For creatures at the top of the food chain with no natural predators, humans certainly have a lot to worry about. Oh no! That person blew smoke in my direction! What if little Jimmy doesn’t get in the preschool of our choice? Oh, I hope the internet doesn’t spoil the season finale of my favorite show since I had to work tonight! What was I saying to my boss after my third glass of wine at the work party?!
These kinds of fears may seem almost comically trite, but in no small way, they erode our daily joy. We have greater fears as well. How will I provide for my family if I’m laid off? How am I going to find love as a 40-year-old divorceé? How am I going to make payroll this week? What’s this lump on my neck?
All of these fears are real and they can all cause us real pain should we realize their worst outcomes. Having said that, none of them compare with the fear of knowing that at some point in the future, everything that we are will be taken from us, at a time unknown to us, and without our consent. In this sense, once we’ve accepted death, that ultimate, inevitable object of our greatest fear, all others pale in comparison.
It’s not just that death outstrips these other day-to-day fears either. As a Thanatist, from the fundamental shift in our relationship with death that comes from our initial conversion, as well as from the daily practices that require us to meditate on our eventual end, we develop the habit of looking at what we fear rather than looking away from it. This habit of looking AT rather than AWAY turns anxiety into resolution.
Further, it’s been shown through multiple studies of game theory, that we humans fear the loss of what we have much more than we fear not gaining something we want. This fixation on protecting what we have is tied to the egoistic clinging to our own personal immortality projects. As we’ve learned already, Thanatism teaches us that these projects are already doomed to failure. We will never hold on to what we have or what we are. It will all come to an end some day. Our fear of loss dissolves, as our realization that loss is inevitable grows.
Finally, as Thanatists, we realize that we have but one life to live. We realize that this life won’t be redeemed at a later date, but is in fact, all that we have. Accepting this reality of life, gives us a certain steely resolution to act. We become less likely to make the decision not to decide. Rather, through our habit of looking clearly at that which we fear, we can commit to action more steadfastly.
I’m not saying that as a Thanatist you won’t have worries. You will. I’m not saying you won’t experience fear. You may feel it daily as you meditate on your personal end. What I am saying, however, is that you will develop a certain fearlessness about life. In the exact opposite way that teens YOLO away life because they don’t understand its value, as a Thanatist, you become so keenly aware of life’s value and yet at the same time of its ephemerality, that you can look into the void of that which you fear most, and with the full resoluteness of your being, act as a fully aware and fully committed human being should.
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.
If you are reading this right now, you are reading it as a being that has already been defined. This definition of you comes from many sources. Your family has defined you, not only by assigning you a value (or lack thereof), but they have also told you your first stories about the world and what it means. You have been additionally defined by institutions–educational, religious, legal, and political. They have taught you what it means to be a good citizen. Finally, you have also been defined by the stories told to you through books, music, and videos. These larger cultural references further shape your values and self-conception.
Just as importantly, this you that already exists, in no small way defines how you experience what you think of as reality. If you’ve been brought up in a culture with cheese, you may find it most natural to top almost any dish with it to give your food a little more flavor and texture. If you have not, however, you may find the tendency of others to slather the fermented fats pumped from the teats of animals on top of their food, and lord forbid, to melt it into the consistency of snot, somewhat disconcerting.
Although you didn’t get to choose this definition of you and the lens through which it shapes your reality, this historical you isn’t all bad. These historically defined views of yours, don’t just limit your vision, they also help provide your life with meaning. Whereas for you, the statement that Aaron Judge has once again punished Red Sox pitching may be an entirely meaningless sentence, because of my culture, for me, it may be a source of great joy.
Although these culturally defined lenses provide us with meaning, they also limit what we can see, and in so doing, limit what we can become. The lens of our personhood shapes reality in such a way that we become blind to ideas that don’t make sense to the being we already are. We continue on as the person the contingencies of our past have defined us as without ever getting the space to see those constructs for what they are and to choose whether they are the lenses we wish to see life through.
