THE DENIAL OF DEATH

THE DENIAL OF DEATH

Alan Harrington said “Death has become an imposition on the human race and is no longer acceptable." 

 The topic of death seems obvious and unappealing in the same time .Some people say that death is an important design meant to get rid of the old in order to make room for the new that may have been a stepping stone, a necessary rehearsal, and a way of spreading the diversity of informations through genes. But what if we were able to create new rules, what if we master biotechnology, we create software that write its own hardware, we start to change the rules of life, death will no longer be necessary, we could create a world without loss, without those encounter with grieves. That may sound like a sort of manic fantasy. But that is the reason why we write poetry and build cathedrals to try to create transcendence as topographical statement. That why we eternalize beautiful moments, make gorgeous status and write amazing songs, we long to eternalize ourselves. We want to say, as Alain de Button said, we want to carve our names, we want to say “I was here, I exist, I felt something and I matter”.

I think man has a mind that soars out to speculate about atoms and infinity, who can place himself imaginatively at a point in space and contemplate bemusedly his own planet. This immense expansion, this dexterity, this ethereality, this self-consciousness gives to man literally the status of a small legend in nature...Yet, at the same time... man is a worm and food for worms.

Socrates said “an unexamined life is not worth living”. The question here is not only how are going to deal with death but also with the expansion of life. We all at some point or many of us at least went through an existential crisis of our own, we thought about death and our first reaction about is upsetting. I am a miserable speck of dust in a large universe, I am culturally constructed meat poppet marching to the beat of somebody else s drums.  I think there is a relationship between the amount of death anxiety or death panic and the degree of unlived life inside of us. If you have sense that you have not lived your life to fullest, there is a terror of dying before you have really lived. Luxury to procrastinate is our darkest secret. “Everything has been figured out, only how to live?”, so perhaps the better question is not what to do with death but what do with life? Why if we can enjoy life to the fullness like no other organism do we often fall to achieve that? Life exist in individual moments and it is up to us to make sure those moments are vital, interconnected and beautiful, that our process of living of contributing to the collective experience of life is embracing, nurturing and meaningful, to create a masterpiece out of life, a life we are willing to repeat if we had to live again and again for all of eternity, this is what we can strive for. I did not came here by my own and will not go by my own, so who ever brought me here, I am thankful to him. I think we only realise the meaning of life only when it has left us, it is not a question of meaning, it is a question of fullness or emptiness, so my dear be brave enough to look into the deep dark truth of yourself and bring it to the light.