All Episodes
Previous Next
March 13, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
34:41
1298 Death
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hey everybody, it's Steph. Hope you're doing well.
It's Friday the 13th of March 2008.
It is 4.35 in the afternoon, and I'm at the gym.
Sorry about the background noise, but I've been collecting some thoughts about a topic which we've really only touched on briefly.
Death. Death itself.
The black well of ending.
The cod-swallop wall Of mortality we are all rocketing at high speed towards, and there's some questions, at least I've had questions over the years, about my attitude towards death, and so I put some thoughts together.
And I had a recent health scare that turned out to be not such a big deal, but it was certainly put it into my mind, so I thought we would talk about it and share some thoughts.
And this is not any kind of syllogism, of course.
These are just merely a grab bag of thoughts about death, which is kind of something I believe that you don't want to It's one of these Aristotelian mean things, I think.
You don't want to live like you're never going to die.
You also don't want to spend your life worried about death, otherwise you end up falling into that hole every day because you're afraid of falling into that hole, right?
Which is not a particularly positive or rational solution to the problem of death.
I wrote a poem many, many years ago.
I was about 18 or 19.
Which was again one of my very short poems, and therefore I can remember it, and it went something like this.
I do not fear death.
Where I am, death is not.
Where death is, I will not be.
We shall never meet.
And I think that's important.
We're never going to be dead.
Understand? We're never going to be dead.
Because being is the opposite of death.
If you're alive, you're not dead.
And if you're dead, you're nothing.
You don't exist.
And so you really are never going to be dead.
So death, of course, itself is nothing to fear because it is the end of all things for us as individuals and therefore it's, you know, important to understand what it is that we're afraid of when we're afraid of when the question of death comes up.
We're not afraid of being dead because there is no fear in the state of death.
There is nothing. And we are afraid of dying.
Of the knowledge of death, of being handed that sentence of terminal illness or something that is going to kill us.
It's the knowledge of death and the act or the process of dying that we fear.
And with modern pain management techniques, the process or the death itself is not Something that has nearly as much physical pain associated with it as it did in the past.
So dying is relatively pleasant compared to how it was say 100 or 200 or 500 years ago.
Or I think it was...
Dickens was thinking of being a doctor.
No, it was Darwin.
He was thinking of being a doctor until he saw an operation being performed on a child.
Where, you know, the screaming, the bloodshed, just staggering, because no anesthetic, right?
And it was Dickens who had to have a bowel operation where all they could offer him was some scotch.
I mean, just unbelievable pain that people had to go through in the process of ill health in the past.
And so it's important, I think, to be precise about what it is that we fear.
And what we fear is not death itself.
It is only to some degree the process of dying.
But what we fear or what we reject or what we hate or dislike or whatever negative feelings we have associated with death is what we will miss.
I mean, if I were dying, I would look at my daughter and think of all of the things that I would miss.
As she grew up, who she would become, what her life would be like.
I would look at my wife and think of how devastating my death would be to her.
As she said, you're not going to find somebody else like me, so it would just be all of the sadness that my death would bring to others, and perhaps a little to you as well.
But it is the sadness that our death will bring.
It is all that we will miss by not being alive.
It is the loss of all of the highs and lows of life.
So what we fear is, or what makes us unhappy, is not being alive, not death itself, not the process of dying fundamentally, but of everything we're going to miss and everything that others will miss in us. but of everything we're going to miss and everything that And that to me is a very interesting distinction.
And it brings up something that I think is really challenging, which is that with an appreciation and an enjoyment and an enrichment of our lives comes axiomatically a growing fear or negative thoughts about About death.
At least that's the case for me.
And of course it could just be aging as well.
I mean, I'm 42, I'm in good health and so on, so I'm not particularly worried.
90% of people who make it to middle age make it to old age, so I'm not particularly worried about that.
I live a pretty healthy lifestyle at the gym and all.
I think that the interesting challenge is that the more meaningful and happier our lives become, The more we become afraid of death because the more we have to lose.
Now, that having been said, I think there's another kind of fear of death that occurs, right?
So just the one is the enrichment that we have.
The richness of our lives causes us to fear death all the more because we have so much more to lose.
And so I sort of compare, you know, if I'd not met Christina, if I'd not Gotten married, if I hadn't had a kid, then my fear of death would, in many ways, be less.
