I have not yet experienced the lost of a loved one. I was alive during the death of all 4 of my grandparents, but those deaths occurred before I was old enough for them to emotionally affect me. Outside of family, I can only recall a few distant acquaintances whose time has come. I've been to 1, maybe 2, funerals in the last 10 years. Perhaps my lack of experience with the related pain is what gives me a positive outlook on death.
I think a proper understanding of death should lead one to live closer to the edge. Being overly cautious, say by staying indoors because of the possibility of giving or contracting a virus, puts too much value on ephemeral life.1 A life is not worth living at all if it's spent bunkered up in a cave.
All organisms die, but only humans know they will die. I try to use this knowledge when I want to reason myself out of fear. Since death is anyways inevitable, why not risk it at times? Not pointlessly, like by driving without a seat belt. Meaningfully, like by shooting at police.
The most beautiful aspect of death is that it gives meaning to each moment. If we lived in ignorance of our eventual demise then we would not have the constant urgency that summons action. Were it not for the insistent tik-tok of life's clock, we wouldn't know to hold one another tightly when we kiss.
- I guess it's natural for nature to select for this behavior. The Darwinian process doesn't care about whether the life of an organism is fulfilling. [↩]
> guess it's natural for nature to select for this behavior. The Darwinian process doesn't care about whether the life of an organism is fulfilling.
It all happened much too swiftly and too recently to blame it on some kind of "genetic Darwinism" or more generally, on biology. The same genetic stock evidently would have made much better people back in 1914 in a world of men than it does in today's Oldwomenland. Whether it was mostly a lack of beatings, an inevitable explosion of complexity, an excess of welfare, or something entirely else that made this tragic downfall possible I won't claim to know, but at least it does look like the agar accumulated over centuries and consumed by the last three generations in this sad experiment is about to run out if not entirely depleted already, so the cycle does seem to be coming to an end. And in any case, jeans are definetely out.
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