DEATH AS THE REASON FOR THE DEATH OF MEANING AND VALUE

I write this just weeks away from my 84th birthday. I don’t know that I’m more aware of my coming departure from this so-called life than I was when I was ten. I was surely aware of my ultimate fate before that. My grandmother had died when I was 8, and I have a vague recollection of learning that one of my schoolmates at about that time had been struck by lightning and killed. But I was ten when my mother found me curled up in a fetal position in the bed she shared with my father crying. She asked me what was wrong and I said “I don’t want to die.” My mother’s response was curious on reflection. She was essentiallly uneducated, an immigrant from southern Italy, and an untutored Roman Catholic who had populated our Brooklyn apartment with pictures and statues of saints and had hung crosses on the walls. Thinking back, I would have thought that she would have comforted me by pointing out that when I died I would go to heaven where I would live forever with all of my family and friends under God’s protection. But instead she said that if I lived an exemplary life like George Washington I would live forever. It didn’t take me long to realize what a small comfort this was, even though it was surprisingly realistic. My father had already enlightened me on the subject by telling me that when you died you died. There was no life or consciousness after death. Throughout my teens, there were times when I would stare at my reflection in the bathroom mirror and imagine what it would mean to be dead for 10 years, 10,000 years, 10 million years and I would conjure increadingly unfathomable numbers until finally I would just scream. And that scream put me on the edge of an abyss that was so inconceivable that I might as well have been on the edge of madness. And thus was born my insight into death as the driving force behind humanity’s inherent madness. I had been headed for a career in science since my earliest imaginings about what I wanted to be when I grew up. I spent four years at the elite Brooklyn Technical High School preparing for a career in electrical engineering. I was into my early years as an electrical engineering student at the City College of New York when my “science brain” told me I needed to have a rational basis to go on living in this firestorm of Cold War nuclear threats and a history of the world written in the blood of humans killing each other over Gods and gold. So I sat down and considered what I knew of with axiomatic certainty, and what I could conclude about life, the universe, and everything. The result was a collegiate conceit I called “existential utilitarianism.” There were two axioms: There is no God; There is no life after death. My conclusion was that the rational thing to do was to commit suicide. In an infinite cosmos it would make no difference if I died at 20 than if I died at 100. In either case it would be the same as if I’d never been born at all. I don’t know what I would have done if I’d had access to an easy, painless, instanteneous path to sucide. In any case, a protoplasmic will to live overrode the rational conclusion. Questions about the meaning of life have been expressed in a broad variety of ways, including: • What is the meaning of life? What's it all about? Who are we? • Why are we here? What are we here for? • What is the origin of life? • What is the nature of life? What is the nature of reality? • What is the purpose of life? What is the purpose of one's life? • What is the significance of life? • What is meaningful and valuable in life? • What is the value of life? • What is the reason to live? What are we living for? Arthur Schopenhauer was one of the first to explicitly ask the general question in an essay entitled "Character” (1897): Since a man does not alter, and his moral character remains absolutely the same all through his life; since he must play out the part which he has received, without the least deviation from the character; since neither experience, nor philosophy, nor religion can effect any improvement in him, the question arises, What is the meaning of life at all? To what purpose is it played, this farce in which everything that is essential is irrevocably fixed and determined? Nietzsche offered perhaps the most pessimistic answer to this question: “...in every age the wisest have passed the identical judgement on life: it is worthless. . . .” Their voices have been “full of doubt, full of melancholy, full of weariness with life, full of opposition to life” (Nietzsche, 1889/1968: 29). The first time I came across this quote, it was immediately clear that I belonged among the wisest across the ages. Terror management theory states that human meaning is derived from a fundamental fear of death, and values are selected when they allow us to escape the mental reminder of death (The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life (2016, New York: Penguin). Jeff Greenberg, Sheldon Solomon, and Tom Pyszczynsk). “The irony of man's condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive.” “Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever.” 
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death “We cannot repeat too often the great lesson of Freudian psychology: that repression is normal self-protection and creative self-restriction-in a real sense, man's natural substitute for instinct. Rank has a perfect, key term for this natural human talent: he calls it "partialization" and very rightly sees that life is impossible without it. What we call the well-adjusted man has just this capacity to partialize the world for comfortable action. I have used the term "fetishization," which is exactly the same idea: the "normal" man bites off what he can chew and digest of life, and no more. In other words, men aren't built to be gods, to take in the whole world; they are built like other creatures, to take in the piece of ground in front of their noses. Gods can take in the whole of creation because they alone can make sense of it, know what it is all about and for. But as soon as a man lifts his nose from the ground and starts sniffing at eternal problems like life and death, the meaning of a rose or a star cluster-then he is in trouble. Most men spare themselves this trouble by keeping their minds on the small problems of their lives just as their society maps these problems out for them. These are what Kierkegaard called the "immediate" men and the "Philistines." They "tranquilize themselves with the trivial"- and so they can lead normal lives.” Man is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill-marks to prove it. His body is a material fleshy casing that is alien to him in many ways—the strangest and most repugnant way being that it aches and bleeds and will decay and die. Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with atowering majesty, and yet he goes back into he ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever.” 
 ...Erich Fromm wondered why most people did not become insane in the face of the existential contradiction between a symbolic self, that seems to give man infinite worth in a timeless scheme of things, and a body that is worth about 98¢.” “[Man] literally drives himself into a blind obliviousness with social games, psychological tricks, personal preoccupations so far removed from the reality of his situation that they are forms of madness, but madness all the same.” Men are so necessarily mad that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.” “This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression - and with all this yet to die.” https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/97366-the-denial-of-death?page=2 So here I stand on the edge of a eternal void unable to comprehend anything at all, afraid to die and yet impatient for its tranquility. I used to imagine that space and time went on forever and sooner or later the combination of star stuff that made me would make me again. There’s no way around the fact that it has all been for naught. And yet, I want to live to see my latest book, now going into production, publsihed. And yet I want to live for my wife Wen. The world around me is crumbling. The water and food stuff I need to survive is polluted. The air I need to breathe is polluted. Our politics is polluted. We humans were not meant for this universe, and as a result humanity has been shitting on itself because death is unimaginable. I sit here wishing only to be able to actualize sexual desires that overwhelm my daily thoughts. Even protons will disappear. Only madness can conjure meaning and value in this firestorm of absurdity. CAPITALISM YOU SAY? ECONOMICS YOU SAY? RATHER SAY DEATH AS A WAY OF LIFE 15,000 Scientists From 184 Countries Are Warning Humankind We Are Screwed https://www.vice.com/en/article/59yqj8/world-scientists-warning-to-humanity-second-notice-climate-change-environment/