Illusions That Make Us Dread Death

In the usual course of events, children and teenagers contemplate the big questions of life, determine they have no good answers, and get on with the mundane business of living. This most definitely includes death. We will all die, there's nothing we can do about this inevitability, so wisdom suggests there is little benefit to fretting over what you cannot change. Of course we can and do put considerable effort into extending our lives and improving their quality by way of exercise, diet, and medicines, to name a few. But we know we will fail in the end.

I feel a bit self-conscious writing a post on this subject. I was a teenager a long time ago -- why dig into the inevitable again? Didn't I grow up? And yet while well-adjusted people don't spend much effort on the inevitability of death, some people may recognize that there is inside of us a slow small feeling of dread when our thoughts pass that way. One way I heard it phrased was that no matter how perfect our life might be at any given time, the worm in the heart of the apple remains -- we will die.

I think the dread is fed by some illusions. I'm hoping that by finding them and considering them, I can tame a bit of my own dread when it surfaces, and if it helps any others, so much the better.

1. Whatever vestige of a person remains after death has no existence over the course of time.

If you are buried in a graveyard in the usual fashion, your corpse lies in the silence and darkness, several feet underground. It's tempting to think of that corpse as being "you" -- where else would you be? When scientists perform sensory deprivation experiments, the subjects ultimately feel very distressed. So the idea that you are lying in a box underground, getting no information from the world outside, which continues without you, even for days and weeks (let alone millenia or eternity) sounds like torture, and so it would be. But a corpse looks and feels completely bereft of life. It is not a person. People who know they will be cremated may be protected somewhat from this illusion since cremation so clearly creates something that has no resemblance to living flesh.

I have spent very little time with corpses, but my sense is that concepts like "brain death" may have good scientific backing, but there is a much more certain and unmistakable change. There comes a point when the heart stops beating, blood stops circulating, and all of the tissues in the body die. Not long after, the smallest child can plainly see that this is no longer a human being. It is a collection of dead tissue -- as inert as mud or stone. That is what gets buried, not a person.

But even if you don't think of yourself as located in a grave, you are tempted to think of yourself as located somewhere. Perhaps you can't say exactly where. It might be in some other dimension of reality. But a critical question, I think, is whether you conceive of time passing. Time passing while any vestige of "you" is in this state would be a form of torture. For some comfort in contradicting that idea, you can consider how things were in the millenia before you were born. Were you bored? No, you didn't exist. And the key concept to resist this illusion of existing over time is to truly get that you cease to exist. As living beings we typically do wonder about what the future will bring in the course of years or even centuries. People who think in grander terms may think about the sun turning into a red giant or in some other way making life on earth completely impossible, or go on to think about entropy creating a cold fog of dust after billions of years. But as those events unfold, there will be no "you" tucked away somewhere as it happens. You won't exist, and your nonexistence lacks every vestige of a temporal dimension.

2. Frustration about not knowing the future does not live on after death.

In our ordinary lives, sometimes the movie ends in the middle, or we lose the book or the magazine, and we want to know how it turned out. We may carry a nagging frustration with us, perhaps for years. We may more generally wonder, "What's going to happen to everyone and everything after I die?" This is entirely appropriate, and we can in advance feel frustrated knowing we will not know how it turns out. But this frustration at not knowing is also extinguished at death. There is no entity left to wonder about any such thing.

3. Struggling against death may be all-consuming, but once death comes things are totally different.

Evolution has programmed us, in all ways and at all levels, to live as long as possible. Heights, snakes, and fearsome predators terrify us because they might kill us. Using our human cognitive skills we also put effort into planning months or years in advance so we have food and do not freeze to death or die of thirst. We devise defenses against others, whether animals or fellow humans, who would do us harm. Yet as our bodies actually do get to the point of giving out, our heart beats frantically fast in its last efforts if it can't do its job properly. We gasp desperately when we can't get enough air. In its last acts, the body is screaming that there is severe danger, something to be avoided in any way possible, and when it finally does stop working and die, its message is that we have met the ultimate failure.

