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March 9, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
30:47
132 Turning Ashes into Adrenaline

We're all going to die - how can that knowledge help us live more vibrantly?

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Time Text
Good afternoon, everybody.
I hope you're doing well.
It's Steph.
It is 1.30 on March the 9th, 2006, and what a night I just had.
I don't have much experience with death at all.
I never really knew my grandparents on either side, and of course a good chunk of that of the German side for sure had been wiped out in the war, the Second World War.
And I've never really known anybody who's died who I've ever been really close to.
My sort of sum total of experience in this matter is a friend of mine who I was good friends with when I was, gosh, about 11 or so.
He died of a congenital heart failure when he was very young, in his early teens.
But I I mean, it was not really on my radar very much.
We had not spent as much time together when he died.
I have had another friend of mine who was part of a pretty rough crowd that I hung out with when I was in my early to mid-teens, and then I didn't see him for quite some time.
And he was a rather self-destructive individual, and he ended up dying in a horrible manner in a car accident.
Sorry, he was on a motorcycle and he hit a truck and died instantly.
And other than that, one fellow that I worked with up north, when I worked for the mining company doing gold panning and claim staking, he was going to be engaged, and a nice guy, and he was engaged, he was going to be married.
And he was jogging, because, you know, he was big on health, and he was jogging, and some kids in a stolen pickup truck ran him over.
I think they were drunk.
And he died immediately.
Up north, when you go along the highways, they don't really have, like the roads, they don't really have sidewalks, especially the ones that aren't in the town.
So he was just jogging along the gravel by the side of the highway, and he was clipped by this truck, or pickup truck, and died instantly.
And his was actually the only body that I've ever seen.
So last night...
I was doing my podcast on the way home and I got three messages on my cell phone, which is very unusual.
I don't normally get a lot of calls.
I mean, if it's not Christina or, you know, one of my few friends, then I don't really get a lot of calls on my cell phone.
So three messages was unusual.
And so I picked up the message and it was a friend of mine who'd said that, a good friend of mine, I'll call him Fred, that Fred had called him because Fred was distraught and couldn't remember my number.
Now Fred and I have been friends since I was eleven so I mean it's thirty years odd that we've been friends and some of the ideas that I have put forward in these podcasts have come directly out of conversations with Fred.
So for instance he was the one who first helped me to identify the corruption in the stock market based on the difference between investment and speculation.
So he is one fierce intelligent thinker and he is a real joy to talk with and somebody who comes with very few
I guess you could say preconceptions you know how you when you talk about ideas you're always running into people who are but that's your mother oh we need the government because oh that's you know this that's the other it's different you know whatever they create all these moral categories and Fred is admirably free of moral categories and I think that he was even freer of them for quite a lot of his life than I was so he's been an enormously beneficial friend to have and I love him to death And we actually worked together up north.
We traveled together throughout Canada.
We also went to Morocco together for Y2K and just had a wonderful time and he's a great friend of mine.
So this other friend, Fred had forgotten my number, and this other friend of mine called and said that Fred's mother was in the hospital.
And it was very sudden and so on, and his mother is 76, so not a spring chicken by any means.
But, you know, also not 95.
And so I had not been aware of any particular issues with her health, other than, you know, a little bit here and there, just sort of the general settling of everything as you age.
So I didn't know what had happened other than it had been very sudden.
And, of course, sudden is never good, right?
Things that happen abruptly in your body are never good and so I jumped in my car and I drove to the hospital that this friend of both of ours, a mutual friend, said that Fred was and I found him and he told me that his mother had no chance to survive and was probably not going to last more than a few hours
Or a few days, and what happened was that she had had flu-like symptoms.
I mean, stomach flu-type symptoms.
She'd been throwing up and so on.
She had been on the mend, so she'd been better, and he had been... Fred had been down in her apartment the evening before, until about 12.15, and then she went to bed, and then he had asked the superintendent of the apartment building to check on her, and that person had gone in around 1 o'clock, 1.15, and found this woman slumped over and non-responsive, right?
So, breathing, but non-responsive.
And so she was whisked to hospital, and Fred came back from work, and He saw that she was in the ambulance and the paramedics were all around her, but she was breathing and he didn't know how bad it was.
But as it turned out, she'd had a massive aneurysm, which had just felled her higher functioning in one swoop.
I mean, the lights...
Just all went out at once, which is very sad.
But, I mean, if you've got to go, that's not too bad a way.
I mean, there's no suffering.
It's the lights just go out.
