Remember that you will die. I’ve been thinking a little bit about death lately, and specifically; my death. I’ve never particularly thought about it before. When beginning this exercise, I thought that the notion of my own death would terrify me. I thought that the realisation that the sum of all of my neurons firing will someday be extinguished unceremoniously in the grand scheme of the universe.
I’m not particularly nihilistic, and to this date my life has been entwined in certain purposes or the other – mostly boiling down to the desire to spend quality time with or away from other members of my species. The notion of death doesn’t make me want to leave a legacy, or climb the highest mountains, or sail the longest oceans. Contrary to my biological programming, it doesn’t particularly make me want to have offspring, or seek to make the world a better place on a macro level. I suppose that’s quite selfish.
Maybe it’s because I’m still entrenched in academia; but death just kinda feels like a deadline. Don’t get me wrong – I don’t want to die by any means. I generally find a lot of joy in my everyday existence, and if possible I’d want that to continue forever until it becomes actively terrible. I just kind know that I get some time, it flies by, and then it ends.
I dunno, this was quite a strained and hollow prompt to follow. Reflecting on death is important and people should do it; as a culture the British are terrible at discussing the concept comfortably and resort to euphemisms in order to avoid confronting mortality. That sounds deep enough to end a blog post on, so we’ll go with that.