You might think that we humans with our cognitive skills could arrange for suicide reliably, but a great many methods are highly uncertain, as the other layers of our biology call forth every trick they know to survive. We will vomit up poisons. When our air supply is cut off, we will by reflex thrash violently in an effort to breathe again, enough to thwart many suicide attempts by that means. You may bleed from a deep cut, but your body tends to limit the loss of blood enough to survive. The prospect of jumping from a high place or throwing yourself in front of a moving vehicle both awaken the deepest instincts of self-preservation. 

And while the body's deeply rooted, desperate attempts to stay alive tell us something horrible is at hand, we can use our human cognition to get past that. The dying is quite possibly painful and distressing, but we knew it was inevitable, and the passing of the pain and distress is equally inevitable. There is no longer anyone to be distressed. They do not go to some better (or worse) place, and they do not hang around as a ghost. They may appear in some form to the living, usually in the form of memories. Occasionally they appear as hallucinataions, but this is entirely a phenomenon of the mind of the living. The dead person is not there. There is no dead person. The comforting thought that the dead person has achieved eternal rest is equally wrong -- there is no vestige of a person who exists in time. Non-existence precludes any concept of "rest".

4. Coming at it from a different angle

Years ago a friend sent me a quote along the lines of, "How strange and unusual life is -- how totally unlike anything else!" What's humorous is that "conscious life" is in its own category, and there is nothing that could possibly be like life. When contemplating that, I feel no particular unease. But then I can consider one of the excluded states that is not like conscious life -- and that is death. I suppose if I had any intuitive sense of an afterlife, I might have questioned the original -- maybe an afterlife, where we are assumed to be conscious and aware of our continuity with a former living being, is sort of like life. But lacking any such intuitive sense, "death" as an excluded state can be contemplated peacefully.

5. Summary

Thinking of ourselves as having any location after death is unhelpful. One vital element to the non-existence of death is the absence of any form of duration or passage of time. A day after death, the non-existent dead "person" is exactly the same non-thing that it will be in a billion years. A non-thing without any trace of existence in time.

Our longing to know the future beyond our death dies with us.

The body's deep-rooted and desperate attempts to put off death as long as possible, and the pain and distress that often arises as parts of its final failure, is naturally something we fear and that is simply "bad". But the final state of non-existence, which we humans can grasp with our big brains, is totally different. It is not pain, failure, or decay. It is simply nonexistence.

Of course I'm not saying I've solved the problem. I suspect death will still feel just plain wrong to many or most of us, from the depths of our souls, and that most definitel includes me. But perhaps some of the dread can be set aside.

And my readers may well ask why I never grew up, or why I have regressed to consider big questions that have no good answers. Sorry. When I look inside, that's one of the things I see.

Daughter Music: Two In a Garden

 

I was never the greatest dad, when my girls were young, in saying that everything they did was terrific just because I was their dad and they were my kids, independent of the actual merits. I wasn't terrible at it, but I wasn't great either. My mother felt feedback should be honest (so sometimes negative) from quite a young age, so I had to break with a family pattern to do it at all.

But now with Becky having passed age 34, such concerns are all gone. She and her friend Nicole self-produced an album in the fall of 2021 called 'Two In a Garden". At first I wasn't particularly taken with it, but at some point early this year I really got into it and now like it a lot. I asked for a description of the genre, and there was no simple, single label. I think it was roughly "a capella quirky folk-trad-song".

She said none of the songs are original compositions, but they did their own arranging and harmonizing. In earlier music experience, she had several sessions with Village Harmony, including trips to Georgia, Ukraine, and South Africa. In college she was a driving force behind making Chaverim into a group focused on international music (https://www.sccs.swarthmore.edu/org/chaverim/). She has become an active presence today in the Sacred Harp community. Her day job now is as a writer/editor/manager for Devoted Health (https://www.devoted.com/).

