正文
Not inspiring but — as far as we know — true. What, then, is the point?
1. Death and Identity Are Not Relevant
In his masterpiece
The World as Will and Representation
, Arthur Schopenhauer tackled the idea of death perhaps better than anybody before and since.
The fear of death is among the most common anxieties faced by us because it marks the end of what we call life. Life is what we know and what we build an identity around, and the idea of having that stripped from us is terrifying.
We have created the concept of a legacy and a lasting memory to lessen its burden, and to strip away part of the damage that we perceive it does to us, but we haven’t yet managed to overcome its power. In fact, on a subconscious level, much of our day to day behavior can be traced back to this.
As a result, we live for tomorrow. We delay gratification for ambition because by doing so, we’re able to momentarily contribute something to a future beyond our reach. Even if we don’t survive, the idea is that our identities will.
While this process does add joy to lives of many people, taken to the extreme, it’s problematic because it’s built on a subconscious foundation of fear.
Schopenhauer’s insight was that death isn’t the opposite of life. In fact, what we call life is just one part of something that’s occurring on a cosmic scale.
It represents a larger turning point in which the mass and energy that create our concept of reality at any given moment slowly cease to do so. There is nothing to feel or experience once that occurs just like there was nothing to feel or experience before birth.
There is no pain. There is no pleasure. There is no awareness. While the idea of nothingness terrifies our living selves, when we do transform into such a state, we’re not going to have any concept of it.