Because I would have that much left to lose.
There would be fewer people who would miss me.
I wouldn't be missing out on my daughter's future and so on.
So the more...
And part of what drove me on this path was the knowledge of death, right?
And knowing death in the abstract is a little different from really getting it in your gut, so to speak.
So, I mean, in hindsight, a lot of what went on for me in my early to mid-30s, insomnia and the sort of A breakdown of prior illusion and the false self that I went through, the couple of years that I was in therapy and so on,
that came out of a growing consciousness of mortality and a sort of desperate desire to struggle out from under these suffocating glacial blankets of illusion and fight my way through to something clear and true and powerful and wonderful and honest.
I felt like a ghost in my own life and that fear that I had was the idea of dying as I had grown up, which was dying in the grip of illusion and emptiness and depression and Kind of despair and nihilism.
I mean, if we're not close to people, it's very hard to feel real.
It's very hard to feel that there's honesty.
Because when we're not close to people, we're either around all of the wrong people or, and this is just another way of putting it, we can't be who we actually are for fear of offense and rejection, and so we live a life of empty-shell conformity, right? A void, wrapping around a void, in order to avoid the feeling of emptiness, which of course the false self is a desperate desire to avoid emptiness by inhabiting emptiness, right?
Like the state is the attempt to solve violence with violence, and excuse me, religion is the desire to solve ignorance with ignorance.
So for me, It was the cognizance, the growing really deep awareness of my own mortality, that I did not have an infinity of time left with which to be wrong, false, with which to not live in my values.
Because I think If I may put this metaphorically as usual, I kind of shot my values into the future like a grappling hook, thinking I had forever to climb.
And eventually it just turned into a kind of sky hook that yanked me up against my will, really, against my preferences for sure.
And that growing awareness of mortality is what raised for me, I think, The stakes of truth and falsehood.
And it began to impel me, again, this was an ecosystem revolt, it began to impel me to live with honesty, more honesty and vigor and integrity, and to not You know, shout and parade my values from the rooftops while living in an empty house of conformity on the ground floor that was not sustainable.
And it came out of mortality.
Procrastination is, in many ways, a belief in immortality.
I believe that we have forever to correct the mistakes that we're making and to live with courage and honor and vigor and depth and passion and openness and with anger, where appropriate.
So when I began to really get that I was going to die, and that really doesn't Didn't for me happen in my teens or in my twenties, but in my thirties I began to revolt against certain aspects of emptiness within my existence.
I began to find the falseness, the false self addictions unsustainable.
Because there is an aspect of childhood, when you go through an abusive childhood, such as I did, there's an aspect of that which is, I adopt this persona as permanent, in a sense, this false self as conformities as permanent, because the situation is never going to change.
There is a feeling of Eternity when we adopt these personas.
And of course, for a child, the situations that many of us went through, and hopefully some of us didn't, did have a feeling at the time of eternity, right?
I mean, for a child, a young child, the week is an eternity, let alone, you know, you'll be here for another decade or 15 years or in this situation for...
I mean, that is, in effect, eternity.
So... That grip, that procrastination of eternity that I will put off authenticity because I get to live forever and I can always do it later.
You know, like if you knew that you were going to live forever and you were overweight, how long would it take you to actually start dieting?
Well, a lot longer than if you knew that your dieting was interfering, your excess weight was interfering with your life and so on.
Nobody would quit smoking if smoking had no negative effects on your health, because, you know, it's a pleasurable thing to do, or whatever, right?
I mean, if you are a smoker.
So, the sense that our days in number are fixed, right?
That it is a pile of coins, or a bag of coins, and every day we take out a coin in the shape of a sunrise and on the flip side a sunset, and we throw it into the depths Of emptiness and history.
And that coin bag is finite, the pile of coins is finite, and we reach in and we don't know how many there are.
We can only take one, we don't know how many more there are.
Statistically we have some idea, but we simply don't know for sure.
And once we understand the gamble of the everyday, which is, how long do I have?
I could get hit by a bus, could get some sort of horrible illness, or any of these sorts of things.
We don't have forever.
And so we should try and invest, in my opinion, or at least this is what has been strongly inflicted upon me by my experience, both chosen and non-chosen, is we should invest, of course, as much into the richness of the everyday.