Death, however, strips us bare. It rips through whatever cultural constructs we define our world with and gives us the eyes of a newborn. It doesn’t show us as our history has defined us, but rather as a raw, conscious being that shall one day be no more. It obliterates the person that we’ve created and reduces us to pure care without definition. The definitions and filters that our culture has taught us are essential about ourselves, can be seen as optional. And although this stripping down of who we are hurts as we lose layers of meaning built up over a lifetime, it also levels the horizon of obstructions, so that we can see what was before hidden.
The New Testament tells us that “Death comes like a thief in the night”. I’d heard that phrase a hundred times before I ever truly felt its terror. Death will come for us when we least expect it and by the time we realize that our time has come, we will already be gone. Having said that, as a Thanatist, I’ve come to realize that life also comes as a thief in the night. It presents us with little unexpected moments of joy like when a ray of sunlight pierces the clouds and illuminates the greenness around us, as well as life altering possibilities that we could have never foreseen.
Our modern culture has become obsessed with building and planning our lives from birth to the grave. We’ve become so adept as humans at controlling our worlds that we see ourselves as the architects of our future. In ancient Greece, at a time when humans were much less in control of the world, they had a much different view of the future. Whereas we see the future as something in front of us, they describe the future as something behind them, like waves crashing against the back of a person looking toward the shore of their past. Life was something that happened to them, not something they controlled.
As I look at the arch of my life, I see much more crashing than architecting. Life often happens to us. This is why the daily cleansing that Thanatism offers is so important. When we give up our own personal immortality project, we free ourselves of this illusion of control. When we clear away that which we have always been, we create the space for life itself to reach in and surprise us. It may seem frightening, but chaos is only chaos if you’re working toward an end. As Thanatists, we realize our end has already been chosen, and as such, we can open ourselves up to the possibilities of life that we couldn’t see because we ourselves were standing in the way.
This is the first truth of Thanatism and our relationship with ourselves–Thanatism gives us the opportunity to see the world outside of the we who has always defined it for us. It reduces the essence of who we are to our very existence. And although this raw, human being that we’re left with can feel almost unimaginably naked, it also creates the space for us to re-evaluate, and it’s this space that’s essential for recreation.
As Thanatists, I’m not suggesting that we abandon the us that we currently are. As I said, our cultures are what provide us with definition and meaning. I am suggesting, however, that every human, once we’ve been defined, could benefit from a fresh look at the world and ourselves outside of that definition that we never chose. In so doing, we can consider if the we that we find ourselves to be, is the we that we want to continue to be for the rest of our lives. We can open ourselves to the life that’s crashing against the doors we’ve built to protect ourselves and consider if we might want to let it in.
I didn’t sleep last night. I didn’t sleep the night before either. That made last night particularly galling because I was still tired from the night before and fully anticipated a fantastic night’s sleep. As a result, I feel sick in my stomach. When my wife woke up and started making noise, I found it annoying. I find everything annoying. Today is not going to be a good day.
What I’m suffering from today, and what I was suffering from the last two nights, is anxiety. It’s something I’ve worked hard in my life to eliminate because I hate feeling this way. We become anxious when we look away from a challenge in our lives, something we don’t want to look at. It’s usually a future event or circumstance, real or imagined, that we fear the consequences of.
Not only is anxiety an unpleasant feeling, it has other consequences as well. Because it’s the result of turning away from that which we fear, we’re less capable of dealing with the very thing that’s making us anxious. Often we bury the object of our fear so deep, we can’t even identify it anymore. We know that on some level, if we were willing to look inside ourselves without fear, we might be able to find the cause of our pain, and if we could bring it forth, we might be better equipped to eliminate it, but it’s so horrible or so intractable in our minds, we’d rather not.
We often don’t stop with just burying our anxiety either and actually begin to create a false narrative to obscure the object of our anxiety even further. We can see this clearly in others who are insecure about themselves. I suspect we’ve all met people who do nothing but talk about how smart or accomplished they are, even though it’s clear they fear that they are in fact just the opposite. Not only don’t their words fool anyone, but additionally these constructs are exhausting, both for them to create and others to listen to.
