My Undying Obsession To Live Forever

A Letter To Myself

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“Death is the inescapable end-game of our life, it fills us with terror.........The conventional remedy is to avoid thinking about it” (Montaigne, 1580)

As human beings, we all crave and desire certainty; it helps us to feel in control.

The unfortunate truth, however, is that when it comes to the fundamental questions of our life; there is no certainty whatsoever. Why were we born? What is the purpose of life? What happens when we die? Crucially, none of us ever asked or chose to be born. We were simply thrown into this messy world.

In fact, the only thing we do know for certain, the one existential given for which there can be no rebuttal or refutation, is that we all will die. All of us. No anomalies, no exceptions.

Although I have yet to turn 33 and have never suffered from life-threatening illness, my daily thoughts are often consumed by death. From as far back as I became aware of my own mortality, I have been petrified of dying.

It is more the concept of death itself than the actual process of dying which produces this terror. The concept of nothingness. Given the fact that none of us can remember a time before we were sentient beings, we struggle to comprehend ‘nothing’. I linger for far too long on the image of my future decomposed self, buried beneath the ground, whilst the world above continues for all eternity. Even just trying to imagine what eternity would feel like is utterly incomprehensible. Never breathing, never thinking, never existing again, forever and ever and ever. Martin Heidegger once described death as the “impossibility of further possibility”. I feel sick just typing it.

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I often find myself looking at my age and roughly calculating how many years on this earth that I have left and therefore what percentage of my life I have lived. Using the average life expectancy for a male in the UK (78.8 years), I have lived 41.87% of my life. Christ.

As I type this, I have just clicked onto a website entitled: www.death-clock.org. For your own sanity, do not go onto this website. Its ‘niche’ is that it provides you with a completely unscientific guesstimate as to how long you have left to live. The cartoon of the grim reaper on the home page is particularly macabre. Whilst everything about this website makes me feel sick to my stomach, I cannot resist going further, hoping this information may alleviate my fear of death once and for all.

As I proceed through the website, it demands that I enter some personal information. Most of the usual suspects are featured: BMI, smoking, alcohol, etc. Being Irish, alcohol has always been my downfall...

Somewhat surprisingly, there is a box for ‘outlook on life’, for which I select ‘pessimistic’ - something sure to knock a couple of years off. I click the ’submit’ button, hold my breath, say a quick prayer and voila:

According to this website (clearly created by a twisted psychopath), I will live until I am 69 years, 4 months and 29 days.

For those of us bad at maths, the website very helpfully has a live ticking clock counting down my life left. It currently stands at 13,492 days, 16 hours, 39 minutes and 47 seconds…46 seconds…45 seconds…I close the tab, wishing that my laptop would freeze on this page and that in doing so my life would freeze at this age forever.

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For years, I have rallied against humanity and the world we live in, in terms of how it relates to death. The concept of ‘time’ is one that particularly depresses me. In humanity’s attempt to make itself more organised, we have in fact become prisoners of time. Seconds, minutes, days, weeks, months, years, decades, centuries. It is far too easy to feel as if your life is slipping away in front of your very eyes because we are always planning for the future or reminiscing over the past.

Birthdays are a big one. Children seem to love having their birthday and getting older each year. Yet, as adults, how many of us dread the lead up to birthdays, the older we get? Knowing that it is one less year we will have on this planet. No present can make up for the fact that in that one year, our body is a bit weaker and more decrepit than the year before.

How many conversations are there in the run up to New Year that feature clichés, such as “oh, where did the year go?” and “before you know it, it will be Christmas again!”. It is almost as if we are wishing our lives away.

Personally, I wish ‘time’ as we know it had never been invented. In fact, I resent our Neolithic ancestors who first started measuring it. Wouldn’t it be so much sweeter and fulfilling if life to us was just one long continuum, with no measurement of time? Or imagine if we counted how old we are by ‘days’, rather than ‘years’. Rather than living to the measly age of 70 or 80, we would live to glorious age of 25,550 or 29,200!