Right? That's courage and virtue and integrity and even love, I would say, to a large degree, that all of these things are habits.
And what we practice, we become.
And I use the word practice in both sense of the meaning there, right?
At least two of the many senses of meaning of the word practice.
Practice in terms of what we do and practice in terms of what we rehearse in action.
So, we are what we do, because our mind is empirical, which is why religious people don't kill themselves, right, to join God.
It's not just a commandment, right?
Our minds are empirical. There is no evidence of God, and that's why you need so much propaganda.
There is no evidence of government virtue, which is why you need government schools.
And we are what we do.
And for me, of course, as I mentioned, Dichotomy between my values and my actions, which, I mean, I certainly forgive myself for, now that I understand what transition was actually required, and that I did not have the money for two years of three hours a week of therapy, and to be able to get the time off from work when necessary, because I was an owner.
So, I forgive myself With gentleness and kindness for my lack of integrity in certain areas in the past, and also because, I mean, everything had to change, and it was not possible before this, before I did change it.
Like, you know, you might want puberty when you're nine or ten, but you have to wait until you're ready, right?
But there was an understanding as I got into my 30s that I wasn't going to live forever, and that I did not have forever to become who I was, or to stop pursuing the void of the false self and the fear of conformity.
And as a result, I now have a life that I absolutely love, and this has so much to do with your generosity, donators and subscribers, so thank you, of course, for that, as always, endlessly.
But now that I have a life that I love, I'm more scared to lose it.
And that doesn't mean that I wake up every day saying, hey, I hope I don't get hit by a bus today.
But my caution has increased.
I don't bike to the gym anymore because there's a couple of areas which are narrow bridges, fast cars, and gravel on the side, and it's too nerve-wracking.
There's no safe way to get to the gym by bike.
So I drive. And other things that I would have done in the past, I simply don't do, and I'm much more cautious now than I used to be.
I was much more reckless in the past.
So I have more caution now that I have more to lose.
And before you get what you really want in life, death is kind of a...
well, the end of life is kind of a mixed...
it's an ambivalent situation.
And so I sort of, you know, this is sort of the paradox around death, at least that I've experienced, that the more you get what you want out of life, the more you're concerned about, you know, losing life.
As if you...
And I think there's no way around that.
You can't have a desire without...
You can't have a desire or a happiness without the fear of losing it.
And we're all going to lose our happiness.
And we're going to lose our unhappiness as well, right?
That's the mixed blessing to some degree of the end of life.
But you can't have these wonderful things in life without becoming afraid of losing them.
them, at least that was certainly my experience when I had these health scares.
I mean, to a smaller degree I experienced this when I first went full-time.
On FDR. For the first, like, more than a year, really.
God. Yeah, a year and three quarters, maybe?
No, a year and a half. No, a year, a little over a year.
I was having the most amazing time, and thrilling and terrifying, because I loved it so much that I was afraid I was going to lose it, or it wasn't going to work.
I still have those concerns, but much less now, right?
So the more we love, the more we fear.
That is, it's the yin and the yang, right?
You can't have something without fearing losing it, and we're all going to lose happiness.
So, that's sort of one aspect of death that, and I mean, of course, When we're so deeply loved as I am by Christina and at least needed by my daughter, knowing the suffering that they would experience if I were to die would only add to that.
And of course if you're not loved, you don't have that fear.
If you're not loved...
I mean, if you're just... I mean, let's go to the opposite extreme, right?
If you're just some horrible person who makes life difficult for everyone, and deep down you know they're damn well gonna be happy when you're dead, Then it doesn't have the same agony of leaving those you love with this void, right, of you not being there for them to love anymore.
So, again, the more that we bring value to people's lives, the harder it is to face the end of our own, because we also know that we're taking that value, that love, that happiness, that joy, or it's being taken away from us, and it's being taken away from others, which is, I mean, just an ultimate tragedy.
So the more meaningful our lives are and happy our lives are to ourselves, the more meaning and happiness we bring to others, the more we view death with a particular kind of agony.
And, you know, I don't think there's any cure.
That seems to me something like...
Just what we would call the human condition, which is the irredeemable reality of a biological organism.
Now, Galileo said, I think it was Galileo who said, that we are alive only because others have died, right? So if we were some eternal Then we would not need birth, right?
