Recently, two articles in the New York Times stood out to me - both relating ot the topic of death. The first appeared in the Sunday magazine - an article about a "transhuman" presidential candidate, Zoltan Istvan, whose major impetus (as there was no chance he'd be elected) was to raise awareness of his personal strides toward ending death. This piece was one in a line of many I have read recently in various publications regarding increasing human longevity beyond anything ever previously believed to be possible. As medical science and technology progress, doctors have been able to elongate their patients' lives by years, if not decades. Yet, despite these gains, the candidate and his followers believe strongly that death has become an inevitability only because we've been taught it's the endpoint, not that it actually is. As a transhumanist, Istvan is interested in wedding human longevity with technology. The author, who traveled with the candidate, seemed skeptical of the overall messaging, though intrigued by which camp - the people who accept death, or those who don't - as the ones who are really the ones deluding themselves.
One of Istvan's followers referred to those who accept death as the finality as "deathists" who have the view that death isn't so bad or is "natural" because they're trying to convince themselves to accept death, when, in fact, they should be breaking free to realize their full potentials as ever-living beings. This wouldn't be my description of my thoughts regarding the matter. Not that I want to die right now, but over the years I have cultivated an acceptance of the realities of a mortal body. There's nothing in observable nature that would make me think there IS another option besides death. I don't believe in god(s) or any sort of higher, supernatural power. What we cannot explain boils down to what we either cannot - or choose not - to understand.
The idea of living forever cheapens the experience. If you only get one go around, you have to be more careful. You have to pay attention to the details. Living in the now is essential. Yet, this doesn't jive well with modern life, where everything is rapidly changing and we're always looking for the next best thing. So why are we obsessed and further falling into this mode of being? A lack of knowledge about death as a part of life. Strangely, it took getting and being pregnant for me to fully understand how little practical information about my own body was passed on to me through general education. In fact, I spent the first half of my pregnancy in a state of shock because everything I thought I knew was only partly correct. Instead of continuing to be surprised or enraged, I began reading as much as I could on the process from the points of view of doctors, doulas, midwives and other moms. This empowered me to be able to go about the rest of the pregnancy with less anxiety.
The second article focused on just that - the importance of teaching students about death from a clinical (and practical) standpoint. What is your body experiencing in this stage? The author, a doctor who specializes in both critical and palliative care, focuses on not only empowering her students through knowledge of the process of dying, but also in how to reach out to those in their lives who might be suffering. Much like sex education, which she also teaches, death education has become, for her, an essential plank in the k-12 education platform. And yet, unfortunately, also like sex ed, it has become relegated to something that many Americans think should either be taught by a child's parents or spiritual leaders. The end result is we have a lot of people walking around with no clue of what their body is capable of. As a history teacher, I've had students interrupt my class with questions like, "what IS a placenta?" because they left health or biology with insufficient answers. How they decided these questions were OK for history class is beyond me, but it probably has something to do with the fact that I will answer most of their questions.
To put it simply, the body, your body, is the only one you will have in this life. And as we spend upwards of 10 hours a day on "screen time" the idea that your body is limited seems, well, antiquated. The reality is that our analog brains (and fragile egos) cannot comprehend that our digital profiles are only avatars in a illusory world. Human consciousness and "flesh-embodiment" isn't privileged, it isn't prestigious, it's simply a function of the biological world in which we all exist. And to the question of whether we should then strive to completely transcend this biology through science does not sway me to resoundingly say, "Yes, let's!" because it puts too much faith in the nebulous concepts of "science" and "technology" for me. As an atheist religiously, I find that this lack of belief I have in gods also inevitably transfers to all things that require a hard-line faith. So, I return to the observable. the cycles of life I see around me in nature and say, "death is OK, really."
