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Sept. 30, 2021 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
28:28
WHY FEAR DEATH?
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Could it not be said it's the fault of Australians that their government slash media is as strong as it is?
Yeah, sorry, I don't mean to brush off that question.
I mean, that's a very, very important question.
I would say that certainly since...
The onset of widely available internet, people believing the mainstream narrative are much more at fault.
So I think that's a good redirect on that point.
Let's see here.
A lot of elderly people support lockdowns because they are scared of the virus.
Yeah, for sure. You can't have a life because people who are 83 could die when the average lifespan is 82.
I don't know. See, I mean, this is a big question, right?
It's a big question. And, of course, the Christians have an answer, which is to die is to rejoin Jesus in heaven.
So it's not something to be feared.
I don't know. See, I mean, 55, you know, you do start to get a bit of a whiff of your own mortality, not to mention having cancer.
But I don't know.
When I'm 80... Will I be desperate for every extra minute?
I don't know. I don't know.
Will I say, okay, I'll take some risks that could go badly, but if you don't take any risks, you're not really alive.
And a good chunk of our consciousness is designed to Measure risk and figure out risk-reward.
So no risk is no humanity.
No risk is no depth.
No risk is no philosophy.
And all life, as you know, is risk and loss.
All life is risk and loss.
You know, I was just today, I was sitting across from my wife.
We were chatting and the thought pops into my head, as I think it does for everyone from time to time, that, you know, one day one of us isn't going to be here.
She's gone. She's looking at an empty chair that will never be filled.
Never be filled. I don't know, maybe we'll both die at the same time.
But, and most likely she'll be looking at my empty chair because women live longer than men.
And All the love that we have, 20 years and counting, of just being the greatest people in each other's lives and having this amazing, amazing cathedral of love that we inhabit that I'm very blessed and have worked hard to achieve, but it's still accidental to some degree that I met such the right person for me.
He's perfect for me. He's perfect for me and I'm perfect for her.
And all of the love that we have, that we share, Everything that we treasure has an hourglass to it, right?
There's sand running through it.
Everything that we treasure. Everyone we love, we're going to lose.
Whether they're going to lose us or we lose each other.
Say, ah, well, you know, maybe I just won't fall in love so I won't get hurt.
Well, that hurts even more. To lose is life.
You don't risk, you don't gamble, you don't invest, you don't Attach.
You don't treasure.
You know, time snatches every beautiful thing from our hands and turns it to dust, ash, nothing.
That's what time does.
We're only here because we replaced everyone who came before.
Everyone who came.
We were standing on mountains of dust, mountains of ash.
We're on a ladder Of sarcophagi.
So I don't know. When I get old, old, old, I saw some video, some joke video, it's kind of like a joke video, where the woman was like, she's blowing out the candles on her cake, she's really old, right?
And they're like, yay, you're 87.
And she's like, I hope there's not one more year.
A little dark, but I don't know when I get into my 80s.
Am I going to be like, I would sacrifice the world for one more day?
I'd like to think, I'd like to think that if I've lived a good, honest, honorable life, contributed good to the world, stood up against evil, advanced the cause of virtue.
You know, I did this rough calculation the other day in a show that I and you have stopped about a billion assaults upon children since this show began.
About one billion assaults on children have been prevented by this show.
Not to mention how many, I don't know, hundreds of thousands of circumcisions and so on, right?
So, I don't know that I can live a better life than what I'm doing.
I don't know how. I don't know how.
I mean, if I knew how, I'd be doing that, right?
I think I've lived about as maximum a good life as possible without getting full Socratesed, right?
So, I don't know.
I mean, at the end of my life, I sort of look forward down the tunnel of time and say, okay, like at some point, you get into bed and you don't get out again, right?
The hospital bed, maybe you get into bed, and the doctor basically looks at you and says, yeah, it's just a matter of time now.
Your organs are shutting down, whatever it is.
Right now, I would sacrifice, what, for another day to be in an old creaky body with no future?
I don't know. My mind is never going to be as good as it was in my late 20s.
My body is never going to be as good as it was when it was 18.
I'm buoyed up by lots of exercise and eating well and maintaining a healthy weight.
I was reading the other day that if you can't fit into your high school genes, you're a significant risk for diabetes.
Actually, I do keep one old pair of genes around to just check how I'm doing.
Actually, they're loose on me now.
