(c) Charles D. Hayes
In Staring at the Sun, Irvin D. Yalom, says
the gift of self-awareness comes at a high price. “Our existence is forever
shadowed by the knowledge that we will grow, blossom, and inevitably, diminish
and die.”
Death
anxiety separates us from all the earth’s creatures. We are the only species
whose lifelong motivation is subconsciously hijacked in myriad ways to avoid or
postpone the inevitability of nonexistence. Death anxiety is the indoctrinating
lifeforce of religion and ground zero for the reasons for doing what we do in
life.
Creating
art, literature, scientific research and discovery, reading, sports, hobbies,
business achievement, and gaining wealth and especially power are all
manifestations of a means of pushing back and seeming to close the door the
grim reaper is forever threatening to open.
There
is mountainous research material in the field of existential psychology that
supports mortality salience as being the breach in the dam of the human
condition—at the crux of global conflict, and yet, for all practical purposes
the subject never gains traction.
I’ve
have written about this human dilemma at great length. This core humanitarian concern is too often
treated like a curious novelty, instead of what it is: humanity’s Achilles
Heel, and the subject never achieves momentum in everyday public discourse,
even though how it is ultimately dealt with may decide our species
survival.
Strangers,
chaos, change, and uncertainty are subconscious reminders of the inevitability
of demise, and even the act of forgetting hints of nonexistence. But nothing is
quite so toxic and psychologically threatening as the feeling that one is
living an unfulfilling life, and this ethos lies at the crux of the political
divide in America. Globally millions of people feel threatened by otherness (a
metaphorical cousin of nonexistence) many of them need someone to blame for
their fears and social contempt works miraculously as a suitable distraction.
Worse,
in some cultures the shelter of submission and losing themselves in a cause
produces terrorists, eager to blow themselves up so that in some deranged
sense, they can feel that their lives will have mattered. Yalom says his
ultimate concerns as a psychiatrist for therapy are: death, isolation, meaning
in life, and freedom.
My
point is that we are in the grip of an authoritative regime of dogmatists,
whose rhetoric for gaining the support of their constituents, fuels the fear
that breeds existential angst. When the future seems overtly threatened by
otherness, nostalgia replaces hope, hatred becomes common currency, and one’s
identity group is suddenly perceived as having been an inadequate shelter from
the inevitable.
We
have people these days with enough wealth to spend ten thousand dollars a day
for a thousand years and still be rich. That these people are assumed to be
acting strictly out of greed is a mistaken assumption. The money they are
making, and the power associated with it, is a subconscious means of
metaphorically poking a finger in the eye of the grim reaper, it means they are
still here, still alive, and that they prevail.
The ultra-rich people fortunate enough to figure this out for
themselves, stand out, often by giving away their fortune and by devoting their
remaining years to helping their fellow man.
In
the Jan/Feb issue of The Atlantic there is a feature about WeCroak, it’s an app
that sends you a notice five times a day that you are going to die. Being the
existentialist that I am, I signed up for the cheerful reminders. I’m curious about the effect of being rudely
and randomly informed that I am soon to be toast, and I will let you know what
it is like.
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