Some nights before I started to write this in mid-2022, I dreamt that I was in an aircraft that was plummeting to the earth. I was not surprised by this dream - less than a week had passed since a tragic plane crash in China. What did surprise me was that I had continued to hope that the plane would right itself until the very end. So when I woke up, breathing hard, still alive, what upset me the most about my nightmare was not that the plane had crashed, but that I had not made peace with my death in those final moments.
I've spent a lot of time thinking about death in the last two years; many of us probably did as we anxiously watched counters on dashboards, each uptick marking the end of another human life. On nights when my overactive imagination conjured up terrible scenarios, I protected myself by taking a mental step back and reminding myself that death was inevitable. But creating distance made me feel guilty. Was it not wrong to feel anything less than all the sadness I could feel? So I thought of death in its many roles - as an end, a motivator, as ubiquitous, permanent, sad, and unknowable - while trying to grapple with what it meant to me and to society. On darker days, I thought about what my death would mean, wondering, as I went to sleep, what would happen if I never woke up. On the darkest days, I wished I did not have to wake up, for even as the thought caused me pain, I felt relief at the idea of not having to try anymore.
I sought and received help when I found myself wandering down these dangerous what-ifs more often than I liked, and I no longer seek refuge in these thoughts. But even with my will to live restored, I couldn't convincingly answer to myself why giving up was a bad idea, except for the fact that it would hurt the people who loved me. This had been reason enough for me to never give self-harm any serious consideration, but I was scared that a day might come when it wasn't enough. So I continued to think about how to value life and find reasons to live in a world where people die and are replaced every day, a universe in which I am a collection of molecules that have temporarily decided to work together. I needed to feel like I was more than just another popup in an endless game of whack-a-mole played by time.
As I searched for meaning in my own life, the news cycle made it painfully clear how easily people died - often in shockingly unfair ways - in the world around me. It seemed almost wrong to seek a point to life in a world where war, famine, disease, and division killed so many people for no fault of their own. Comfort came to me in the relaization that I was not alone in my thoughts. In his moving book, The Anthropocene Reviewed, John Green writes
"The thing about [playing 'What's Even the Point'] is that once my brain starts playing it, I can't find a way to stop. Any earnest defence I try to mount is destroyed [...] and I feel like the only way to survive life is to cultivate an ironic detachment from it." [1]
I saw myself in those lines- disturbed by my hope in the crashing dream-plane, struggling to find a point to life beyond an obligation to the people who had protected me. As I grappled with what I should feel, an episode of the podcast Invisibilia turned my understanding of emotions upside down. The episode features Dr. Lisa Barrett, a neuroscientist whose research shows that our emotions are constructs based on our experiences rather than universal reflexes to events. Host Alix Spiegel summarises,
"... emotions are not objective, even the emotions you have in response to a death." [3]
Over the course of that episode, I went from feeling like a passenger on an unpredictable roller-coaster to feeling like I was - if not the designer - at least the operator of the ride. By allowing myself to assign a Sad Value other than negative infinity to loss, I could appreciate the ephemerality of life, of my relationships, of my time, without immediately feeling guilty for not living each day like it was my last. Seize the day? Sure, but I could sleep in when I felt like it.
In her book 'Why Fish Don't Exist', Lulu Miller writes almost matter-of-factly,
"Don't get too squeamish. Camus estimates it's on the mind of a majority of us at any moment. That remedy for pain so enticing that eighteenth-century poet William Cowper termed it the "grand temptation."'[2]
If humans had been struggling with these questions for as long as we had existed, I could accept that I was struggling too. Green and Miller go on to talk of how they eventually did find the point, and though their journeys did not give me any epiphanies, they told me that it was okay to be lost, and gave me hope that I might see the point myself one day.
It took me months of work and a combination of approaches to start loving life again. Typing that sentence still takes some effort. It's so much easier to pretend to be indifferent, but it's hard to live really feeling that way. Now I wish to live for the sake of living, because the universe is beautiful and bizarre, and every day I live in it is a day I interact with it consciously. There continues to be injustice and suffering in our world, but I pin my hope on the fact that I recognize this to be so, which is more than any rock or supernova can claim to do.
[1] Sycamore Trees: From The Anthropocene Reviewed, John Green
[2] Pg. 36: Why Fish Don't Exist, Lulu Miller
[3] Emotions: https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=530726335
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