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.
As humans we tend to act on what is immediately in front of us. The further out the consequence of an action is, the less we seem to feel it viscerally. This can be seen in the different ways we market credit cards and insurance. Credit cards promise us something now (things and cash) with consequences that only follow later (payments with interest). Because of this, credit cards hardly need to be marketed at all. Now that the industry is saturated, there is competitive marketing, but Homo Sapiens need no convincing to spend money that they don’t currently have.
Insurance on the other hand promises just the opposite. With insurance, you spend money now for protection against calamity in the future. Because of this, there is a massive industry around insurance sales, so much so, that the insurance salesman has become the very archetype of the sales profession. In fact, insurance is such a counter-intuitive proposition for humans that auto and now medical insurance both have to be mandated by law to help us accept this very inhuman way of thinking.
Why we value the present so much more than the future isn’t entirely known, but I suspect there are at least two mechanisms. First, the parts of our brains that focus on immediate rewards are more ancient than the relatively new machinery that can reason out future consequences. This sets up a brain divided. Almost every human being has felt this internal conflict and experienced both the perils of losing this battle between now and later as well as the exultation of making a decision for our long-term benefit in spite of the current sacrifice required to achieve it.
Another less discussed reason, however, that we value immediate rewards more than those in the future is that the future-brain knows that one day, we the thinker, shall no longer be. In this way, the mental machinery that helps us deny this ultimate consequence also atrophies the extraordinarily valuable processes that help us resist superficial urges in order to achieve long-term goals.
Finally, no matter what we currently think we believe about death, we already know that death is coming for us. Our minds may be hard at work keeping us distracted, but somewhere our probability calculator has already done the math. Whether we want to believe it or not, our brains can’t help but know the truth, and by fleeing this reality, our brain taints every living moment with a sense of dread, the cause of which we can’t quite touch.
Addiction, procrastination, and anxiety–these are the hallmarks of a mind unwilling to look into the future. Although I’d love to tell you that, as a Thanatist, you will no longer feel this internal conflict and consistently and effortlessly make sacrifices in the present to facilitate future gain, sadly, even a core belief as powerful as the acceptance of our own mortality can’t free us entirely from one of the core conundrums of human existence. I can say, however, that by accepting death, and developing some of the practices we shall discuss later, you will develop a certain predisposition to think longer term. In doing so, Thanatism cleanses our thoughts of the uneasiness we can’t quite place, and enables us to more easily divert our ancient obsession with the immediate toward that which will ultimately make for a better life.
In the previous post, I explained how one of the great personal advantages of Thanatism is how it provides a solid core upon which to build the rest of our thinking. What makes Thanatism such a great core though? Is it uniquely so, or is it just one of many core beliefs we could have with similar effects? Although this is a work of faith and not epistemology, I think it’s important to discuss these things that make Thanatism uniquely well suited as the core of our thinking.
First, and as discussed earlier, Thanatism makes a fantastic core belief because of its statistical certainty. Very few phenomena have been observed as carefully and for as long as that of death. Throughout and even before history, humans have actively worked to evade death’s grasp, and yet no one has managed to do so.
Though this statistical certainty helps, many statistics have been used to tell untrue stories. The fact is, however, that although we as humans often make honest mistakes, more often than not, we defend untruths, not out of a lack of carefulness or precision, but rather through some moral failing. The most common of these “moral mistakes” is simply that we don’t want to admit we’re wrong.
There is perhaps nothing too meaningless that, having been spoken, we won’t defend until our dying breath. We’ve all felt this. We say something. Someone else challenges what we said. What follows is a tightness in our chests, a shortness of breath, and a firm resolve to defend our statement–with almost no consideration given as to whether or not it’s valid.
Thanatism defends against this moral failing, not because Thanatists are naturally virtuous, but rather because the truth at the core of Thanatism is one of the few truths that eviscerates our ego even more than being wrong. Although admitting that we’re wrong hurts our ego, knowing that we are but a temporal phenomena that shall soon pass without so much as making a ripple in the universe, or this planet, or even really in the lives of our loved ones for any length of time, hurts way more.
This brings us to a related moral mistake–that of “wishful thinking”. Many of the things we believe as humans have nothing to do with how well something conforms to our observations. We humans have an incredible willingness to suspend belief for something we want. How many young men have continued to pursue that special lady in spite of her obvious lack of interest? How many miles have been driven with the check engine light brightly displayed in the hope that it has illuminated in error? How many fortunes have been lost pursuing ventures that have spoken clearly of their impracticability from the start?