And she was reduced to lower brain functioning.
And so he had to make the decision for the DNR that they do not resuscitate.
And that was obviously difficult emotionally, but easy logically.
I mean, she was not the woman who raised him anymore.
She was simply a body with some lower brain functioning and the heart and the lungs pumping and so on.
But her kidneys had failed and it was just a matter of time.
They could have kept her alive, but she would never have never have been anybody close to who she was.
She never would have really been anyone at all.
So he gave the DNR order and then we uh... christina casey's christina missing a late patient so she came of course and then uh... they took her off the resuscitator so we went up to be by her and she was uh... taken off the resuscitator and
They took the tube out of her chest, which meant that she was breathing in these ragged gasps that came sort of once every 15 to 25 seconds.
So it really was very hard to know how long she was going to last.
And, of course, they had made her very comfortable through morphine and Ativan, so she wasn't in no pain.
But it was a very desperately difficult situation, of course.
She continued to breathe for the next almost three hours and at this point it was 2.30 or quarter to three in the morning and the nurse was of course rather surprised that she had survived to this length of time.
It really didn't make her heart was strong and so on.
For a lifelong chain smoker she had a pretty strong heart.
Certainly nobody had ever guessed that it was going to be her brain that gave out and not her lungs.
At that point I said, because Fred was really fading, I mean, he'd had just an unbelievably difficult day, and it had gone on for quite a long time at this point, 13 hours or so.
So I said, let's, you know, take a break, and one other person volunteered to stay.
So I drove him, Christine and I drove him to our place, and we put him up, and we put a phone by his bed, our cell phone, and they called.
And we had about, I don't know, an hour of fitful dozing and then they called and said that his mother had passed away.
And so we drove him back.
And I mean, it's just quite shocking.
I mean, at least for me, I mean, it's something that when somebody dies, it's amazing how quickly the pallor changes, how quickly the waxy pallor of the skin takes hold.
And you really can't imagine them being alive again.
Or you can't imagine them ever having been alive.
And Christina said, as we were talking, I mean, of course, my friend was a mess.
He has no siblings, and his father's already dead, his estranged father.
So his mother was the only family that he had left, and so, of course, he was devastated.
And Christina said, though, and I thought it was a wise thing to say, as most things are, if not all things are, that Christina says, she said that it is probably for the best to not have actually seen her die sitting by her bed.
Because the last memory that you want to have of the woman's life is not her death rattle in a morphine-induced coma when she's lost all her higher brain functions.
And I mean, the woman had died.
Basically and fundamentally, the woman as a personality died when the aneurysm struck.
And the body that remained was nothing more than pulsing meat.
I mean, it wasn't anything to do with a human being that we would recognize as a person.
So, the end of it, I mean, obviously, if she'd been conscious or lucid or anything, but it's just amazing how quickly this stuff can happen.
She was a healthy woman and just, blap, you know, out comes the cosmic finger and flicks her off the stage of life.
And, of course, my friend doesn't know He knows she has a burial plot, but he doesn't know where.
He doesn't know where her life insurance is.
He doesn't know... You always, I guess, think that you're going to get some warning.
So, I mean, the reason that I'm telling you all of this is because there are a number of things that come to my mind, which I think are helpful to people.
One is that... And I'm talking about you, if you have a difficult family, and not myself, so please forgive me if it sounds like I'm talking about myself.
But I felt absolutely no impulse whatsoever to contact my own mother in any way, shape, or form.
That is something that is important for you to know.
It doesn't mean that you won't face different feelings if you end up defooing or breaking with corrupt parents.
The presence of death, the inevitability of death that we all face, that we all have to accept, It doesn't sentimentalize me.
It does sentimentalize most people.
And this woman who died was a pleasant woman, but had her flaws, which were not inconsiderable, and there was an enormous amount of sentimentalizing as she was dying.
I can understand that in some ways.
I don't think it's particularly healthy, but I can understand it.
And it's going to take a little while to help my friend out of the sentimentalizing phase.
He felt, oh, I should have been a better son.
I should have told her I loved her more.
You know, the things that you generally hear around a deathbed.
And I think there was a certain amount of sentimentalizing on his part in that way as well.
And I'm not going to gainsay or criticize any of that because I've not been in this situation.
But I will tell you that watching this man's mother die made me in no way, shape or form And I sort of asked myself this question pretty openly and pretty deeply.
In no way, shape, or form has it even remotely altered my own feelings about my own family.
This woman was not ever violent.
She was not verbally abusive.
She had her issues.
