You Will Die: The Burden of Modern Taboos (71 page)

Vast curative advances have also given the tacit impression that all diseases can and will be conquered eventually.
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When a person dies from disease it is now often someone’s fault. Either the person did not have a healthy lifestyle, or scientists have not yet figured out how to cure the affliction. Death is no longer an inherent part of life, but an evil to be beaten by health, safety, and medical research.

Science has not been able to tell us what death is like. For most Americans, this is unnecessary, because almost ninety percent believe in heaven.
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The Christian concept of heaven was a remarkable form of social control in the Middle Ages. Medieval rulers did not have to worry about the happiness of the peasants’ lives because Earth was merely to be suffered through for the joys of the afterlife. For the dutiful Christian, living life according to an interpretation of the Bible is still the most important accomplishment before death.

For those who value reason more than faith, the speculative nature of an afterlife puts the emphasis on joy on earth. The recognition of death is one of the keys to terrestrial joy. According to the historian Jennifer Michael Hecht, there are four doctrines of happiness found in all philosophy, psychology, wisdom literature, and self-help. One of these is to be mindful of death.
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Survivors of near-fatal experiences are happier people. The vivid reminder of death forces them to appreciate how precious each moment is and how important it is to live fully. Recognizing that life is limited gives it value. The power of regularly pondering death has been extolled by wise men as varied as the Buddha, Plato, and Christian saints. Medieval monks often kept real human skulls in their cells. These
memento mori
would help remind them of death.
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Under the modern taboo, keeping human skulls would mark one as weird or even mentally disturbed.

Although obsessing about death can be depressing, periodic meditations can help give people greater perspective on the often trivial troubles that cause distress. Being mindful of the ultimate deadline reminds one to seize the day. The full line of the famous Roman poem by Horace is
“Carpe diem quam minimum credulo postero,”
or “Seize the day, never trust the next.” The reason you cannot trust tomorrow is because you might be dead. Seizing the day is another of the four universal doctrines of happiness.

The sole means now for the saving of the beings of the planet Earth would be to implant again into their presences a new organ . . . of such properties that every one of these unfortunates during the process of existence should constantly sense and be cognizant of the inevitability of his own death as well as the death of everyone upon whom his eyes or attention rests. Only such a sensation and such a cognizance can now destroy the egoism completely crystallized in them.
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In America seizing the day often means fully engaging in the competition for money, power, or fame. Materialism is drummed into the population’s heads with ubiquitous commercials whose underlying message is that you are not as happy as you could be. However, the wise have never advocated seeking any of these superficial goals.
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Even the father of capitalism, Adam Smith, knew pursuing wealth was a trivial and unsatisfying pursuit.
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Happiness cannot come via these superficial means because of four instinctual characteristics that evolved to aid the propagation of our species.
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First, humans quickly acclimate to any situation. Riding in a limousine, living in a penthouse, receiving critical acclaim, or having screaming adoring fans is an awesome rush for the uninitiated, but when they become the norm even these delights quickly lose their uniqueness. A study of major lottery winners found that after the passage of mere months, their happiness levels were not higher than their peers.
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Second, happiness is dependent on expectations. The adage is “Satisfaction equals performance minus expectations.” A Soviet labor camp prisoner can be happier after receiving an unexpected piece of bread than a rock star whose album only reaches number five on the sales charts.

Third, happiness is dependent on your reference group. Americans experience innovations beyond anything queens, kings, and emperors of past eras could imagine. Food and music from every land is easily accessible. Driving, flying, and movies are marvels available to almost everyone. Yet we are not ecstatic. The average American is earning almost three times as much in real income as fifty years ago, but the
average American is not any happier. Since innovations and income have risen for everyone, no one is happier.
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Fourth, we will always want more. Subconscious greed is encoded in our chromosomes. International studies have found that for every dollar rise in experienced income, people’s estimation of how much income they
need
to support their family rises by at least forty cents.
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A palliative care worker found that one of the most common regrets of her dying patients, and one expressed by every single male, was that they wished they had not worked so hard.
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Wealth is not irrelevant, as anyone who has been unemployed is aware. However, studies have shown that wealth’s influence on happiness decreases markedly after the point of providing for basic needs. Additional income does not influence a country’s happiness level for countries with more than a $20,000 annual income per person.
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Contrary to many Americans’ conceptions, being able to pay for your children to go to college and having a plush retirement are not basic needs.

To combat these irrational instinctual traits regarding wealth one should follow another of Hecht’s universal happiness doctrines—control your desires. “To want what you have,” is simple to understand, but difficult to practice due to our DNA. According to Eastern philosophy, not just avarice, but all suffering stems from the desires of the self—the ego. To find bliss one must discard the ego.

