Instead, we are to die

I've been thinking a lot about death lately. Not in the macabre, unhealthy kind of way - more of a pondering. It is a question we all have to face or flee, eventually. I shared some of my musings with C last week and then Q last night, given he's not one to retreat from any philosophical inquiry, but we didn't really come up with anything useful to defend against the question. It is a question of great importance, one that shapes how you see the world and where you see yourself in it. We walked in circles in search of an assurance but only found ourselves confounded and confined; mortal coils.

Our lifespans, even if they were doubled, would not satisfy our souls. Even if we were to live for millennia we would find ourselves wanting more. One lifetime, like one drink, is never enough. But were we immortal, life would be hellish and infinite and we would go mad and lonely. Things would seem somehow even more meaningless than they do now. We would be powerless against our invulnerability, unable to even suicide, forced to endure an endless eternity. Perhaps I'm just looking at immortality through my mortal eyes. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad. It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to try and approach the limitless from such a limited vantage point. It is unanswerable.

If we're all to die - and we are - and everything that is, eventually isn't, how can anything have any meaning? It is easy, in the face of annihilation, to align with Nihilism, but there is no opium for the Nihilist. When everything is meaningless there isn't one thing that's better than another. Nothing is meaningless or meaningful, only thinking makes it so. We ascribe meaning to things; to love and life and courtesy; to passion and pleasure; growth; creativity, innovation, even meaning. Why? Were I to do nothing, the result would be the same: death and obscurity. Why struggle trying to achieve mediocrity? Even the thick cement memories of our most historied heroes, the ones decorated on dusty pages and erected as stone statues, will one day be reduced to rubble. So what does it matter? There is no true monument.

There must be a thing that is objectively more fruitful to pursue than others, though. Empathy, compassion? Giving? Maybe. Maybe there is no answer. Maybe everything is just an ocean of illusory subjectivity, veiling that one inescapable grim imperative: perish.