Nobody would die, so we wouldn't need reproduction.
There would be nothing of that sort.
And so, in a very real way, we're only alive because others have died.
That's a very sort of fundamental fact of existence.
You and I We're only alive because others have died and if there was no such thing as death then we would never come to be.
We would never come to life.
And so to hate and fear the end of life, which is natural, is to really hate and fear life itself because we're only alive because of the fact that there is death and thus Because there is death, we need birth, which is why we're alive.
And that's a minor philosophical point, but it's something that I think is a very helpful thing to think about, to remind ourselves that we are only able to perceive tragedy because of death, and therefore death itself cannot be a pure tragedy, because otherwise we would not be alive if there were no such thing as death.
So, I mean, this is something, it comes with the territory to me as an important thing around finding happiness in life.
You know, it comes with the territory is something that I've, you know, I used during the media stuff that was going on and all that.
Well, you know, it comes with the territory when you help victims of child abuse.
People are going to get upset.
It comes with the territory.
There's no way around it.
And death comes with the territory.
And as long as we're conscious of the fact that the more rich and meaningful our lives are and the more happiness and meaning we bring to other people's lives, the worse the end of life becomes, then we can be conscious and aware of that and not avoid the joys in life for fear of losing the joys in life, which Is, I think, a net negative.
In my favorite film, Room of the View, someone sings a song where it ends, easy live and quiet die.
And I've always sort of, I don't believe in this sort of Richard Branson sail around the world hanging onto the legs of an albatross, but I do believe in living richly and deeply and passionately and not having this kind of life where you're afraid of gaining values because you fear they will be taken away.
Because all our values will be taken away by death, by the end of our life.
So, to avoid values because of the inevitable end of values seems to me kind of a loss, and a net loss.
And that's another aspect of life that I'd sort of like to talk about, at least things that I've observed around death.
Now, the friends that I had in my teens and 20s and 30s, early to mid 30s, maybe some late 30s, To my way of thinking, it doesn't matter any particulars, but to my way of thinking, they avoided going after really great values.
To me, they settled into lives of bland and sometimes, I think, fairly dismal mediocrity.
And they were spared The stress, the storm and stress of outgrowing their history.
And maybe you know people like this, or maybe you ask somebody like this, I don't know.
And so they achieved, in a sense, they experienced less anxiety in their 20s and their 30s than I did because I was in a restless growing spirit and constantly striving to outgrow the limitations of my history.
And so people that I knew They did not try to outgrow their histories.
They basically just reproduced them to varying degrees of sophistication.
And they didn't do therapy, they didn't keep intellectual journals, they didn't strive to overcome themselves, they didn't confront themselves or challenge themselves in fundamental ways.
One of them went to an anger management class, but that was court-mandated, and he refused to do therapy even after I strongly suggested it.
So they did not try to overcome their histories, and so they lived lives of complacency and relative, to me at least, relative peace throughout their 20s and 30s.
But then, and this is really more true in their 40s, early 40s, and to some mid-40s, What happened then was they had significant depression.
And when you only look at things in your teens and 20s and sort of early to mid-30s, when you only look at, oh man, why am I struggling so hard?
And why are other people...
Not confronting their history, not dealing with, you know, for some problematic pasts, to say the least.
But why are some opting for cynicism and eye-rolling when it comes to psychology and self-knowledge and wisdom and so on?
Why do they get to get away with that and seem to be fine, whereas I am constantly struggling to overcome history, to grow, to challenge myself, to change my ways of thinking about myself?
The feeling then, of course, becomes one of...
They're healthier, you know, they didn't get their legs broken so they don't have to do rehab and I'm struggling to regain the strength of legs that they have innately by having them not broken, right?
So the feeling that we're broken and we need to fix ourselves through an immense amount of work is something that really occurred for me.
I felt that a lot. I had to fight that a lot during my storm decades, right?
And it can be really hard to believe that they're riding for a fall and you're building from strength to strength, right?
To sort of recognize and understand that we're all broken and we all need to be fixed and those who don't are in some ways the most broken of all because they actively often will interfere and put down other people's attempts to heal themselves.
It's, you know, the tortoise and the hare thing.
Slow and steady wins the race and people who dart around and don't take a steady course of action We end up not doing particularly well, at least in my opinion.
