On the Horrors of Immortality

Imagine living forever.  No, I mean really imagine it.  Sounds great at first, right?  No looming fear of death.  No wondering when or how you'll die.  None of that creepy mortality stuff... funerals, the Grim Reaper.  Ick.  But the alternative in my opinion would be far scarier. 

"Forever" is an unimaginable amount of time.  By about age 40, we start getting annoyed with younger people and their... let's just say, "made-up" lingo, problems and youth culture that involves things like shitty music, words like "skibidi toilet, rizz, cheugy, bussin'" and whatever "special" clever (not) things they dream up, including the Gender Identity cult.  By 50, we feel fully out of touch with it all and by 60, we're shaking our fists at the sky, just hoping for a day to pass without some body part going out on us.  By 75 it's "get off my lawn!" and Trump stickers.  You get the point.  The neurons harden off and life gets uglier, harsher and less pleasant.  Yet for some reason people want MORE of this?  😒

But aside from the health and cognitive issues, there's a bigger issue with immortality:  it takes away the meaning of life, the urgency.  Even if we could stop the clock in your peak years, I wouldn't.  In my belief, we're sent to this 3rd rate planet to learn and experience things.  Maybe to teach and help others... whatever you consider the "meaning of life" to be.  We have a limited time to do it which lights a fire under our ass.  It's like a video game with a time clock counting down (say Super Mario World)--you only have so long to complete each "world".  Sure, you might not have as much time as you'd like to hang around and explore all the cool hidden parts of each world, but you're also not going to waste time gathering coins, going on side adventures and fighting with pointless enemies because you have to hurry up and beat the clock by getting to the end.  Or at least one would hope you don't waste time doing that crap.  Otherwise you'll fuck around and die before the clock runs out.  




The Great Beyond

The white light is a recurring theme in NDEs

I happen to believe our consciousness does go on after death, not necessarily to a Heaven or Hell but in some form to some place, perhaps able to travel throughout time and space freely without the confines of a human body holding it down.  See here for more on that.  My belief is based on the law of conservation of mass and the law of conservation of energy.

After being diagnosed with brain cancer, psychedelic guru Terence McKenna reported feeling so overwhelmed at the beauty of a bug landing on a blade of grass that he was moved to tears.  This was in response to a question about having a limited time left on this Earth and how the small things become more meaningful in that context.  I try to remind myself that some people are dealing with terminal diagnoses or other horrific circumstances when I get inconvenienced about the small stuff daily.  The universe truly is a chaotic place in which things happen for no obvious reason at times.  You can do everything right--eat a raw vegan diet, jog 5 miles every day, sleep 8 hours every night--& be struck with terminal cancer as a reward.  Or you can drink, smoke & bang hookers daily & live to be 90.  Most of us fall somewhere in the middle but my point remains.

Life's not fair, which is yet another reason I wouldn't want to live forever.  Aside from those universal inequities, humans dish out things like sexism, racism, homophobia, classism and other ugly forms of unfairness all the time.  Wealth inequality is the big one.  And war.  Just look what's going on in Gaza, ffs.  While Hamas is a brutal terrorist organization, what did the women and children of Palestine do to deserve what's happening to them?  Fuckall.  Nothing more than being born in the wrong place at the wrong time in history, at least.

I find it interesting that the most devout Christians and religious folks tend to be the most afraid of death.  Why, when your holy book promises you great things beyond your mind's wildest imaginings if only you follow said holy book's rules?  Doesn't said book claim that this Earth is a dirty, evil place you wouldn't wanna become like anyway?  I tend to think it's the other way around:  people with an innate fear of death cling to organized religion BECAUSE they're so afraid of the uncertainty of death.  Religion promises them certainty, except none of us can truly know for sure what happens after death until it happens to us.  The closest we can come are the experiences of people who have died, flatlined, and been revived.  And across time and cultures, they tend to be very similar:  crushing blackness followed by a beautiful white light, maybe "looking down" at the scene below as rescue crews try to revive them, hearing conversations they shouldn't be able to hear, dead loved ones beckoning them forward toward the white light & ultimately being "sucked" back into their Earthly bodies. 

Some of these people reported hearing and seeing things in their homes miles away from hospitals where their physical bodies were--what their mom was cooking for dinner, what people were wearing and talking about.  Others saw things in odd places like the rooftop of the hospital.  These things were later confirmed by those involved.  That gives me hope that consciousness does go on after physical death because it's the most scientific thing we have to prove it.  Furthermore, these were almost universally ecstatic, glorious life-changing experiences that the survivors described as overwhelmingly positive.  Some of them were atheists before and became spiritually inclined afterward; others switched career paths.  The Wikipedia page on Near-Death Experiences is one big "Yeah, but..." that never successfully debunks or explains how these things happen.  Every possible "logical" theory about the brain just going haywire at the time of death is shot down.  See for yourself.  This may be the one area of science humans never truly crack, and I'm okay with that.  

Overcoming Thanatophobia

"Take my good hand"

If my anxiety disorder-riddled ass can be okay with the uncertainty of death, you should try a little harder to come to terms with it yourself.  And you can do that by making the most of your life starting right now, this instant.  Don't cling to life by focusing on longevity which is not something we control, but on QUALITY of life.  Make the moments count, do the things you've always wanted, tell people you love them, say you're sorry without reservation when you fuck up... just live with integrity and stop caring about superficial shit that doesn't matter. 

Break behavioral patterns that no longer serve you or you'll regret it.  (The #1 regret of patients in a hospice survey was living the life that was expected of them by society rather than having the courage to live the life they wanted.  That's incredibly sad to me because that's a huge fucking regret--it's like regretting your entire life in a sense).  Don't fall into the Sunk Cost Fallacy of "Well I've wasted so many years in this job/relationship/place that it's too late to start over now".  It's NEVER too late as long as you're breathing.

And keep in mind that this human experience we're having right now might not be the most meaningful or enjoyable one we get to have.  "Ashes to ashes and dust to dust" sounds scary, sure, but how do you know what it feels like to be dust?  Maybe it's absolutely euphoric and indescribable!  To be consumed by fungi and come back as flowers or grass may make this existence seem trivial by comparison.  And that's just the physical:  our consciousness that rises up out of the body at death and can move in any direction like a weightless beam of light... now that must be a trip.  No gravity, no bag of bones body holding it down.  All kids dream of being able to fly:  well baby, now you can. 🪽