You have this one opportunity to fall in love with existence

Over the last few days I’ve been spending an inordinate amount of time thinking about existence. If you live in America, the mainstream headlines this past week can be summed up by two subjects: The Corona Virus and Kobe Bryant. This got me thinking about how we think about death in our society and I’ve come to the realization that this is a topic that America falls short on compared to other regions around the world. In Asia it is viewed as peace, in the Middle East it is viewed as liberation, but in our culture it feels like a topic that we are sheltered from and as a result we have become terrified of it. This runs parallel to the loss of the ability of self reflection in broader society. While it’s humbling to see that we’ve advanced so much that we can worry about petty issues like societal norms and political parties who play make believe using taxpayer money, it’s saddening to see that we’ve dismissed the profound thoughts and ideas that were so pivotal in shaping our values and beliefs. Fortitude and Wisdom are no longer virtuous and we’ve “evolved” from the thinking ape to something that’s been nurtured by the masses so much that independence is no longer valued. As far as modern science is concerned, we are unique because we are always consciously aware of the present and we have the ability to use the present to help determine the present in the future. But I believe ignoring the wisdom of death is fatal to this uniquely human awareness and a recognition of death is the only sustainable way to appreciate life. So this is concerning to me because an ignorance of death and the scarcity of time that comes before it, opens the door for so many to live an unfulfilled life and for so many to miss out on much of what makes your time among the living so unbelievably special.

How we think about death often changes when we are thinking of ourselves or the ones we care about. Whichever side of the coin we take here, death is really an ever present reality for us and it is so whether we are thinking about it or not. Death is always announcing itself in the background, on the news, in the stories we hear about the lives of others, in our concerns about our own health, even in the attention we pay in something as simple as crossing the street. If you observe yourself closely you’ll find that you spend a fair amount of energy each day trying not to die. And as widely noted by philosophers, thinkers, and poets: death makes a mockery of everything else we spend our lives doing.

Just take a moment and think of how you spent your day and the kinds of things that captured your attention. The things that you’ve been genuinely worried about. Think of the last argument you’ve had or think of all the time you’ve spent on social media. But like every human being, I’m guilty of the same mistakes sometimes as well. If you would’ve stopped me at any point over the last 48 hours and asked me what concerns me or what deep problem I’m attempting to solve, the solution to which seems most likely to bring order to the chaos in my corner of the universe, the honest answer would have been that I’m looking for a thought. Now I’m not trying to say that everything we do has to be profound. I mean sometimes you just have to find a thought. But contemplating the brevity of life brings some perspective to how we use our attention. It’s not so much what we pay attention to, it’s the quality of attention. It’s how we feel while doing it. This matters because we don’t know how much time we have in this life. And taking that fact to heart brings a kind of moral and emotional clarity to the present- or at least it can. And it can bring a kind of resolve to not suffer over stupid things.

Take something like road rage for example: You’re behind the wheel of your car and somebody does something erratic or they’re probably just driving slowly, so you find yourself getting angry. Now I would submit to you that kind of thing is impossible if you’re being mindful of the shortness of life. If you’re consciously aware that you’re going to die and that other person is going to die, you’re both going to lose everyone and everything you love, and you don’t know when. If you’re mindful that you have this one moment in life, this beautiful moment where your consciousness is bright and it’s not dimmed by morphine in the hospital on your last day among the living. Take in your surroundings, maybe the sun is out or it’s raining- both are beautiful. Consider that your loved ones are alive. Acknowledge that you’re lucky that you’re not in some failed state where civilians are being rounded up and murdered by the thousands. And you’re driving. You’re just running an errand and that person in front of you who you will never meet, who you’ll never know their hopes and sorrows but if you could know them then you would recognize are impressively similar to your own, is just driving slow.