Thanatism guards against this wishful thinking simply because its core tenet is so awful. We’ve perhaps all had moments where the sweet release of death seems like something positive, but for the vast majority of humans, for the vast majority of their lives, the prospect of their own, inevitable non-existence is the exact opposite of what they want. Rather, this prospect is terrifying.
A core belief that is both consistent with our day-to-day observations of the world and yet equally destructive of the self–what a perfect foundation for human reason. As such, Thanatism provides us with a core belief that is not only statistically compelling, but one that also guards against the most common moral failings of belief. There may be other core beliefs that share its statistical certainty, but there aren’t many that are so personal. Nothing is quite as intimate as death. It tears at our attempts to self-aggrandize. It makes us turn away in terror like nothing else. As such, although not our favorite belief, in fact, for the very reason that it is our least favorite belief, death and with it Thanatism, serve as a unique core from which to build our lives.
Another powerful result of accepting death is the ability to live with integrity. When we describe someone as “having integrity,” we typically mean someone who’s a “stand-up” kind of person. This usage captures a piece of what I mean by living with integrity, but I’m really using it more in line with the root meaning of “integral” or “integrated”. For us Thanatists, living with integrity is simply about living without contradiction. It’s about getting to be the same us across a broad spectrum of social situations. It’s about letting our day-to-day actions flow naturally from what we believe at the core.
For most of us, our thoughts and actions have to go through a number of filters before we release them publicly. Since we are the immortal stars of our own play, how our audience perceives us is of the utmost importance. As Thanatists however, we know that the preservation of ourselves is a futile endeavor. Not only do we know that at some point in time, entirely not of our choosing, that death will abruptly end our project, we also know that each day, in some way, brings the previous day’s actor to a close. Because of this, we can speak exactly what we see, regardless of how it affects others’ perception of us.
It can hardly be overstated how much mental energy the unconscious filtering of ourselves takes. In fact, many anthropologists believe that the greatest advantage our enormous brains confer is not that of understanding the natural world, nor in the building of sophisticated tools, but rather in our ability to predict the social consequences of our actions and to filter them accordingly.
The brain is a zero-sum instrument, however. It only has so much processing power. When we eliminate a particular processing burden, it naturally transfers that processing energy elsewhere. A great example of this is the theory of “Getting Things Done”. In GTD, we’re encouraged to offload any thoughts of things we need to do onto a piece of software or paper. By doing so, we free the brain power normally used to juggle a list of priorities in our heads for other tasks. In the same way, by removing the brain’s need to filter our thoughts through the lens of self-preservation, we free massive amounts of brain power. It makes living and interacting with others feel effortless.
Not only does Thanatism reduce the pre-filtering load, but it also removes the need to create our positions and thoughts from scratch every time. When we lack the firm foundation of a well-defined core belief, our thinking has no soil to dig its roots into. All our thoughts are loosely connected and free-floating. Having a firm foundation gives our thoughts strength and purpose.
Even better, because Thanatism’s core belief is a product of our normal way of thinking about things, its conclusions about the world don’t feel artificial and defenseless. I was at one time a true believer in Christianity. As such, I enjoyed many of the same benefits of a firm core belief that Thanatism provides. The difference however, is that when I stepped outside of my social enclave of Christianity into what I would have described then as the “secular” world, my foundation crumbled.
My faith demanded that I speak with others frankly about it because a core tenant of that faith was that should others fail to accept it, they were damned. This internal conflict, however, created moments of unimaginable cringe, moments where I was forced to say things that, at some fundamental level, felt wrong. I feel no such pangs with Thanatism though. What now flows from my core does so naturally and without fear because at the core of my being is a courageous acceptance of what is true for all of us, and its fruits bear the same character.
The importance and power of having a core belief that is both defined and objective is hard to fully articulate unless you’ve experienced it. There is no shame. There is no worry. There is no flailing around in an effort to create thoughts ex nihilo. The core belief that we shall one day no longer be serves as a simple yet powerful foundation for our thinking and a litany of beliefs. Acting from a core free of self-interest feels incredibly liberating. Your interests are aligned with that of every human, and the simplicity and integrity of your thoughts, speech, and actions frees you to join the human project fully and without fear.