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One of the problems of living in the Western World is the general attitude to life and death. Some, like me, allow death to rule our thoughts while we are living; clearly not healthy at all. Others simply see it as a minor inconvenience and even try to euphemise it by using phrases such as “he passed away” or “she kicked the bucket” when discussing death. This is equally unhealthy in its own way, refusing to face to inevitable prospect of death head on. Then there are the huge swathes of humanity that throw themselves so utterly into the daily grind, that they almost tranquilize themselves from the thought of death.

It is this latter mentality that makes me question humanity and our purpose on this earth. For so many of us, we spend the entirety of our lives striving for success. Getting that promotion, earning that money, securing that mortgage, buying that car...

If you consider that the average length of sleep in the UK is 7 hours a night and the average length of time spent per day at work (including commuting) is 9 hours, that means we spend 16 out of every 24 hours working, travelling or asleep....that’s over two-thirds of our lives! And for what? We will all die. Your job title, car and antiques collection will be of little comfort to you when you are 6 feet under. For those who chase bodily perfection, having a six-pack will be of little use to you when you are very literally a pile of bones. For those who chase fame and to truly leave their mark on this earth, what benefit will it be to you to have others speaking of your great deeds when you are not there to hear of it?

The most ironic thing in all of this is that my life is not perfect, not by any stretch of the imagination. And yet, I love it. I love the concept of life. I love being alive. Even if my life remained sub-standard for the rest of my days, I would rather have a sub-standard life and live forever than have an incredible life and lose it prematurely to death.

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Over recent years, however, I have come to appreciate that all of my analysing and raging does not prepare me any better for my inevitable death. Nor does it minimise the chances of me dying. All it does is cause much anguish and anxiety on a daily basis and hinders me from truly enjoying my life and living it to its fullest.

In fact, I have begun to see how my dread of death may have become displaced onto other aspects of my life, in particular, compulsive or quasi-addictive behaviours which can, temporarily, push death from my mind.

To use an oft-cited quote: “Anxiety is like a rocking chair. It gives you something to do but it doesn’t get you very far”. The only thing that my incessant fixation on death has given me is a lot of wasted time on the slow road towards death.

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I am beginning to take comfort in studying the philosophy of death, particularly that spoken of by Ancient Greek Philosopher, Epicurus. He put forward a number of ideas of tackling death which appeal to me. The first is his argument of the ‘Ultimate Nothingness of Death’. He suggests that if our soul does not survive when we die, then we have absolutely nothing to fear because we will not be able to perceive that we are in fact dead. He says:

“Where I am; death is not. Where death is; I am not”.

His second fundamental idea is known as the ‘Argument of Symmetry’. He describes life as a crack of light that lies between two eternities of darkness. In this he is describing before we are born and after we die. He posits the question as to why as humans we view prenatal darkness (before we were born) with more calm than death?

Finally, Epicurus speaks of the fact that we all taste a morsel death every single night when we are asleep. He goes on to emphasise the fact that in Greek Mythology, Hypnos and Thanatos (the gods of sleep and death) were twin brothers.

Even though these philosophical formulations do not change a single thing in relation to the certainty or experience of death, they have somehow enabled me to view death through a slightly different lens. And maybe, just maybe, the knowledge and awareness of my own mortality will enable me to prioritise my life better, embrace the liberation I do currently have and provide me with fewer interpersonal fears and a greater willingness to take risks.

As I come to the end of writing this letter, I find myself reflecting on goodbyes and endings more generally. Both of these do not come naturally to me. In fact, to some extent, I have found myself avoiding getting too close to people because subconsciously I know what it will be like to have to say goodbye to them when either they or I die. This is what Irvin Yalom referred to as “refusing the loan of life in order to avoid the debt of death”. Going forward, my personal ambition is to take out the loan, with interest.