This is your one life. The only one you’ve got and you’ll never get this moment back again. And you don’t know how many moments you have, no matter how many times you do something, there will come a day where you do it for the last time. You’ve had a thousand chances to tell the people that are close to you that you love them, in a way that you both feel it, and you’ve missed most of them- and you don’t know how many more you’re going to get. You have this next interaction with another human being to make the world a marginally better place. You have this next opportunity to fall in love with existence. So why not relax and enjoy your life? Really relax. Even in the midst of struggle, even while doing hard work, or even under uncertainty.

You are in a game right now and you can’t see the clock. A game that you’re free to make as interesting as possible; you can even change the rules. You can even find new games that no one has thought of yet. You can make games that used to be impossible, suddenly possible. And make it so that other people can play them with you. You can literally build a rocket to go to mars and there are some people out there who will spend some time today or next week doing that. But whatever you do, however ordinary, you can feel the preciousness of life. And an awareness of death is the doorway into being that way in the world.

The one thing people tend to realize in moments like this is that they’ve wasted a lot of time when life was normal. And it’s not just what they did with their time, it’s not that they’ve spent too much time working, or checking their email. Rather it’s that they cared about the wrong things and now regret what they thought they cared about. They regret allowing their attention to be bound up by petty concerns, year after year, when life was normal.

This is a paradox because we all know that this epiphany is coming. Don’t you know that it is coming? Don’t you know that some day you or someone you know will be sick and you’ll look back on the kinds of things that captured your attention? Even if you live to be 100, there just aren’t that many days in life. It’s always now. However much you feel like you need to plan for the future, to anticipate it and mitigate risks, the reality of your life is now. Our conscious awareness of the present moment is in some relevant sense already a memory, but as a matter of conscious experience, the reality of your life is always now. And I think this is a liberating truth about the nature of the human mind. In fact I think there’s probably nothing more important to understand about your mind than that- if you want to be happy in this world.

But the past is a memory. Meaning it’s a thought arising in the present. Similarly, the future is just something anticipated, but it is another thought arising now. So all we truly have is this moment. Regrettably, we spend most of our lives forgetting this truth; fleeing it; overlooking it; and the horror is that we succeed. We never manage to really connect with the present moment and find fulfillment there because we are continually hoping to be happy in the future, but the future never arrives. Even when we think we are in the present moment, we are always looking over its shoulder. Always looking for what’s next. There are more connections in a single cubic centimeter of human brain tissue than there are stars in the galaxy, yet our inner experience offers absolutely no clue so we are subjectively unaware of what most of our minds are doing. Our experience of everything and the experience of those around us, is a matter of consciousness and its contents. Therefore the frame we put around the present moment is important and largely determines our experience of it. So how can we create lives that are truly worth living, given that these lives come to an end?

Now you might feel that your consciousness is in your head- or behind your face. But as a matter of experience, the only evidence of your face and head is sensations arising in consciousness in this moment. Whatever you can possibly notice in your body or in the world has only one place to appear: in your conscious experience. Now I’m not saying this is all just a dream, but as a neurological matter it is just like a dream. It is a dream that is constrained by inputs from the external world. And the dreams that we call dreams at night are dreams that are not constrained by the external world.

But your mind is all you have, it’s all you’ve ever had, and it’s all you have to offer other people. So if you’re constantly ruminating about what you just did or what you could have done if you had the chance, you will miss your life. So being the mere hostage of the next thought isn’t useful. If there is an antidote for the fear of death and the experience of loss, that’s compatible with reason, I think it’s to be found here. If you think about the world, why is it that we create relationships or culture or build anything at all? It is because we are trying to create a world that our minds want to be in.

“We love life, not because we are used to living, but because we are used to loving”

-Friedrich Nietzche

From here on out, I plan to post at least one topic unrelated to Cryptocurrencies every weekend. I’m aware that posts like these that are unrelated to Cryptocurrencies may be unpopular given the nature of this platform, but I’d love to hear your feedback if you’re interested in any topics like this. Believe it or not, I spend a significant amount of time thinking about thinking about philosophy and meaning so I hope these posts can be of interest to those who share similar feelings or opinions.

Thanks for reading!