I've been thinking a lot lately about how death is a natural process.
It's one of those things that seems perfectly clear when you look dispassionately at people that you are not connected to, people that you do not know personally. We get very callous about death when it happens somewhere else to someone else.
But it's everybody's lot in life.
I've often thought that death is one of the things that makes life worth living. Knowing that your life is temporary makes it more precious and sweet. The only problem is that you appreciate this fact the most only when you are getting close to the time for yourself. If you're lucky, that will be because you're getting old. I've listened to older people complain about getting older and how bad it is, and I understand what they are saying, I just think there's something to be said for the alternative - it's much worse. Actually, I can't help but think that if you took care of your health, exercised your body and mind, and took the time to find pleasures in life and have some accomplishments you are proud of, then age isn't so much a time of defeat. Who isn't going to long for their bodies when they were at their peak of beauty and resilience in their youth?
I have ofter realized that while death is always mourned, it's also necessary to clear the population, make way for people born into the current age. Give the youth their chance. We humans have searched for the fountain of youth since the earliest records, back to the days of early pyramid builders. Perpetual youth is a bit of an oxymoron. What people want is a youthful body and a fresh perspective. With science, we might be able to give them the youthful bodies, but how do you restore innocence? After all, isn't innocence just another word for ignorance? Would you trade in all your experience for youth? I'm sure some people would. In a way, we do become more innocent as we age, for it seems certain that we don't store all our memories, some are destroyed or overwritten as more things happen to us. If you live long enough, you can read the books you read years ago, and it's almost as if you never read them before. Old acquaintances are that way too. Try going to your 20 year high school reunion and see how many people you don't remember at all.
Immortality would bring it's own problems. Would wealth concentrate into the oldest people's hands? Would they tend to get into positions of authority and never give them up? Would the population truly explode if people weren't dying? This would tend to make life cheap. If no one ever died naturally, you'd have to either stop having babies (a biological drive so strong, that I can't see how you could eradicate it) or let people murder without penalty.
I sometimes think that people feel that their life gets stale after a while. We don't seem as sharp, our senses are dulled and we become emotionally jaded. That might be natures way of making us want to die. In biology, there is a phenomenon called apotosis. Cellular suicide. It's used as a way to take a cell that is misbehaving, badly damaged, or developing incorrectly out of the game. The body or the cell itself sends a signal that makes the cell kill itself. You see parallels in human life. Some people commit suicide. It makes you wonder if some of them somehow know that they aren't met for life. If you knew that the people that commit suicide were destined for a horrible life of pain, you could understand why death might seem like a better alternative. Or, if you look at society as a body and people as individual cells in the body, it seems quite clear that society benefits from the removal of some individuals.
On an individual level, when it's someone you care about, it's a tragedy for a person to die. I wonder what it would have been like to live in an era where death was very common, like during the Civil War or the Bubonic Plague. Do you just get numb to all the death? If we lived in a world where people rarely died, would the occasional death seem that much worse?
No comments:
Post a Comment