She was a single mother with a single son.
She was clingy and fostered codependency, and I think kept my friend back from the kinds of heights he could have achieved.
I mean, with the mind that he had, he could have achieved, and hopefully will achieve, so much more.
And he said that one thing he said last night, oh, death is a great focuser of wisdom,
if you allow it and he said last night that those who are capable of more will be judged more harshly and he was referring to himself and his own potentials and I think that that's true and I hope that as I've tried to sort of mention to him very briefly because it's not the time but to say that death can be a clarifier and a propulsion to a greater kind of life you know I think this is very important that death
The consciousness of death, the consciousness of the end of everything, the consciousness of all of your fears and hesitations and everything that you lose because of the fear of consequences and the fear of disapproval and the fear of people being upset with you and angry at you.
That everything that we lose, the souls that we lose grain by grain away into the wind because we compromise everything we believe in, and I speak about myself here as well, I'm no towering pillar of integrity, but everything that we lose because we compromise, we're going to lose it all anyway.
And I think that's something that I sort of want to get across.
One is that I don't feel any differently about my own family and my decision not to see any of them because this woman has died.
In fact, what it does do is it makes, for me, the benefit of not seeing my own mother is that much greater because I'm not going to have to go through this with somebody who I hate.
I'm not going to go through this.
I'm not going to have, and of course, this was a relatively quick and painless and uncomplicated ending of a life, right?
Aneurysm, next day, dies.
And for my own mother this could be a year-long process.
This could be Lou Gehrig's disease.
This could be cancer.
This could be anything.
Lymphoma.
It could be anything that is lengthy and unpleasant and expensive and emotionally exhausting.
And so I don't have to go through any of that.
And that's, I mean, as I think I've mentioned before, one of the things that helped me with this decision with my own mother And to a smaller degree, my own father, was the simple fact that I said I was going to be damned if I was going to be somebody who had a terrible childhood at the hands of these people, and then had a terrible couple of years as an adult as they got ill.
And if I got the terrible childhood, I wasn't also going to have the terrible nursing situation.
I'm not going to take both.
I'll do the terrible nursing situation with somebody that I love, God forbid if Christina ever got ill, but I am not going to do it with somebody who I despise, because that's getting the worst of both worlds.
And I always feel very strongly that it's so important in life... There's an old book called The Screwtape Letters by C.S.
Lewis, which my brother gave to me, or insisted that I buy and read, which I thought was interesting.
For a variety of reasons we don't have to get into now.
And what it is, is a series of letters from an old experienced Christian devil to a younger and more inexperienced or less experienced Christian devil on how best to tempt people away from God.
And one of the... there were two things that came out of that book for me that maybe will be of interest to you.
One is that he said, you know, if you want to tempt somebody away from virtue, don't tempt them with great sins, because great sins will provoke their moral defenses and they will then turn... they may then turn those great sins into great virtues or they will be frightened away from them.
The way that you turn a man away from God is by filling his mind with fitful inconsequentialities.
Worrying about past slights, staring at a fire until the ashes has gone cold, replaying old conversations, wondering about, did the clerk cheat me at the store two weeks ago, and all of the little trivia and inconsequentialities of life.
Fill his mind with those things and send him racing after those empty vessels.
Have him chase those will-o'-the-wisps, and he will not find God, and he will not even notice that he has not found God, because There is nothing of depth left in him.
I'm sure C.S.
Lewis put it better, although a crazy Christian, a good writer.
But I think that's important, that we do get distracted and dissolved into the minutiae of our lives, and we do miss out on the deeper, bigger pictures, which is the larger canvas our lives are drawn on.
Our lives are painted in very broad strokes, very large canvases, and very deep colors.
And if we focus on every little paint speck, then we lose everything, in my view.
And I don't think we should lose everything because we're going to lose it all anyway at the end of our lives.
So that was the one thing that I got out of the screw tape letters.
The other was...
The older devil was saying to the younger devil that the worst thing that can happen to you if you are tempting a Christian into vice is for the Christian to turn your vice into a virtue.
So, for instance, if you tempt a Christian with gluttony, then that Christian may very well recognize that gluttony and turn that gluttony into I don't know what the opposite of gluttony.
Extreme moderation.
Or if you tempt him with lust then he is actually going to become chaste.
And there's nothing that makes the devil gnash his teeth more than trying to tempt someone with an evil and having that person recognize it as an evil and then turn it into a great good.
Because that way the devil is creating goodness in the world by tempting somebody with a sin and having that person then perform the opposite.