Western psychologists are also beginning to battle the ego. The “talking cure” of psychoanalysis, which indulges the ego, is being supplanted by cognitive therapy. Cognitive therapy teaches people to battle depression by challenging the ego’s irrational negative thoughts. It also teaches that self-worth should not be based on externalities like love or accomplishments. If one must retain the concept of self-worth, it should be that everyone has an equal and unchanging unit of worth. However, it is best to throw the concept out completely.
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The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has also found that people are happiest when the ego is erased in “flow.”
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Flow can occur whenever someone is using skills to achieve a challenging and clear goal. Flow experiences are marked by high concentration, forgetting about your worries, losing track of time, and the loss of self-consciousness. When in flow the action is being undertaken for the sake of the action itself. Ulterior motives like money, recognition, or winning are forgotten. Remarkably, people experience flow at work more often than at leisure.

In Hindu philosophy, to completely destroy the ego and all of its wants is to reach nirvana.
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There are multiple routes to this end. The shortest and steepest is the path of knowledge that involves realizing that complete consciousness is buried underneath your ego. An ego-bound adult compared to an enlightened person is like a child who cries over trifling matters because she lacks perspective. You must understand how “I” and “me” are merely cultural concepts, and that even your personality is a mask.

The process is aided by visualizing yourself in the third person. In this context, personal failures and setbacks are seen as trivial, as if one is playing a loser in a play. Antagonists and enemies are characters that make life challenging and interesting. Negative emotions and thoughts are not suppressed but simply allowed to pass through. You are a bemused observer of life, the last form of the ego.

Beneath this final layer is the full awareness that links you to all people, all life, and the cosmos. Your separateness from the universe is a deceit of the ego, a deceit that ends when the ego is vanquished by either death or enlightenment. Like a drop of spray returning to the ocean, when the ego dissolves completely nirvana is reached. Alan Watts wrote:

In Hinduism there are numerous routes and combinations of routes to nirvana. The path of knowledge is for cerebral people. Other paths include the path of love for emotional people, and that of work for active people. Christianity is an example of the path of love. A personification of the eternal, Jesus is loved above all else and for no ulterior motives. The attachment to the ego is thus replaced by an attachment to Jesus. The path of work is to throw oneself fully into one’s job. One works not for the superficial rewards of wealth or prestige, but as an exercise in focusing on something other than one’s ego. This path is similar to the Western concept of flow.

Those who reach nirvana do not float away to heaven or even a temple in the mountains. A successful business executive may be more enlightened than a
monk. Those who attain full awareness are serene, joyful, radiant, and their love flows to all.

While nirvana and complete ego annihilation may appear to be an unrealistic and supernatural aspiration, it is still useful to see life as
lila
, or play. Play inherently requires ego detachment and lightheartedness. The universe has arranged itself in the form of you for a tiny moment in time. To let the ego—that genetic code programmed solely for voluminous breeding—interfere with your happiness is folly.

Hecht advises to play life like a game but to keep in mind that the game is “somewhat stupid.” As examples of its stupidity, she points out that in business, government, politics, and even the arts, the “winners” are often the heartless, the greedy, or the well-connected. Play the game. Enjoy the game and the rewards that you attain, but do not take it seriously.
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In time everyone—even presidents—will be dead and forgotten. From the perspective of a lifetime, most setbacks, enemies, mistakes, and grievances are mere bagatelles.

For existentialists such as Martin Heidegger, embracing death is the key to life.
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Recognizing your finitude creates existential angst. Life is absurd. No meaning is provided for you. It is marvelously bizarre, random, and comedic.
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You are brought here to wander and coexist for a brief moment, and then you are gone just as inexplicably and suddenly as you arrived.
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Many people never ponder death and merely accept the beliefs of those around them. They get pulled into the temporal concerns of the ego and the routine of robotic conformity.

Existential angst jars people out of this passive mimicry. This is supported by those forced to confront death. The most common regret of the dying patients of the aforementioned palliative care worker was that they hadn’t had “the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”
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To existentialists, seizing the day means to live authentically. This means you
make a rational examination of what goals, values, and recreations are true to you. You alone can determine what meaning to give your brief existence.
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This process involves the fourth and last universal happiness doctrine of knowing yourself. Knowing yourself takes work. It requires exposing yourself as broadly as you can to different knowledge, ways of thinking, and experiences. It is in this manner that you can find meaning that is genuine to you.

Living authentically is difficult. Conforming to social norms is easy and you will have the reassurance of the people around you that you are doing the right thing. Family and friends may resent you if you turn from their lifestyle. If your path leads you into taboo territory you can be branded as weird or even criminal for acts that harm no one.

Liberty protects those people whose authentic life strays from the mainstream. The philosopher John Stuart Mill believed that liberty required that the government not punish offenses where the alleged harm is to the perpetrator. Mill argued that individuals knew what made them happy more than politicians did and that politicians used these laws to force conformity with the majority’s cultural norms.

Mill believed that authentic people with the courage to step away from the herd give more value not only to their lives but also to society. Without original individuals to try out new “experiments in living” a culture becomes a “stagnant pool” mired in custom. Mill believed that the amount of eccentricity in a society correlates with its mental vigor, moral courage, and genius.
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