I’ve been contemplating my mortality a lot since the birth of my son this past March. I went through a brief period of fear at the thought of dying, but reading a handful of stories about near death experience survivors helped me calm down and realize the actual act of dying is pretty peaceful and calming. Selection bias, I know. Maybe only the ones who were chill with it were allowed to come back. That’s all the more reason to be chill with it.
If it isn’t the act of dying itself that bothers me, what is it? It’s not the thought of nonexistence. There’s that old line about how you didn’t exist for billions of years before you did, and you didn’t care then, but in reality I actually just do not believe death is the end of qualia just like that. Qualia are far too mysterious to be written off, in the zeroeth place. In the first place, it seems straightforwardly silly to mind/body dualist me the same way the polar opposite seems straightforwardly silly to most of my monist friends. All of the evidence of my senses suggests, almost tautologically, that I will continue existing; I see no real metaphysical reason to believe that will stop merely because I lose my physical form here, and a lot of empirical evidence that the train keeps chugging. If we wanted to get really out there I’d point to my actual life plus those NDE accounts as Bayesian evidence that whatever comes after is probably going to be pretty chill too. A kind of reconstructed heaven if you will.
So it’s not the act of dying, and it’s not what comes after. And yet there’s something about it that bothers me. I think I’ve figured it out, to the best a man can without losing his mind: Death bothers me because I have things to do. I can’t do those things if I’m dead. I have a son to raise. I have a wife to love. I have the Amalfi coast to see. I have the four-plate deadlift to hit.
I think this is more profound than it lets on at first. I have had the sad experience of knowing some depressed people, deeply, deeply depressed. I was myself mildly depressed for a few years in my flotsam teens. It’s certainly not the case that depressed people don’t have things they are driven to do, but I do suspect that having something - anything - that you take seriously enough to not want to die before it is done has a protective effect against the worst of the ailment. It might even have a protective effect against getting the ailment at all, at least in those edge cases where genes aren’t driving it to be a biological near-certainty or the like.
I find myself eating healthier now after I had my son. I find myself a lot more interested in going to the gym, and having nice conversations with people, and just generally taking care of my health. I know that none of this guarantees I won’t drop dead tomorrow, of course. They all just tilt the odds in my favor. And those odds heavily favor me now, and they will start to steadily less heavily favor me as I age, but you know what? By the time I get there, hopefully, death will bother me less, because I have done some of those things. I think this is how I fundamentally make sense of all of those good old people who say things like “I’ve lived a full life” - they aren’t lying, they literally did the things they put at the top of their list and are at peace with maybe not making it all the way to the bottom.
I’ve already recounted on this blog how not so recently I hit 1000 days without drinking alcohol. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this but I’ve probably actually driven a car maybe a two-digit number of times in my entire life. I take reasonable precautions around this whole “don’t die” thing. I’m a little upset with past me that he didn’t take it more seriously, and I know future me would be upset with current me if I didn’t in turn.
But also? I have life insurance, and a will and stuff. My wife and I have contingency plans in place for if I do die. And that takes a great deal out of the sting of it for me. Raising my family is maybe the thing I want to do most before death takes me, but I understand that I cannot absolutely guarantee that I will be there for them. In such unfortunate times, knowing they’ll get enough money that my wife can finish college and probably put the little ones through college too is an incredible gift, and I am extremely grateful to the highly developed market economies I find myself inhabiting that I can do this for less than a week’s worth of my take home pay each year.
And when I think over all of that reasonable needle-nudging I’ve been doing, I feel … good. Good not just in the “Yippee I statistically get to live another day” good, but good in the sense that nearly all future possible versions of me benefit by this action good. When I stop and try to imagine, say, 100 copies of me all starting from this point in my history and branching out into all kinds of strange and twisted tendrils in the future, I see people who are broadly on better tendrils on the days where I do my pull ups (ugh) and eat my lentils (yum) than on the days where I watch How To with John Wilson and eat frozen pizza (feh).
There seems to be something morally good about this. Even if 99 of those 100 people never turn out to exist, I am doing my part to shape the envelope of the unfolding universe to be just a little bit better. Maybe it’s because, by ensuring that I stay in the game for as long as possible, I get to work and push and strive and create for as long as possible too. That creates economic value, which then improves the lives of others, which means death bothers them less because they get to do more stuff too with the limited time and energy they have. I mean, shoot, 99.99% of the things I do with my own life are built solidly on the economic achievements of those around and preceding me.
So I guess that’s my answer to the question of why death bothers me.
I would be remiss to post something like this and not end with saying that, to Jenni my dear wife, and to A my dear son, I love you both more than anything in the world. I genuinely have gotten a lot more hardcore about taking care of myself since both of you came into my life.
I know I’m not the most adventurous or exciting person you two will ever meet. I hope this post goes some way to explaining why I don’t really plan to change that. (Not that you asked!) You know that saying, “I’m here for a good time, not a long time”? Well, I am optimizing for a long time, because when I’m with you two, it’s always a good time. 🤍