Endings

I think all the time about endings. I see every project, including life itself, as phasal: phase one, the project is born. It’s very easy to start things. For most human beings, most of us only need to have sex once without the involvement of contraception and lo! nine months later a baby is produced. And then what? From this point, an entire middle phase called “living” must be then dealt with, it must be lived. And later on, this phase slowly overlaps with the terminal “dying” phase. Of course, at the end of the dying phase, death assuredly happens; the project ends.

It’s a terrible over simplification, but nevertheless, it is essential truth. What is also true is the fact that once a project has begun, once we’ve passed over the threshold of the primary “birth” phase into our lives, then comes the complicated and often difficult task of actually being alive, not just in the biological sense, but also in the meaningful sense. As is likely the case with most living organisms, human beings are sentient. However, while I cannot make any assertion as to the consciousness of other creatures, we humans are able to communicate ideas about what’s going on in our minds with each other. This is how I know that to simply exist as a fish might, or a rabbit, naked in the world, utterly vulnerable and free, is an intolerable prospect for most of us. I know this because it is made known to me through our language and culture, through our communication.

We are for the most part social creatures, we do not handle loneliness well. We human beings are generally not islands, capable of extreme self-reliance, whereupon we have found a way to survive utterly without the support of others. It is possible of course and no doubt would take knowledge and skills to do so (which arguably are themselves given to us by others), but let us say that it is not our preference. Instead, we tradeoff bare freedom for the complexities of social interaction and the illusion of stability and security. Moreover, interacting with our fellow creatures brings to us the sense that we are not alone in the universe, which in turn allows for the possibility of meaningfulness and worth - both attributes of aliveness that human beings evidently crave.

Although remarkable and utterly rare, biological life is but one fascinating facet of what makes us who we are. It is indeed miraculous and meaningful in and of itself, but to derive meaning from this fact and to be aware of that process whereupon one might derive said meaning, is equally astonishing. Yet while it is arguable that a fish swimming in the sea is utterly agent and autonomous, that is to say, free within the limitations of the tolerances beyond which it might die, to choose where it swims, we can only wonder whether it knows this, is aware of this ability and if it therefore derives meaning from that knowledge. As for us humans, there is a slightly different project afoot, a paradox: for we have exchanged our naked agency for illusions. That which would genuinely console us we have given away. Putting aside our own limitations as to where and how we live for physical and political reasons, human beings who suffer, who are the majority, do so because they have fewer choices than they agreed or expected at the start, not more.

The paradox is this: that we derive meaning in part from the naked agency into which we cannot return. We are creatures maddened by our desperate yearning to simultaneously be able to make choices and appreciate those choices and the process by which we came to them, despite these two states effectively cancelling each other out. The “authentic” autonomous free agent has no need for appreciation, because they are just “getting along”, but should they stand on a thorn, they better pray their wound goes uninfected. In other words, most living organisms on this planet are free, free to live, free to die and so both happen in abundance. For human beings however, in our denial of mortality, in our efforts to control the environment and our place in it, in our medicines, our health and safety protocols, our near obsessive yet futile stratagems to avoid death and suffering, our ability to choose, our ability to accept risk or responsibility is greatly attenuated. For most of us, we cannot be free agents, because it would mean giving back our knowledge, our structures, our medicines and the stability these represent. Tragically, we also have to give back meaningfulness, that which makes life worth living.

The issue is that we believe we have retained meaningfulness whilst simultaneously eroding it, resulting in the current situation for people in, especially, the world’s dominant cultures: having effectively abandoned meaningfulness, our fear of death has manifested in nihilism. To be nihilistic, to possess the will to annihilate, or accept annihilation as inevitable, is a cheap substitute for authentic meaning, yet it belies our need to reconcile what we’ve convinced ourselves is an impossibility: the gap between the crushing, abject nothingness of existence which at first glance appears to resemble purpose or worth, and our ancient fear of death, of erasure, of no longer existing. Nihilism is what fills the gap in our lives when authentic, meaningful aliveness is abandoned.

Just like starting things, this abandonment is easily achieved. In fact, we have become so accustomed to it, that in effect, it has become tantamount to a birth right. Our new humans are born as little vessels for whatever we might give them and, as a species, we increasingly spoon-feed them a diet of nothingness. Arguably, World Death Day has been established to address the correlation between fear of death, death-denial, nihilism and its products, all of which evidently have a deleterious effect on our lives. It is nihilism that causes people to ignore the reality of their own ending until finally, intubated, panicking, as expensive medics undergo the macabre and ludicrous theatre of medical interventions in a futile bid for immortality, do people finally sense regret: finally they understand that the pain they felt in their lives, the suffering they caused others, could have been alleviated by filling their lives with meaning rather than nothingness.

How could this be? How did we come to this? While our existences, our day to day lives, are placed within the scale of our bodies within space, our curiosity has taken us to explore both the elements from which we are made and the universe in which we belong. And in them we find nothing, predominantly. We are made from very little, we exist compressed into this tiny corner of the one world that’ll have us, which is itself hurtling through an infinite vacuum. Physics is ambivalent: life is chance, as easily begun as ended. It is a mode of insanity, yet it is nonetheless true, that it becomes possible to see that despite the scarcity of life, despite its nature as the jewel of all existence, in imagining nothing, giving it shape, allowing it to become the definition of meaning, life itself becomes worthless.

We know that this is a lie, of course. We know that life is special - not just our own, but all of it. We know it in our bones. But we also know that we don’t want to die and therefore don’t want to think about death and in this, we do ourselves and all of life a great disservice. This is how it came to be that while the most nihilistic and cynical among us can unthinkingly despoil the environment, because nihilism is the opposite of creativity, it is the great destroyer and our most fearsome enemy, perhaps our only true enemy. This is why our art schools keep closing, their funding dries up, their focus shifted away from expression and beauty towards emptiness. Nihilism is the enemy that destroys by giving us, in the end, exactly what we fear most: to be lost and forgotten, devoured into nothingness. And it is our great pain to only know this at the very end, when it’s too late to look it in the eye, to admit the truth before us and step into what maybe the only antidote: the creative life and the aliveness and meaningfulness this can bring.

So I call all humans to look now and in as far their agency will allow, admit their own ending as a gentle truth. Death is no monster, it is not sinister or morbid, it is not the same as fear, but simply signifies the end to the project; it is how it is known the project is complete. In this admission, is it not possible that the hole in our lives that for so many humans has been filled, whether they like it or not, with nothingness, can be filled with life itself? Perhaps you believe, as so many nihilists do, that life is irrelevant, disposable. Yet there is no nihilist out there who is consoled in their existence. To them I propose as evidence of meaning in the infinite void, of something that may provide ample worth and meaningfulness, is the dry and measurable fact of the reality that of all the atoms in the all the universe, the universe made you. It’s bewilderingly unlikely, incredible, miraculous and, at the very least, acknowledgement of this truth, of life’s fragility, it’s rarity and above all, its certainty of ending, can only give life structure, stability, meaning.

When we acknowledge our own death, life becomes a project, a story with a start, middle and end. In this, life becomes a shape, an arc. There is a question that exists in our cultures, it’s so ingrained that it’s almost invisible, it asks: what would you do if you knew you were going to die? World Death Day invites you to ask this question, seriously, once a year, on the 31st of December, because the reality is that although we want to believe the question implies you will live a long life, in truth it could be asking about tomorrow.

Graeme Walker, November 2021