Anyway. So, I don't know.
What do you guys think when you get old?
Will death come as a true and deep horror that you would do anything to escape?
In other words, let's say you're old, 75 or 80.
And somebody sits in front of you and gives you a choice.
And they say, look, you can go on a cruise with your friends.
But there's like a 1-2% chance you might get sick and die.
It's a two-month cruise.
You go through the Aegean.
You go through Mediterranean.
You go up the coast of Spain.
It's a beautiful cruise.
And let's say you're moving around enough to go, right?
You say, well, you can go on this cruise, but there's a 1-2% chance you might die.
Maybe it's a 5% chance that you might die.
Because, you know, there's an illness.
The virus. Could get it.
Or you don't go on the cruise.
You stay in this little room and you double your chances of living.
Right? So instead of a 2% chance that you're going to die, there's just a 1% chance that you're going to die just from old age in this room.
I'd like to think, and I believe this will be the case, I'd like to think I'd say, suit me up sailor, I'm going on a cruise!
Why would you want to, just to maybe have a couple of extra months, why would you want to just sit in a room?
Why? It's not how we got here, that's not how we got to be the apex predator's top of the food chain.
To live is to risk.
And some risks pay off and some of them don't, but that's life, man.
You know, as I get older, and at some point your body's just like, yeah, I mean...
A, I'm not going to inform you when you pull the muscle, and B, I'm going to make it hurt for a month.
Right now, it's better. I use these massage guns to sort of pound it off.
I was racing with my daughter, climbing these...
They look like big giant spiderwebs, but they're made of ropes, and they're in playgrounds.
And so, like, I don't know, 10, 20 times or whatever, 10 or 20 times, we just...
We raced to the very top of it, and it was pretty high, right?
And I was like, my butt muscles, my glutes, they're a little throbby the next day, right?
They didn't give me any complaints at the time, but we just went back and did it again today.
So, you know, you just get kind of creaky.
You get kind of old. So everything I do is a risk now in a way that it wasn't before, right?
If I play tennis with my wife, we go play tennis.
If I play too hard, I might ache.
Why? That's new. It just happens, right?
So you get 55, right?
Does that mean I'm not going to go play tennis?
No. Because if I don't go play tennis, maybe I get fat, maybe I have a heart attack, maybe I get diabetes, whatever.
There's no risk-free situation.
So I'd like to think, okay, if my chances are double of death, if I go on the cruise, I'm going on the cruise.
I'm going, I'm going to live, I'm going to live, I'm going to live.
Because there is no risk-free existence.
We know this, right?
But it's just important to clarify and speak that truth really importantly.
Because if you don't go on the cruise, you have regret.
You've got the frost on your windows, the bare trees outside.
A cold sky.
Blowing snow. You're stuck in your room.
You're bored. You're frustrated.
And regret is eating away at you.
You say, yes, but at least I didn't go on the cruise where I could risk dying.
It's like now you're being eaten alive by regret.
haven't solved the problem.
I don't know.
I suspect Thank you.
From my still relatively middle-aged vantage point, I suspect that the people who are least comfortable with risk when they're old are the people who've risked the least and who have regrets.
I think regrets make you afraid of death.
They do. Because Let's say that you weren't great to your kids, and they have complaints against you, and maybe they've talked about them, and you've just kind of brushed them off, or, you know, I did the best I could and stopped being so petty, and it was the times, and blah, blah, blah, right?
Oh, I guess I was a bad parent or whatever, right?
Let's say you've just kind of brushed aside their concerns.
Well, what happens, of course, is that you have regret about that, but as long as there's a future, as long as there's a future down the road, you can have this fantasy, and it usually is a fantasy, you can have this fantasy...
That you'll fix it.
One day you'll call.
You'll never know just how much I love you.
You'll never know just how much I care.
If there was some other way to tell you I love you, I swear I don't know how.
You'll never know if you don't know now.
Everybody's got this belief.
Just, I'll fix it.
And then they throw this solution, this better behavior, just down the road.
Down the road. And they just kind of blank it out and suppress it.
It's in the nowhere land of someday.
And then I think when they see that blank black wall approaching, they freak out.
I'm not ready. I haven't done the right things yet.
I haven't fixed it. I'm not ready.
And I think they're terrified of death.
Because death demands that they fix it before they go.
That they fix it before they go.