This is Becky and Nicole's Bandcamp page: https://beckyandnicole.bandcamp.com/

I think Becky said you can listen to 3 or 4 tracks for free before they want you to pay. And if you did, these are my recommendations:

https://beckyandnicole.bandcamp.com/track/the-old-churchyard

https://beckyandnicole.bandcamp.com/track/witch-hazel

https://beckyandnicole.bandcamp.com/track/fields-of-wonder

https://beckyandnicole.bandcamp.com/track/give-me-wings-been-in-the-storm-i-will-meet-you-in-the-city

Turning pages, and getting back to the home position

Also, as a bonus paragraph, a few more linguistic quirks of aging. I know when typing I used to look down every time I returned my hands to the home position. I thought the little bumps on the "f" and "j" that help you determine this by feel were curiosities that I didn't feel the need for. Now, I can't imagine doing without them! It's hard to remember the sort of mental energy and focus that made looking down and back up so trivial

Another quirk has to do with page-turning. Naturally we've all had the problem of turning the page in a book but being unsure if you managed to get two pages instead of just one. Until recent years, I could easily resolve this by feel. But more and more lately, my solution to this problem is to look at the page number I am turning from and the page number that shows up after my tentative page flip. If it is one or two higher, I'm fine. If it is three or four, I'm not so fine. This would have seemed ridiculous to me before the age of 50, I believe. It's handiest when I am pretty sure I've only turned one page, since if it was two I have to separate them anyway.

My father, sex, and natural childbirth

My father taught a course at the University of New Hampshire from roughly 1960 to 1980 called "Human Reproductive Biology". He found in 1960 that students at UNH were woefully uninformed on this subject. Times being what they were, this was a controversial step. Sex should be taught in the home, not as an elective at the university! His connection with the subject was that he was a professor in the zoology department who did research in endocrinology (with frogs mostly, I believe). The course met a science distribution requirement, for the first several years. As you can imagine, this was a very popular course! (I like to think my father's teaching was appealing as well as the subject matter.) At its peak, his lectures were shown by closed-circuit TV in a total of three lecture halls, and he had roughly 2,000 students enrolled. Apparently it also came to include "drugs", meaning recreational drugs, which was another subject of immediate practical interest to students.

My father was a self-effacing man who sought to avoid conflict, but this was an area where he was willing to take some heat. Later a woman was charged with indecent exposure for walking naked through town (with, I believe, a plastic replica of a penis worn as a pendant). Against the advice of legal counsel, he volunteered to testify that in the course of walking, a woman was not exposing any sex organs. Why she was doing this is something that eluded me then, as it does now.

Anyway, the reason for bringing this up has to do with natural childbirth. At some point a group of female students encouraged my father to show a film on natural childbirth, and it showed a woman showing considerable distress while in labor. He declined to include it in the course, saying that he thought if women had to see that they'd never have children! This was probably a common view for its time.

I have the modern view, in most respects. Women should be fully informed about natural childbirth and other options, and choose for themselves what they want. No opinion of mine should influence what any woman decides to do. However, if I imagine myself as a woman planning for labor, I would not be inclined to choose that option. Without intervention, labor is extremely painful. Why would one choose to go through that? Many causes of death involve increasing pain towards the end. Are there people who choose to forego painkillers because they want it to be natural? I suppose there are a few somewhere, but I doubt they are anywhere near as common as those who choose natural childbirth.

I can see that being awake during the event, as opposed to the general anesthesia that I believe was common at one time, would definitely have an appeal. But I believe that all methods where you stay awake do involve a considerable amount of discomfort anyway. Does someone really need the whole nine yards? It's not for me to say, but that's my take on the issue.

Pictures on the Wall Reconsidered

When decorating a home, it is customary to put things on the walls. Large expanses of bare wall are unusual. Visitors will note the blank space as a peculiarity.

For the past year and a half I have lived in an apartment with a rather eccentric and demanding landlord, who asserts that any screw holes or nail holes must be patched up perfectly to avoid a charge against the security deposit. My solution has been to just leave the walls bare. For the five years before that, I lived in a converted attic with slanting walls which do not allow putting up pictures in the usual manner. I elected to leave the very few suitable vertical wall spaces bare as well. Although external factors led me to this situation, I find I like this arrangement.

