This is a sensitive subject, surely close to home to countless people who might see it. But I feel it needs to be said (written) out loud.
One of the most fascinating things I find about us, human beings that is, is the ongoing cognitive dissonance innate in our nature as it relates to our coming deaths. It is as if something in our core biology changes the subject whenever we think too deeply about it. Otherwise we would be so consumed by it and its unanswerable questions that we would hardly bother to move about at all. So we let ourselves think about it for a moment, then move on, because those questions have no clear answers.
And yet, the only true thing in the universe remains that we are born and then we die. Everything in between -- meaning, purpose, faith, belief, destiny -- are narratives we create out of nothing to make it all make some degree of sense. Yet they are not inherently real. We create them, and it is a good thing we do, because otherwise it would be pure chaos at all times.
But regardless of your philosophical or religious persuasion, you cannot argue that there is only one true objective truth. We are born and then we die. And in between, there is what we call a life.
The remarkable thing, the cognitive dissonance I think about, is how we observe this reality firsthand, especially as we age. Family gets sick, friends get sick, mental illness rears its ugly head, accidents happen, or we ourselves get sick. If we are blessed to avoid such horrors, through luck or timing, we are nevertheless still exposed to these stories of hardship among others. The old phrase "memento mori." That movie. That song. The friend of a friend who got diagnosed. The horrible accident that took someone far too soon. The Italian fisherman story. The interviews with old timers on their deathbeds listing off the things they wish they had spent more time doing and less time worrying about. We say to ourselves that if we died but were given another chance we would live entirely differently, and we think to ourselves how obviously true this is. When we hear sayings like the rich man has 99 problems but the sick man has just 1, we nod and agree without hesitation.
But then, despite all these reminders of the one objective truth, we continue living lives that are not maximally fulfilling, or in places we do not love completely. Our fear instincts, learned helplessness, and societal coding kick in to pull our minds immediately off this track of thought. We have a mortgage. The kids are in school. What about my degree. What about my upcoming promotion. What about my car. What about what my in-laws will think. What about this, what about that. None of that matters in any real way if you are not fully happy and fulfilled. But then this itself becomes a trap. We layer on even more dissonance and convince ourselves that what we are doing is fulfilling. We come to believe this, that we are actually happy, and that the person writing this post right now is just some existential nihilist who needs to touch grass or find Jesus.
It feels like some invisible hand of progress is always pushing us away from the light of thought, making sure we keep the engine of productivity and progress going. Toward what mysterious ultimate end we may never know. But we will unlikely be around to see it when it comes.
We should be training ourselves to break our coding more often -- on a daily basis -- and think about death constantly.
Only then, I think, can we live fully.