goula.sh

đź“° To Die Happily Ever After

Author: everythingstudies.com

Full Title: To Die Happily Ever After

URL: https://everythingstudies.com/2020/07/29/to-die-happily-ever-after/

Highlights from March 2nd, 2021.

A shot at eternal life! Yeah! Yeah? Yeah… Maybe I’m broken somehow but that isn’t something I spend my time longing for. I’m not sure why. Yes, death is a terrible and sad thing but I’m not entirely convinced there are better alternatives.
Living forever would have appealed to me when I was 20, I think. It would involve a lot of radical changes and… I’m 36 now, I have kids, and I think I’ve stopped enjoying change. Or, maybe that’s the wrong way of looking at it. I think we enjoy change when we are young because we haven’t experienced very much of it. Newness is still, well, new.
Adolescence is a move from stasis into change and of expansion of the scope of our experience. Expansion can’t go on forever because the world is only so large, and societal change will stop being that big, singular “event” and instead become a process that just goes on and on and on in the background, without a clear beginning, middle and end.
Youth is like spring, not a steady state but a transition. It’s in the nature of transitions to end. They can be followed by others, but transition after transition after transition become just a new steady state. You’re only plucked from stasis and brought into a grand narrative arc like some Campbellian hero once in your life. The second time is not the same. The fifth barely registers.
The intensity of meaning was greatest just a bit after I discovered the interest, and it remained high for maybe 2 or 3 years, before the illusion of a grand narrative began to crack. All these games didn’t really lead anywhere, did they? It didn’t add up to anything bigger. After one ice hockey world championship came another, and then another.
I believe the key to a meaningful life is feeling part of a narrative arc. And just like fiction, our lives are made up of little smaller arcs that together add up to a big one
The differences between me at 10, at 20 and at 36 lead me to believe that our life story is ideally made up of different kinds of sub-stories at different points in life.
I feel this is the function that dreams of space exploration and limitless expansion into a vast, virgin universe performs in the minds of many transhumanists. Us “humans 1.0” being one link in the chain from lifeless matter through bacteria and animals up to freed-from-the-flesh gods-in-everything-but-name is one hell of a story — a perfect meaning-making narrative (as well an echo of the old Great Chain of Being
Eliezer Yudkowsky has tried to prove mathematically that everyone wants eternal life. I want to live one more day. Tomorrow I will still want to live one more day. Therefore I want to live forever, proof by induction on the positive integers.
I get the whole sense that there’s something insane about not feeling like death is the ultimate enemy to be conquered. It’s a great grand story
I don’t believe that “death gives life meaning”. I do suspect that the mental architecture responsible for us experiencing meaning has developed under the constraint of a limited life span.
Our lives are like stories, or rather, stories are made to mirror our lives. They have beginnings, middles and ends. And note what those ends are like. I’m not talking about the ends of experimental, subversive stories but archetypal, classic ones, designed to comfort, soothe and satisfy. In other words, to make you feel the way you want to feel when you’re about to die.
Stories end. But they also continue, without us, the reader. “They lived happily ever after” it goes. The story ended but the characters and setting did not. That all goes on, out of sight. That’s a satisfying story, and I suspect, the model for a satisfying life.
Without something playing the role of God, the buck doesn’t stop and meaning is never “cashed out”. It has to remain pointing into the future forever, always deferred. This doesn’t sit well with us living forever. We’d catch on.
Few things are meaningful all by themselves; most derive their meaning from the things they point to. Of course, the buck has to stop somewhere, at some source of inherent or axiomatic meaning. In a religious context, for example, God is the ultimate arbiter of what is or isn’t meaningful.
Note how similar this is to the promise of heaven: things continue, but in a vague, static, unspecified way that moves into a vanishing point. You’ll go on, sure, don’t you worry, but the story is also over, because nothing really happens in heaven — there’s no future there, nothing to build or affect. It’s over and it’s not over.
What I’m trying to say is that I suspect our psychology is set up for us to find it satisfying to die while leaving descendants to carry on after us — to be a single link in a chain long enough to seem infinite.