife and I have experienced a negative pattern like this to varying degrees throughout our relationship. As may not come as a huge surprise for someone who has the audacity to write a new faith, I consider myself a pretty thoughtful person. My thinking doesn’t just dwell on how death might affect our personhood; however, but also encompasses the mundanities of life. There is no aspect of my life too small, be it my toothbrush, the pen I write with, or the toilet paper with which I wipe my ass that I won’t spend countless hours researching the alternatives on to determine the best fit for me and mine.
As you can imagine, my finely tuned considerations about the details of life aren’t entirely appreciated by my life partner. She, not surprisingly, would occasionally like to make a decision about how our household operates. She’d also like to make said decisions without doing the same obsessive level of due diligence that I might enjoy. She would most certainly like to make such decisions without me glancing askew at her choice should it differ from my deeply considered opinion. To make matters worse, my overbearingness dovetails perfectly with a deeply held insecurity she has of not being heard. As the younger child who had a much more outspoken sister, she grew up feeling like her opinions were never given the weight that they were due. This insecurity followed her into her adult life, and make her particularly sensitive to needing her opinions to be taken seriously.
Together, we’ve worked hard to overcome these character traits and the conflicts they lead to. Although I’m not without the occasional opinion on matters great and small, I’ve changed deeply throughout the years. I’ve learned to better separate opinion from fact. More importantly, I’ve been taught that in spite of my deep respect for the truth, who is right is sometimes more important than what is right. In other words, regardless of how deeply considered an opinion might be, we can’t be a partner with someone if they never get to ultimately make the decisions that define our lives.
My wife, on the other hand, has worked hard to understand that not everyone who expresses an opinion is doing so to negate her own. She’s learned to recognize the voice of fear that leaps into her chest when she feels confronted. She’s learned that sometimes people are just expressing their opinions to participate in a conversation and aren’t trying to control or change her at all.
Recognizing these kinds of habitual behaviors in ourselves isn’t easy and making the necessary changes is even harder, but Thanatism can help. Thanatism helps by undermining the ever-me, so we aren’t so attached to the person we’ve always been. When the ever-me is left unchecked, we identify with it so deeply that we will go to any lengths to defend who we are. We have to defend it, for letting it go is akin to dying for us. As Thanatists, we learn to accept this dying and even to value the loss of what we once were, particularly when that which is born in its place is an evolution of ourselves.
Thanatism also helps us by removing the lenses with which we’ve always viewed the world by breaking us down into our pure essence. As Thanatists, we do this, not only at the moment of our acceptance of our mortality, but daily through the ritual of letting death cleanse of our built-up selves. It helps us step outside of that person and see how we affect others and the world around us. Through this, we can actually see ourselves through the eyes of others.
Finally Thanatism helps us overcome the fears that drive our habitual behavior. Although not being heard may be a legitimate cause of fear, when we compare that fear to our eventual non-existence, it tends to fade away. As a Thanatist, we learn to practice courage as we daily confront our own non-being. There is hardly a fear from our pasts that can match death, and so the courage we develop when confronting it makes quick work of the insecurities that drive conflict in our relationships.
The negative communication patterns that our relationships fall into are some of the greatest destroyers of happiness in our lives. They continue because they are defined by deeply held aspects of our personalities. Thanatism, however, can free us from the ever-me we hold onto so tightly. It helps us see the perspectives of others. It helps us overcome the fears that drive our negative reactions. In so doing, Thanatism can help us undermine negative patterns of communication that left unchecked could destroy the very relationships that we hold most dear, and in the void that remains, we have the opportunity to recreate the love that our habitual interactions have destroyed.
One common and crippling social fantasy that many of us engage in is what I call our “imaginary real friends”. For most of us, our social circle consists of family, classmates, co-workers, and when you get as old as I am, our kids’ friends’ parents. These relationships, often because of our own fears of intimacy, only provide us with a certain level of social satisfaction. We don’t blame ourselves though. Rather, we blame our friends. After all, these people surrounding us are pretty much just average joes we just happened upon in life; whereas, we, captivated by our own immortality project, know ourselves to be so much more.
We accept these relationships for the immediate social sustenance they provide us, but deep down, we know that they are only temporary. In reality, we know that they are just rest stops as we make our way to our “real friends”. These future (or past) real friends are of a much higher caliber than the people who make up our current social circle. They often consist of celebrities, famous politicians, people who we’ve idolized in our past, and other people who really “get” us.