But if they fix it, oh man, that's brutal.
Thank you.
Why don't people fix things before they die?
They don't. They don't.
They don't. Why not?
I'll tell you why. It's also why they fear death so much.
They don't fix things before they die.
Because if you've spent...
30 to 80, 50 years not being super nice to your kids and then you finally act nicely towards them when you're 80.
The amount of regret you'll have about the previous half century will eat you head to toe.
You'll be consumed.
The level of regret that you'd have for acting well, for acting better, for acting morally, The longer you act in an immature and immoral fashion, petty, vindictive, avoidant, the longer you act, the less likely you are to fix it.
Because then the more regret you'll have about all of the years or decades that you acted badly for.
Which is why you don't hope for turnarounds from old people who've treated you badly.
You don't hope for it. You can hope for it if you want, but you're going to be disappointed.
Guaranteed. And I've talked to enough people with old parents and my father died last year.
My mother is very old, may in fact be dead for all I know, but I doubt it.
I probably would have heard about that.
And did my father reach out and fix things?
Nope. He died in a hospital.
I assume he had some time before he died.
I assume he knew that there was a big risk or at some point he knew he was going to die.
Didn't reach out, didn't call, didn't fix things.
Why? Because then he'd sit there and say, oh gosh, my son is 54!
I spent more than a half century not being a good father.
Trying to turn it around at the end would be way too much regret and pain.
Way too much. Instead, he let...
I assume he approved these things ahead of time.
Instead, he let everyone in my family be listed with the one exception.
My daughter was listed. Everyone in my family was listed with the one exception.
My wife was not listed.
She was conspicuously absent, and that's not by accident.
You can be a jerk from beyond the grave.
Really. So, that's a big question.
How are you going to face down the reaper?
How are you going to face down the dude with the scythe who's going to cut the strings that bind you to life? Or when one of my characters, my main character, was dying in one of my novels, I said, said and it was it remained to be seen whether she floated up to a perfect choir of angels or fell down to a flat mattress of wet meat just dead
so i think that the fear of death and the desire for one more day it is uh it's the desire to avoid confronting the death that will injure pettiness and that you will have lived and died a petty and vindictive person a waster of all that is holy and beautiful in human existence, a minor curse and plague lit upon the world.
Someone who diminished rather than enhanced.
Somebody who insulted rather than elevated.
Someone who demanded rather than provided.
Can't turn that around at the end.
But that war coming is like, holy shit, I'm going to die as petty as I lived.
Oh my god.
There is no magic glowing fingered intervention that moves the chessboard of my minuscule pettiness to anything other than a checkmate and a loss.
And I think...
I do think...
I do think that when people get old, if they've lived poorly, pettily, meanly, How do you stay mean?
How do you stay petty?
How do you not...
How do you not turn it around?
How do you not...
If I've acted in a way that is not to my standards, I mean, it's like a thorn in my brain.
I have to fix it.
I have to call the person.
I have to uphold it. I have to fix it.
I don't know how people...
Stay mean, stay petty, stay vindictive, stay insulting, stay abusive.
I don't know. But I think that there is this desperate sense when they get near the end.
This panic. Because I think people stay petty because they keep pushing forward in time the moment they grow up and take responsibility.
And that's what the devil would want, right?
The devil would want you to say, oh, you don't have to fix it now.
You can fix it tomorrow. Don't bother with it now.
Relax and watch the movie. Fix it later.
Fix it later. Just do later.
Fix it later. Don't worry about it right now.
You've earned some relax. You've earned some downtime.
Put your feet up. Have some chips.
Let them fix it. Oh, you're always fixing it.
Just do it later. Do it later.
Push it off. Push it off. Procrastinate.
Procrastinate. And then that wall comes up.
And you realize that you've put off any kind of decency.
Any kind of elevated, better, moral, productive, helpful behavior.
You've put that off and put that off.
And now you're out of time.
you're done.
And the devil distracted you into being a shit heel your whole life.
A friend of mine, many years ago, this is really, really important.
There's two things. One is that I saw these two old women on a bus.
One was 80, one was maybe 65.
And they were just, it was mother and daughter.
They were just bickering and snarking, and you did this, and that's the wrong handbag, and I told you to bring a coat.
I'm like, holy shit.
You can be old as fuck.
And still a retarded toddler.
You can look like an over-tan, shrunken-ass raisin.