I am of the opinion that thoughts should be guided from within. We should choose what to think about. Of course this is usually originates with our senses. Whether we use old-style books or magazines, or look at screens, we usually start with words and images to guide our thoughts. (The battle over advertising's imperative to impose their own agenda on our minds is the topic for a different day.) In the internet era it is more and more possible to actively choose. A TV channel was much more passive. The only options were to look for a new channel or turn it off. Even there, the TV screen was constantly changing, showing us new things. Today, clicking different places on a screen in sequence can lead to a stunning variety of different destinations.

Pictures on the wall never change. When we look at them they interrupt anything else we were thinking about and our perceptions of them take a place in our minds. Is there really anything that we want to endow with that power? Is even a picture of a beloved deceased parent really helpful? Perhaps you do want to remember them, but do you want your memories to be guided by looking at that particular patch of wall at that particular time? Most pictures do not tie us to something of such powerful emotional significance. Why should we think about that particular thing (yet once more) when we were in the midst of a train of thought we recently chose to start in on? The mind wanders plenty as it is, but do we really want to give another nudge to the wandering? We may feel we get so used to what's on the wall that we don't really register it any more. But more of our thoughts are governed by automatic processing than we are aware of. And if we really don't see it, there's surely no strong reason for it to be there.

Then there are visitors. What a first-time visitor sees when looking at our walls gives them an impression of us. But does a series of pictures, however carefully chosen, really convey what we want to convey? If we follow the standard rule that walls should be covered with things, then they can judge us compared to the other things we might have chosen to cover our walls with. But perhaps we would do better to escape that paradigm entirely, and with mind uninterrupted by anything on the walls, hope they listen more carefully to what we say, or think more carefully about what they say to us. If we want them to concentrate on a particular set of images, we can show them a photo album in some format or other (phone, tablet, paper book).

I recently saw at someone's home a sort of intermediate arrangement, which is presumably quite common. A large-screen TV had a looping slide show of pictures from a recent vacation. Presumably they enjoyed being reminded of that vacation. But they quite likely replaced it with a different set of pictures after the next vacation, or perhaps simply shut it off and had a blank large-screen TV on that section of wall.

Compare this to places outside your home. If you have your own office, the same considerations would apply, if to a lesser extent. If you go into a restaurant, the décor has likely been chosen to help set a particular mood, and quite possibly you chose the restaurant in part because of the "ambiance" for that particular block of time while you're eating. If you go into something like a Target or Walmart, you have put yourself in the world of retail commerce and probably aren't upset to be inundated with advertising -- some of it might actually be useful! If you go into the sanctuary of my Unitarian-Universalist church, you are typically wanting to nudge your thoughts in the direction of the profound or spiritual. Stained glass windows are in line with what you want to be thinking about.

In your own home, whatever is on your walls is bound to be relevant to a much smaller fraction of the things you want to be thinking about at any given time. Likely so small that they hinder rather than help you in your life goals. Maybe bare walls would serve you better.

It's not the money, it's the eternal emails

I am a fan of the YouTube channel "Mentour Pilot" https://www.youtube.com/@MentourPilot, especially the series on airline crashes or near-crashes. I'm not sure why, but I like them. The Swedish owner "Petter" has a variety of sponsors. One sounds kind of appealing to me, "Curiosity Stream", which would offer a wide variety of documentaries. What amuses me is how he emphasizes how it's only $20 a year, and you can get $5 off if they use his code, and to top it all off there's a money-back guarantee (I'm making up the specifics, but you get the idea). Presumably others with sponsors make the same sort of pitch.

But the price has nothing to do with why I won't subscribe. I'd happily pay twice that much. I won't subscribe because once I did, and my information got into their database, my expectation is that I would never, ever be able to free myself of the various promotions and "junk email" arising from that purchase. Possibly if you look carefully there's a way to opt out of them selling your information to others, but it wouldn't stop they themselves from sending me promotional email forever. Or they would change their terms of service, or Curiosity Stream would be bought by a bigger organization who would inherit the access to your information, and send you promotions for far more products. Basically, my perception is that one way or the other they've got you. Perhaps writing a blog post with "Curiosity Stream" in it will bring me to their attention and get me on their lists.

You could create an identity with links to entities you're not sure you want to hear from forever and then shed it every so often, like Thidwick the Big-Hearted Moose shed his antlers. Perhaps some service could help you with this. But perhaps the marketers have a clever way of rediscovering people if the new identity subscribes to some of the same things as the old one.

