Morality Arises From Mortality

Imagine being an Earthling and believing your species would live forever amongst the stars and not partake of the nature of everything you are and everything that gave you life in the first place by dying.

Imagine being so afraid to do something that absolutely everything before you has done that you would pretend you were going to live forever for your entire life.

Now imagine the one minuscule level of mental abstraction above that required to apply this at the species level.

I understand that immortalists are fond of reason.

What is the reason for wanting to live forever amongst the stars?

IS there a reason? Or is it all just fears and appetites?

Do immortalists have a particular tendency about imagining death?

Do they try never to think about it? Or have a certitude that it will never happen?

Do they think about it all the time?

If so, … what do they imagine it will be like?

Or are they all over the map on this?

I experience some aspect of my own death probably a thousand times a day.

It first happened to me involuntarily, in the forms of anxiety or nightmares, and they definitely disturbed me, but I stuck with it. I clearly wasn’t going to escape it, so I tried just being with it.

I guess it took a while, but it was obviously the most important thing in the world as soon as I realized there was even a minute amount of difference this could make in the terror and suffering, and I was probably, I dunno, 16 years old when I realized I wasn’t scared anymore?

I mean I was scared about all kinds of things, but I wasn’t Afraid of Death™ anymore.

I was definitely afraid of dying, and how horrible it usually seemed, but that seemed like something I could have SOME degree of influence over.

Had to be ready for surprises, too, though.

So I just started working on that stuff and living my life, and so far my life has turned out pretty beautiful and joyous, although fairly challenging, but not as hard as it gets, especially in matters of health and wanting to live.

I’d like to think my attitude about dying helped me live pretty well, though. Helped me say yes to things, accept sacrifices and losses for greater goods, look out for other people, get married and have kids. Work jobs. Knowing none of it will last forever helps me savor it.

I look ahead now to a “rest of my life,” and it seems kinda tractable, even if it’s not half over yet. Might be.

Death is with me every day. I try to see into it. Feel into it. Remember it. I can taste death in my mouth at any time.

It’s terrifying. But it’s invigorating.

When someone around me is dying — or is losing someone else — I pay more attention. Everybody around it has death on them. In them. We have to be there for each other, because death is scary. Understandably so, to most people, to some extent, I reckon.

This is why people act so beautifully when death is around, and why stories about it are so beautiful, even when they’re super simple.

They show us how we should treat each other all the time.

Because death is always around.

So where death goes, there’s beauty and goodness.

Anyway, that’s what being a human is about, if you ask me. The entire point of human life. So use this take as a metaphor for our whole species to understand the other part.