And still have eternal petty temper tantrums.
That was chilling as hell.
Because we grow whether we're mature or not.
We go through puberty whether we're emotionally mature, self-actualized, honest, virtuous.
We can have kids whether we're virtuous or not.
We can have a job often whether we're virtuous or not.
In fact, sometimes the less virtuous the better job.
Politics. But emotional maturity, I mean, you can still be like a petty, ridiculous toddler moving the levers of a giant, wrinkled human frame until you just pitch straight into the great beyond.
Take the six-foot dirt nap with roses on top forever.
That was number one. Number two was a guy I knew who got married...
And his mom was just, his parents had separated and he hadn't seen his mom much because she was just a real witch with a capital B. And he was getting married and he'd said to his mom, like, you can't come because you're just causing so much trouble.
And then she showed up with a couple of mean friends and just disrupted the whole ceremony and caused a real scene and just yelled at people and just ruined his marriage day.
Just ruined it. And she was maybe mid-60s, late 60s at that point.
Just gathered her little friends together and came in with that tight-lipped, unlaid, Karen, genocide-of-happiness energy.
I'm thinking, my God, you can be in your late 60s and you can still be a total bunt.
I haven't seen my mother close to a quarter century.
Close to a quarter century.
She's going to die. She's going to go into the ground.
She's not going to turn it around. She's not going to fix things.
It's too much of a loss. It's too much of a loss.
So why is it that people are so desperate to cling on to extra life, even if it's just locked in a room, not seeing anyone, sometimes locked from the outside, I think that they're desperately avoiding death because they've desperately avoided virtue.
I think they can't stand.
See, the thing is, oh, well, you know, it's not that you're afraid of dying.
It's just you were afraid of living.
It's like, no, it's not that.
Death is when the bill comes due.
Right? Or everyone's dependence on the government.
And COVID is when the bill comes due, right?
I think, I mean, a lot of life is preparing for a good death.
Not a huge amount, but a lot of life is preparing for a good death.
And people don't seem to have very good deaths.
And I think that life flashing before you And you will never be the...
Like, if you haven't become the person you want to be, it's never going to happen when you're old.
It's too late. Because if you become the person you want to be when you're old, and 90% of your life is behind you, you look back at that 90% and say, I fucking wasted it.
Holy shit!
I married the wrong person.
I raised my kids the wrong way.
I was petty, self-righteous, vindictive, judgmental, narcissistic, self-aggrandizing, never admitted that I was wrong.
Thank you.
Pride, vanity, insecurity.
I never became the person that I wanted to be.
And now that the final infinite bill is coming due, I realize there's no chance for me to ever become the person I want to be.
So I don't know, man.
Why are they clinging so much to another day?
Okay.
Because it's too late to apologize.
And death is going to come and take them in their petty alien form.
Alright, sorry, I've got a lot to catch up with.
Thank you.
Alright. Richard Dawkins.
Yeah, Dickie D, man.
He says that, yeah, pedophilia wasn't so bad.
Not as bad as Vosch, though.
Oh, my God.
Sorry, let me...
I'm just going to go down to the bottom and read up.
Is it 75% of Australians improve over the lockdown?
Is that right? Wow.
The one Steph stream I catch live and we deep dive into my grave.
I outgrew my parents emotionally at a very young age and it's painful trying to get through to them about anything.
Why try?
You're not there to spend your life wandering the graveyard attempting to resuscitate the dead.
Yeah, when you're raised by petty parents, immature parents, one day you just look at them and you say, I outgrew you at the age of three. I outgrew you at the age of three.
Thank you.
And then you've got another 15 years of trying to navigate this.
And of course, the other thing too, when people act in petty, vindictive, abusive manners, when you look at them with an honest, rational, objective assessment of exactly who they are, they blow up and they just hit the roof.
When you look at somebody you don't respect, and that's clear in your clear vision of them, and they can see this because they look in the mirror.
My mom's very pretty, right?
Very beautiful. So they look in the mirror.
They see this beautiful person. They look in the mirror of your eyes, and they see Gollum at best, and they know that that's how they see themselves deep down.
They rebel against your honest assessment because they rebel against their honest assessment.
So you've got to hide it.
You gotta hide. You just gotta hide.
You gotta hide everything you think, everything you evaluate, everything you judge, everything you know about the pettiness of the people around you.
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