When the object of our anxiety is an inevitable future event, however, our hiding fails, and so we walk backwards into said event, totally unprepared, and suffer the consequences. The ironic thing of course, is that often the reality we were fleeing from isn’t as bad as the anxiety of turning away from it. We survive, in spite of ourselves, and wonder afterwards why we were so concerned in the first place.
The point is that the anxiety itself was the thing that was robbing us of our happiness. It was the anxiety itself that was making us more likely to fail. And it was the anxiety itself that was causing us to create distorted images of ourselves and reality, which created a whole new set of problems. Anxiety, in other words, is the root of all kinds of human unhappiness, failure, and illness.
We know this about anxiety, and yet we live in a society where over 80 percent of people are going to a better place where they’ll be happy after they die. Over 80 percent of people are looking away from an inevitability, not because it’s improbable, but because it’s terrible, and even those who aren’t part of that 80 percent, tuck away this inevitability deep into the backs of their minds to avoid looking at it or considering it.
Do you think this might cause some sleepless nights? Might we all be walking around with a slight pain in our gut? Is it possible that we are so afraid to look clearly at our ends that we’d rather drown our existence in substances and media? Might we be spending an inordinate amount of time telling ourselves stories that we can’t really believe to soothe this aching fear? Of course we do and we suffer accordingly.
We’ll spend most of our time together discussing how looking clearly at death and fully accepting its consequences will change our lives for the better. I also wanted to remind us, however, that how we’re currently handling death isn’t necessarily something we really want to hold onto. We may in fact find that the reality we currently see as normal–living in a constant and lifelong state of denial–has consequences of its own, and that eliminating these consequences, the sum of which are the permanent human state that we call anxiety, may, in itself, be reason enough to turn toward that which we fear.
Now that we’ve gotten a cursory look at how and why we deny death, I want to turn our focus to how embracing our mortality can serve as a tool for personal transformation. As I’ve written before, Thanatism isn’t a philosophy or scientific study, it’s a faith. Like all faiths, it serves as a way to transform us personally and, should enough of us embrace the new life it offers, society as a whole.
How does this work though? How does Thanatism transform us? Well, as humans, we have a tendency to get stuck. We get stuck in our beliefs, our thoughts, and our habits. We don’t really plan on this, but as we go about our lives, we begin to fall into certain patterns that, left unchecked, can put us into a perpetual groundhog day of mundanity. Worse, sometimes, we get stuck into beliefs, thoughts, or habits that are destructive both to us and those around us.
Traditional faiths help us get unstuck by proposing an otherworldly entity (usually a God or gods) who we focus on through prayer, song, and ritual. By focussing on this other entity, our habitual thoughts about ourselves get disrupted and momentarily replaced by the thoughts and ideals of that other entity. This focus on that which is entirely other than ourselves wrenches us from our day-to-day thinking and creates the space for reevaluation and recreation.
Obviously death in Thanatism works a bit differently. We don’t worship death. Death doesn’t have a set of rules that it asks us to live by. Death will not supernaturally intervene in this world to transform events in our favor. Although death fails in these regards, it does serve admirably well to wrench us from our day-to-day thinking in order to help us refocus on what is of ultimate importance to us.
That’s what I mean by death serving as an existential tool. Accepting our mortality, and not just intellectually, but actively and spiritually, disrupts our stale and staid thought processes. It strips us down to our essential being. It throws our attention back onto ourselves and the realities of our world, and it asks us to remember what we really care about.
And although death doesn’t have a book of right and wrong, it does have some specific things to say about who we are as humans–namely it demands that we accept ourselves as we really are as opposed to our idealized selves we often get lost in. By doing so, it not only helps us shift from our habitual ways of thinking into something new, but also exposes some truths about us that can help us become our better selves.