Action or thought the devil then through his temptation is creating virtue in the world which drives the devil mad and so on and I think that is an important thing to understand about life that everything that is difficult Can be turned into a positive and it doesn't mean that you don't regret the difficulty and it doesn't mean that you want the difficulty But it does mean that it can be turned into a positive so to take a simple example
If somebody breaks their leg and they go through rehab and through rehab they figure out how to exercise better, how to eat better, and they learn some patience and they get some peace because they're stuck in a hospital bed for a while and they learn something about their life.
It's not like you're going to say to people, you know, for growth, just break the glass and break your leg with the bat therein.
But you can if you do get misfortune.
And life is a long series of misfortunes.
It's not the only thing that's in life.
Of course, life is wonderful, but misfortunes are a pretty integral part of life.
And if you live your life as if I'm going to enjoy the good times and not enjoy the bad times, then I think you're missing out on life.
Frankly, I think that you're missing out on the purpose of life, which is that not that it's all good, but it's all rich and The tragedies that I've had in my life.
I have really tried to make into virtues So if there were any such thing as the devil If the devil tempted me to violence and vengeance through the violence that I experienced as a child, then what I have done is turned my experiences, for want of a better word, turned my experiences with violence as a child into an extremely, I hope,
Passionately argued and relatively consistent position on the evil of violence in all situations.
So if there was a devil that put me with my violent family in order to provoke the addition of violence into the world, well not only have I become a pacifist, in the deepest sense of the word, but I have also become a passionate advocate for the cessation, or at least the moral identification of violence within the world in all its forms, both religious, state, and familial.
And in the same way, when these sorts of tragedies occur, if my friend is underachieving, and I think he believes that he is, and I certainly believe that he's capable of more, what is going to best honor the terrible loss that he has undergone It would be to wake up, to shake off his lethargy, to remove the cobwebs of habit from his eyes, and to see something further, and to reach for something greater.
That does not mean that his mother's death is good, but it means that the best that can be achieved from his mother's death is achieved.
And in many situations in life, that really is the best that we can hope for.
The best that we can hope for is that we can achieve the greatest good out of calamities that occur.
And I would really urge you in that position or from that position to look at your life and where there are misfortunes and tragedies to see where you can't use those holes to build palaces, where you can't use those misfortunes to build greater goods, to turn the misfortunes and the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, as Hamlet put it, in life, to turn those into the foundations
of a greater striving and communication for and of truth and virtue.
That really is taking the natural misfortunes of life and making something wonderful out of them.
And it in no way makes the tragedies wonderful, but it does make them as great as possible.
It makes them as positive a force in the world as possible.
And it's a lesson that I need to constantly relearn, and maybe it's the same thing for you as well.
But when we came back from the hospital and I sat with my friend and Christina and another friend of his, two other friends sat with him and we listened as he talked and we asked a few questions and we were sitting among these woman's material aftereffects or her detritus, the jetsam and flotsam of a life of details, the little figurines, the little pictures, the bric-a-brac, the white elephants, the
VCR still set to record a show that evening.
The ashtray with a cigarette in it.
A half-full cup of cold coffee.
Every little detail bought and placed and dusted and cared for, now all of the meaning that was infused into everything that she owned is gone.
Because she's gone.
Everything that Injected or enveloped these material goods in meaning and sentimental value is all gone and everything is just revealed as just stuff.
And that is something that is very important to remember on two levels.
One is the obvious one, like don't care so much about material things, and I mean that's something which we all know deep in our hearts, right?
It's nice to have an iPod, but love and virtue trump that, and everything goes to ashes anyway.
We're all food for worms.
At the end of your life, no matter what you said and what you did, they throw you in a hole and throw dirt on your face.
That is the end of all of us, and It is important to not focus so much on material things.
I mean, I certainly do that, and it's a reminder that I constantly need.
But at another level, in terms of fear, to change the world, to try and be a better person, is very scary, and it is very intense, and it provokes a lot of conflict.
Exactly why the world doesn't change, because it is so hard to try and make the world a better place.
It is so demanding to try and live a virtuous life, especially in the modern world.
But in the modern world, it's still a lot easier than it was in the past.
At least we can have this conversation.
And there are no gulags here yet, for those of us who speak our minds.
But it's very hard to make the world a better place and I find that in my own life there are times when I get weary and I get beaten down and I feel that it's impossible and I feel that I am provoking conflict without benefit or with inconsequential benefit.
And I want to give it up at times.
