How to Deal with Growing Old and Dying
There is only one thing we can be certain about in life, and that is everyone will eventually die.
Death is something that scares everyone, because there is no stopping it.
All your life you have been figuring out how to avoid danger, but sooner or later, it will be your time to say your final goodbye. Neither flight or fight will save you when your time is up.
No amount of wealth in the world can save you from your death. You can try to bubble yourself away from all dangers in the world, but eventually you will die.
After your death you will be what you were before your birth.
~Arthur Schopenhauer
We all fear that one day we will return to the same nothingness that we were before our birth.
We fear it so much that we are afraid to even call it what it is. When someone who is dear to us dies, we try to lessen the blow by using words such as “passed away”, “resting in peace”, or “departed”.
We find it difficult to accept that they are dead. We want to hold on to them, and we would rather believe that they are still around as ghosts or that they are waiting for us to join them in the afterlife and that they are watching over us.
How Do People Generally Cope with Death?
Many religions stem out of this fear of death— this fear of letting go.
We create these elaborate imaginary worlds in which we can continue living for eternity. Some place that is safe from all the things that scare us. Some place where we feel no pain. Some place where we can be with our loved ones again.
But there is no winning over death. Truth hurts but we cannot run from it forever.
Many of us can no longer find it in ourselves to believe and take comfort in these white lies. These grand narratives about how living a good life on Earth will one day free us to live an eternity with our loved ones — these lies aren’t enough to fool ourselves anymore.
But when we have nothing to believe in, we fall into meaninglessness. We become nihilists.
“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”
~Friedrich Nietzsche
Without these grand narratives about the world, we find it difficult to carry the weight of our own existence. When we give up our “why”, we lose our will to live.
Why do anything at all, when we all turn back to dust? What is the point of all the pain and suffering, if nothing matters in the end? We start to hate our existence and to curse those who brought us into this world.
The image above shows Sisyphus, a man who was punished in Greek Mythology, to carry a heavy boulder up to the top of a hill only to see it roll down the hill, and to repeat this task for all of eternity. This is how it feels to live life when man has lost his meaning.
The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
~Albert Camus
The philosopher Albert Camus argued that we should learn to accept the meaninglessness of life i.e. the absurdity of our existence. This philosophical theory is known as Absurdism.
Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.
~Victor Frankl
However, the problem still stands. How does one create one’s meaning in a meaningless world?
Many people pass on this problem of meaning to the future generation by creating children. Raising children gives meaning to their lives.
Others who do not want children, choose to live life for their pets. However, this is not enough, because every living thing that is dear to us, will eventually also be consumed by death. Sometimes this occurs before our own demise, and then we fall into nihilism yet again.
The meaning has to come from within ourselves, so that it cannot be extinguished. It cannot be external to ourselves.
How can we achieve such a meaning?
Life is only meaningless when we see the world through our eyes. We identify too much with our human selves and that is what produces these feelings of disappointment and worthlessness about our existence.
We have to let our ego die.
We are all only capable of seeing things through our own eyes, but there is a lot more than that. Once you realize that the life that is within you does not die when you die, you start to learn to worry less about death. Life itself is impossible to extinguish.
We are but sacrifices to be made for life to become greater endlessly with each cycle of life and death. The only thing that matters is the furthering of life itself — the constant overcoming of existence. The fact that we get to experience what it is to have life flow through us, is a great honor, because it is the most powerful thing to ever exist.
The death of the ego also frees us to do things that we would not have otherwise. The things we worry about are worries of the ego, and not that of life.
The same thing that flowed through all the great people in history — all your greatest heroes, is what flows through you. Everything that empowered them to reach for greatness, exists also within yourself. You are even luckier than them, because you have access to their experiences and their knowledge to soar even higher than they could ever have done in one lifetime.
That being said, there is no wasting away your life, because there are no mistakes. Every life is a way through which life learns about itself and learns to overcome itself. Learn from your situation, but if you can’t, that’s fine too, because that’s also what you are meant to do. Amor fati. Love the fact that you get to experience such an incredible thing, and you get to be part of it.
If you are looking to make your life more meaningful, you can do so by overcoming your problems. Solving your problems will help reveal who you are to yourself. By facing your problems, you learn more about yourself and learn to be more of yourself. We are all different brush strokes of life. By becoming a more authentic version of yourself, you are adding something new to this world that never existed before. And by sharing your experience and existence with others, you are making it easier for life after your existence, to become more than what you are now.
Everything changes from one form to another — nothing stays still, but this also means nothing actually disappears — only changes. There is no point fighting death because it is inevitable in the end, but rather focus on living an authentic life that is your own. Aim to live life in a way that no one else before you has lived.
Such a great read. What do youean by this: "Once you realize that the life that is within you does not die when you die, you start to learn to worry less about death."
And: "The things we worry about are worries of the ego, and not that of life."
I also think of it like this way: no matter what your religion, the more you put into the world and the better you make it the more likely your religion is to be true