If there was a service that guaranteed they would use your identity for the sole purpose of the subscription you make, and never ever send you another email or share your information, on pain of criminal penalties vigorously enforced, I think they might have a market -- if we could ever really trust them.

I'll also share one way I stayed naive until just a few years ago. When you belong to something like the ACLU, they send messages like, "your membership is about to expire!" and "last chance!" and I somehow got the idea that if I didn't respond then I'd lose my chance to be a member and they'd take me off their mailing list. Ha! Of course they won't ever take me off because they'll always be hoping I'd come back and give them more money. (The ACLU has lost its way -- they have become "woke" at the expense of protecting civil liberties.)

Subscriptions and "Ghosting"

I recently emailed an old work colleague to reminisce about that old job, and he replied telling me he was not on speaking terms with me because of a blog post I had made a year and a half before. He had disliked it, but decided that we were so far apart there was no point discussing it, so he just unsubscribed from my blog. This overall situation has disturbed me quite a bit.

I think in modern terminology what he did is called "ghosting" -- someone just disappears without a trace, and you aren't informed of it.

I don't know how many people read my blog. When I looked using the simple tools at hand, I found one person subscribed by the simple method, but I know from email replies that there are at least 4 other people who have read my blog within the past year. At least two of them get my blog posts by email, one of them (maybe more) from Google FeedBurner. I have generally been fine with that situation. I figured only a handful of people read the blog, and I was writing for those few. I started this blog in 2007, which is forever ago in internet time, and I am very poor at figuring out how these shifting program configurations connect things together. There was some hint that FeedBurner was itself an obsolete technology. If anyone knows how to figure out who is actually reading my blog, I'd love to know. Then I'll at least have a method to figure out if someone "ghosts" me.

The readers I have heard from emphasize that they don't always agree with everything I say (possible translation: think lots of it is really crazy), but find it interesting. A blog author would ideally get comments from readers and there would be occasional discussions back and forth. I've accepted that my blog isn't that kind of place -- which is probably more the rule than the exception for blogs with few subscribers. Sometimes I toss out ideas that I am not at all sure of, and a few words might lead me to look at it again and happily say (perhaps even with relief) that I take it back.

The post my former colleague reacted to so strongly was one where I said people were eager to make sure Derek Chauvin paid for what he did without knowing the full evidence, and I gave some reasons why maybe he wasn't really guilty of murder. Simply being alerted that "Someone really hated this post" led me to look at it again and see that it was terrible. I hadn't looked at even the basics of evidence on the other side, and it quickly became apparent to me that he was appropriately convicted. The whole post also had an emotional tone to it, where feelings were trumping careful thought. I first quickly posted a reply saying that this was a bad post and I didn't believe it, and then within a couple days decided it was such a bad post I would just delete the whole thing (I do have a saved copy in case anyone really, really wants to see it).

My former colleague was an "inconsistent ghoster", where my recent email brought the whole issue to his attention again, but I can hardly blame him for that. It just happened to bring to light a situation that otherwise would have just lain hidden.

Overall I think what's disturbing is this idea that people who sign up for the blog might have extremely strong negative reactions -- and I'll never have a clue. Of course maybe many or most of my readers are prepared to have very strong negative reactions but just let them go by and wait for the next interesting idea. Perhaps they would think that only if I was actively a purveyor of evil would they be moved to reply or unsubscribe -- but I would never know about the latter course either. If anyone wants to comment to me privately, my email is bart.wright@comcast.net.

In one post from a while back (http://bartfusn.blogspot.com/2021/05/racism-as-one-of-many-comparable.html), my reasoning led me to the astonishing conclusion that racism shouldn't be in the top tier of problems we should be working on. I also said I definitely believed it was a serious injustice -- not trying to say there was no racism or white people have it just as bad or anything of that kind. I'm not sure I had ever heard anyone with that combination of views. Could some reader with a few words point me to some article that would explain why my thinking on the subject was wrong? Or maybe they all agreed, or they just let it go -- reading a blog doesn't commit anyone to provide feedback, ever. I guess I'll never know.