It's not very common, and it certainly becomes less and less common as I get older, but when it comes to making decisions like when I don't see my family and people say, well, how is your family if they don't know this?
Of course there's discomfort.
When people say, I'm very much for the Iraqi war, and I have to roll up my sleeves yet again and get into it, knowing that the odds of changing somebody's minds, even about the Iraqi war, are pretty darn small, and also that even if I do change their minds about the Iraqi war, the odds of them recognizing the truth and realizing that the state is corrupt and evil, and even if I get them to there, recognizing the more important and immediate truth for them,
That their families need to be subject to the same moral examinations as the state.
All of that is such a long chain of causality that I've really only ever been able to achieve with, like, two people in my life.
So, when somebody says, oh, the Iraqi war, it's so great, and, you know, we've freed everyone, and it was that great.
Well, When I have to roll up my sleeves yet again and dig into these issues with people, I find it wearying sometimes, and I find that I don't want to.
I mean, I understand.
Of course, I'm not a robot of truth.
I mean, I can choose not to.
I mean, the whole point of life is freedom, and it means that you don't have to draw your sword at all costs, no matter what.
But in terms of the larger picture of whether people approve or disapprove of what we do, I think that At the end of it all, we're going to die anyway, and they're going to throw us in that hole in the ground, and they're going to throw dirt in our face, and they're going to seal us up.
So all of the petty problems that we have in life, all of the disagreements, where you can mend bridges and mend fences, mend bridges and mend fences, and where you can't, don't waste your time throwing your virtue and your integrity down a huge hole with no bottom, called the corruption of others.
And I think that Whatever we can do to try and make the world a better place, given how difficult it is, it is so important to do and to recognize that when it comes right down to it, all of the fears that keep us down are going to vanish anyway.
And if we knew, you know, if you knew, if you could project yourself forward past the end of your life, past the end of your existence, and you could look back upon yourself now, upon yourself now, And you could say to yourself, if you could give yourself some advice, what would that advice be?
To some degree we do need to live with the reality of death.
We do need to live with the reality that we are going to die, that we're going to need people to be there for us, that we're going to need to be taken care of, that people are going to have to wipe our chins, that people are going to have to help us move our limbs, that there is going to be something at the end which is going to be difficult and we need to have people that we trust and love there.
we don't want to end up at the end of our lives back where we were at the beginning, dependent on corrupt people, if those people are corrupt.
I don't want to sort of paint this brush too wide for everyone.
But if you could go to the end of your life, bounce back and give yourself some advice from beyond the grave, I know what the advice to myself would be.
My advice to myself would be something like, enjoy the challenges.
Enjoy the challenges.
Enjoy the challenges.
This is a noble fight.
This is a brave fight.
This is a fight that everybody loses throughout history.
And throwing your hat in the ring is, among the few people who ever do, to really oppose things like violence and corruption, to throw your hat in the ring is a very noble endeavor.
And the only thing worse than not throwing your hat in the ring is not to relish and enjoy the challenges that are inherent in trying to get the world to be a better place.
And everybody who's involved in these kinds of movements, in these kinds that we face, enormous opposition.
But it's only emotional opposition.
It's only emotional.
All people are going to do is disapprove of us, or storm out, or get mad, or call us names.
It's really nothing.
When you look at the final insult of reality, which is that we just die, The fact that people are going to use the sticks and stones arguments against us, I don't think it really matters at all.
I don't think it's something we really have to worry about.
So my advice to myself, and maybe it's helpful for you as well, is to be brave and to enjoy this challenge.
It is a deep, rich, and exciting challenge.
I really, really love the conversations that we're having.
I think that the feedback that I'm getting, the community that is developing, to me is a beautiful thing.
It is a beautiful thing.
And it might be, it might conceivably be without precedent.
I don't know, because I don't know enough about the history of these sorts of ideas, but I think to the community and the conversations that we're all having.
is a significant and powerful force and I think we should relish it and enjoy it and I think that we should do everything that we can to expand these ideas most importantly we should enjoy the process and we should enjoy the challenges and we should engage as supreme athletes you want the greatest opponents to bring out the best in you and that way when we come to the end of our road we can look back upon a life that not only did we have meaning not only did we have an effect not only did we make a difference
To the greatest degree that we're capable of, but most importantly, we enjoyed that process.
Because that is the most important thing.
We are not here to be slaves to freedom, in a sense.
What a paradox that would be.
And we believe that freedom brings happiness, so the first people that it needs to bring happiness to is ourself.
So, I hope that this has been helpful.
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