And that's sort of been my clear experience.
And so the people who don't lay the foundation for middle age, and as will occur in 20 years for old age for me, those who don't lay down the foundations for a mentally healthy middle age seem to be doing all kinds of fine.
In their 20s and 30s.
And then they hit a kind of depression, right?
Because they haven't prepared and they haven't become authentic and they haven't struggled to overcome.
And so they then get caught in the grip of repeating their histories and it suddenly doesn't look like such a good deal anymore, right?
It really, really doesn't look like such a good deal anymore to have taken that choice, to have taken that path or that road.
And I think the interesting thing, at least that I would think about that, is that their lives now are not rich, not deep, not happy, not healthy in a way that I would understand it, in a way that I would look at it.
And I think that's true.
I don't think that's just my opinion or thoughts.
I think that's true.
And when you don't deal with your history, you don't struggle to overcome and to grow, and then you end up in a situation where the history really does become your prison, in my experience and observations, then I don't know what your relationship is to death.
Because life just seems to me like a shrinking prison cell in that situation.
And, you know, 40, to a lot of my listeners, that may seem kind of old.
It's really not, right? I mean, I'm not...
If I live to 84, which seems reasonable given my history and health, I'm only halfway through.
Of course, the first 20 years were a complete washout.
I've had 20 years of my own self, and I get twice that going forward with some diminishing capacities later on in life.
Of course, no guarantee for any of it.
But for those of the people that I knew growing up who are in their early 40s now, One of whom just died, actually.
Anyway, maybe that's partly why I'm thinking about this.
But, you know, they are another 40 years to go, or maybe 50, or maybe 35.
That's a long time to listen to the broken record of a history that won, right?
To have the same kind of habits.
And I think for those people, there is a highly ambivalent relationship to death, right?
Because with the knowledge of death comes the end of procrastination and the The sometimes catastrophic rise of DEFCON 4, of emergency stations, of must-change, times ticking on, days are draining away.
But if you're not capable of change, and I would say that if people who haven't significantly examined their lives and challenged their mythical preconceptions...
Which, you don't have to come out of abuse.
I mean, all the stuff we're taught through religion, through schools, through statism, through the media, that's all nonsense, right?
It's all destructive nonsense, so it doesn't have to have anything in particular to do with any kind of significant abuse.
It's just that the culture we live in is false, right?
It's immoral and Epistemological and metaphysical lies, right?
Political lies, well, political is lies, right?
So the falsehoods that we're all raised in, even in the absence of specific parental abuse, you need to be confronted and overcome to be authentic, to be true to who you are.
And if you haven't done it by the time in your late 30s and early 40s, that's really tough.
It's really tough to start, and I've not seen anybody who really has, and maybe I'm sure there are some, Actually, no, I can think of a few, but certainly none of the people that I've known, I knew growing up, have made that transition to my knowledge.
And then it becomes very interesting, because then it's like, well, what is your relationship to death?
If tomorrow is going to be pretty much the same as yesterday, but with middle-aged and thereafter depression mixed in.
And that is a really tough situation to be in.
And that, I think, is where some of the desperation that people experience comes from.
Some of the desperation that people experience around life.
And in which case, you don't have that much to live for.
There's not going to be that much change or growth, but it's in fact a kind of defensive false self-decline and depression and emptiness and hostility and all that kind of those empty echoing defensive things.
Emotions. That's all you're going to be left with.
And I think for people who live that kind of life, I think that death is sort of a mixed blessing.
Because it is the end of life, but life is emptiness and defensive repetition and attack and self-justification, all of which are exhausting and debilitating and enervating.
And so for those people, I think death is not as horrifying a specter as it is for people who You know, have achieved the life that they want, the authenticity, and the fundamental relaxation and happiness that comes from self-acceptance, self-knowledge, wisdom, courage, all the virtues that we talk about here.
So, I think there is no escape.
You know, you either have the life that you want, and then you fear losing it, or you don't have the life that you want, in which case the fear is of having never had it.
I think there's fear. That's kind of what I'm saying.
I hope this makes some kind of sense to you and not just a complete ramble fest.
Think of it as a distant sequel to the Death of My Friend's Mother podcast from many moons ago.
And I look forward to your donations.
▲
Export Selection