This new group of imaginary real friends will of course materialize at some point because, unlike the average joes who make up our current social circle, we are in no way average. We know that we are actually quite special and once we do whatever magical thing we intend to do in the future that will enable these other special people to see our specialness, they will naturally reach out via email, text, and phone to invite us into their special club, so we can participate in our new secret and all-around spectacular adventures together.
Let me give you Thanatism’s perspective on your current social circle–they are the only people who will ever know you. The fact is, your imaginary real friends don’t exist–not in this world and not in another. If you are particularly young, throughout the rest of your life, you may well equal in new relationships the number of relationships that you’ve already made, but that’s it. Offsetting that will be the loss of the majority of your current relationships that will fall into holiday card and Facebook friends mode. One thing is almost certain–your new friends will likely be the same caliber of people as your existing friends. This is because your new friends, like your old friends, will be human beings.
What is absolutely assured is that your relationships with your new friends will be exactly as fulfilling as your current relationships unless YOU fundamentally change. The fact is, it’s not the caliber of the people who surround us that limits these relationships–it’s us. The people we already know are as capable (god forbid perhaps even more capable) of understanding and relating to us than our imaginary celebrity menagerie. And this is a critical point for authentically relating to the people in our lives today–understanding that they are just as capable and anxious to have deeper and more meaningful relationships as we are.
This is also a good point to meditate briefly on a “death trip”, a practice we’ll discuss further later. Consider the people you have known and who have known you who have faded from your life. They are the only people who will ever know the person you were then. As those relationships fade, so does the you that you once were. That person and those relationships will never come back. Further the people who you already know are almost assuredly the vast majority of the people who will ever know you. To the rest of the world, you simply don’t exist.
Even if you’re a world-historical figure, this is the case. How many people today know Abraham Lincoln? The answer is zero. No one knows that man and no one ever will again. The point being, we, as people, need to stop denigrating our existing relationships with fantasies about our imaginary real friends. We need to focus on the people who surround us today. We need to step down and realize that they are our people and embrace them for who they are. We need to have the humility to accept the shortcomings in those relationships as our own doing and find the courage to open ourselves, so that the brief opportunity we have for authentically relating to each other in this world doesn’t pass us by.
Although Thanatism unites us together in the real human dilemma we all share, I don’t want to minimize the fact that some relationships are hard and in fact cause real injury. Many of us have family members or friends, who because of their own fears or self-centeredness, make the lives of those who love them less fulfilling. One particularly unpleasant device such people use is guilt. Because our lives are in some way threatening to their preferred order of the world, they judge us and make us feel insecure about being who we are. Fortunately Thanatism provides us the tools to better understand and free ourselves from these judgments.
People, particularly people who haven’t come to terms with their mortality, often have hugely elaborate personal worlds they’ve built to obscure what their internal calculators clearly know. Because these worlds serve as defenses against their greatest fear, it’s only natural to expect them to defend these worlds vigorously. Worse, given that most of us develop these protective worlds privately, these worlds will naturally conflict with each other.
Having said that, understanding, although it may help to lessen the impact these judgments have, doesn’t fully free us from them. Fortunately, as Thanatists, we have another spiritual tool at our disposal, and that is understanding that when we die, ultimately we die alone. I don’t say this to minimize the effect that our deaths will have on those who love us. They will no doubt feel a great loss. For us, however, the loss is entirely different. We won’t feel great loss. We won’t feel anything at all. We simply won’t exist. At our death, all of our cares, everything that we’ve built into us, will vaporize instantly. Our death is no one’s but our own. No one, no matter how much they mean to us, will experience it with us. It is the ultimate moment of aloneness–where we and we alone will never be with anyone ever again.
This isn’t a particularly cheery proposition, but it does put limits on the power, particularly the negative power, others can exert on our lives. In some sense, because we know that we will ultimately die alone, we know that we alone are the ultimate judges of our lives. Others may disapprove of who we are, but thank you very much, this is our life and no one else’s in the end. Obviously, this shouldn’t be taken as carte blanche to be a selfish asshole (if for no other reason than such a disposition will lead us to miss out on the deep human need to genuinely relate with other people), but as I said, it does set limits on how much say anyone can have on who we are.
We’ve all felt the crippling effects that other people’s judgments can have or have seen the damage of judgement in the lives of others. There is perhaps no greater destroyer of joy in human relationships than people judging one another. It’s sickening to watch someone who is trapped between wanting to please a loved one and living life as they see fit. As Thanatists, however, we can see judgemental eyes as the blinders of self-centeredness that they are. We know that in the end, no one has a right to judge us but ourselves, and in such knowledge, we can free ourselves from the pain that judgement might otherwise cause.