Several years ago, a good friend of mine died from brain cancer. It was the first time I had to deal with the death of someone I was close to who was the same age as I am. At that time, I wouldn’t say I was a Thanatist, but at the same time I felt strongly about the dignity of accepting death for what it is. I really wanted to help my friend accept his own death, so he could end his existence as a fully aware human. Going through the experience of his dying proved just how personal death is though.
His decline was precipitous. One day he was just complaining about some fuzziness in his vision, the next thing I knew he was scheduled to go in for a biopsy. A few days before his biopsy, he and I were at a birthday party for his one-year-old son. It was pandemonium as all kids’ birthdays are, so I convinced him (against his protests) and another friend of ours (who required no persuasion) to escape and go out for a drink.
We found a nice bar nearby that was sunny and bright. I think we were drinking tequila on the rocks. We just kind of sat together at the bar looking out onto the beautiful sunny afternoon. We didn’t talk about his appointment. We didn’t talk much at all. Mostly we just sat and existed together. I think we were all feeling the weight of the moment in our own way, but that didn’t need to be said. Just being together felt right.
The next time I saw him was in the hospital after his biopsy. We were alone together in the hospital room, and the tone was much changed. The biopsy had a hugely deleterious effect on him. He was unsteady on his legs. He was weak. He looked like a broken, older man. He was also terrified.
I told him that I thought a lot about death and dying and that if he wanted someone to talk to I was there. I think he barely heard me though and certainly didn’t understand what I was saying. He kept talking about how he didn’t want his kids to see him so sick. He talked about another friend who was looking into alternative treatments. He talked about how he had to beat this thing.
It was clear even then that he wasn’t going to beat anything though. He was dying. The last thing that he wanted at that moment, however, was to “get real” with death. Just the opposite. He was running hard from what was becoming increasingly obvious. What he wanted was full-on denial. It was clear that the terror he was feeling, which would seem to be a clear realization of what was happening, made him all the less willing to confront its reality. What was even clearer was that it was his choice and there was no way I was going to do anything that made it any realer for him. It seemed like he was experiencing about all the real he could handle.
I saw him a couple of times after that, but his condition was declining rapidly enough that I never felt like I was really with him during those times. I don’t know how his attitude toward his condition evolved as he got closer to death. I don’t know how he felt. I don’t know to what degree he concentrated on how his death would affect his family or whether he thought about himself. I don’t know if he thought he was going to a better place or if he believed this was the end. Before I knew it, he was already gone.
His funeral was a beautiful affair. He was loved by a lot of people and given that he was the first of any of our friends to die, it was well attended. After the service, there was a huge dinner on the rooftop of a nearby club. The crowd was filled with some family, but many more friends–people he knew in the city, friends from business school, and friends from college.
At one point people began to get up to the microphone to talk about their relationship with him. It was really nice. His wife and his sister spoke about how they would miss him and what a great father and family member he was. His fraternity brothers busted on him just like they did when they knew him back in college. His family and friends obviously loved him a great deal.
Throughout that portion of the dinner though, I felt a tension that I couldn’t fully understand. Part of me wanted to get up and say something, but there was an even bigger part of me that definitely didn’t. There was something about the festivities that was making me angry. I felt like something was being left unsaid. It wasn’t until close to the end of the dinner that I realized what was missing and what I wanted to say.
There had been many people talking about the tragedy of my friend’s death. They talked about the tragedy for his wife. They talked about the tragedy of his two young children growing up without a father. They talked about the tragedy for his parents, who were devastated. The one thing they didn’t talk about though, and the thing that I realized I wanted to say, was that in spite of how horrible his death was for his friends and family, the real tragedy was for him. He was the one who would never know his children. He was the one who had spent thirty-five years building up a person, only to have it all taken away from him in his prime. He was the one who would never experience anything ever again.
And that’s what I mean when I say that death is personal. You can be surrounded by friends and family, but the only one who ends at your death is you. This helps us understand another aspect of our denial of death. It’s not so much that we deny death. We can talk about death as it relates to an anonymous soldier. We can understand the death even of a loved one. What we can’t fully comprehend though, what really drives us to our knees, is our death.
