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One of the weird things I've come to appreciate about death is it is actually a fairly communal activity in a philosophical sense. We all go through it, vanishi
by roenxi 2y ago
One of the weird things I've come to appreciate about death is it is actually a fairly communal activity in a philosophical sense. We all go through it, vanishingly few people like it and we all approach it with similar prospects of surviving for 150 years (nil, none, nothing, zip, zilch). I don't think these concepts of "positivity culture" and "denial" are really on the same spectrum. Any and every culture can devolve into delusion - in some fairly practical sense the default state of every culture is delusion (riddle me any culture that doesn't boil down to doing what "we do what we do because we can" at its logical root). We're all dying, some faster some slower, and it is possible to deal with death productively at any speed in most cultures.
The issue is more that people honestly don't know how to deal with bad situations and for obvious reasons don't have personal experience with being terminally ill to fall back on to generate instinctive empathy. It transcends the cultural aspects, I expect you can go anywhere and people will be uncomfortable with pain, sickness and suffering. One of the major things that unites humans is they'd much rather that trio of feelings stayed well away from them and this leads to some fairly harsh treatment of the people who are not doing well.
There are 2 approaches that I'm aware of - ignore death or turn to religion (I personally recommend Buddhism). Beyond that and symptom mitigation there isn't a lot that can be done although loosening up the regulations on the medical industry would probably help make life a little more bearable. I can imaging sitting in the medical system and watching it crush the life out of someone through economic inefficiency would be its own journey through hell.
> You lie there for a while and dwell on the fact that, barring technological innovation like the Singularity, you’re going to bite it one day.
The singularity won't save anyone. The maths of "forever" is unforgiving.
- Rhapso 2y agoI'm not afraid of dying, I'm honestly planning on intentional death if specific conditions are met, (dementia or "locked in"). I have DNR on my medical necklace next to my conditions because if they bother to slow down enough to check, im probably in a situation where that fate is worse than death. I am terrified of not finishing my todo list. I have things i want to make and changes to effect on the universe before i am ok with leaving it. I take a very utilitarian and brutal view of the future, and inevitable fates don't merit my fear, only my planning. However, I don't think the world would be better should my point of view be universal. I evangelize it only to those I think could benefit.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y agoI am more terrified of getting old. I don't have much on my to-do list and every year feels like I get weaker and more things become impossible forever I guess dying is just the final form of that
- Rhapso 2y agoI have multiple medical issues that all have the effect of "you will go downhill fast in your 60s". I'm actually optimizing my health choices for QoL now over long term survival. Lots of more intense medications have side effects that get felt at point (high dosage Prednisone makes you go blind early, my most likely flavor of chemo makes you go deaf similarly) Decide now on what QoL isn't acceptable to you and plan accordingly. The idea you have to wait around forever to die is a strong cultural belief, but you get to pick how you live your life. That includes how and when it ends.
- silverquiet 2y ago> I am terrified of not finishing my todo list. This is one of the main fears of death.
- cyber_kinetist 2y agoJean Baudrillard (the French philosopher known for his concept of "simulacra") explores this uneasiness towards death in modern society in his magnum opus "Symbolic Exchange and Death" (recommend reading the whole chapter, it is essentially his defining work): "Our whole culture is just one huge effort to dissociate life and death, to ward off the ambivalence of death in the interests of life as value, and time as the general equivalent. The elimination of death is our phantasm, and ramifies in every direction: for religion, the afterlife and immortality; for science, truth; and for economics, productivity and accumulation. No other culture had this distinctive opposition of life and death in the interests of life as positivity: life as accumulation, death as due payment. No other culture had this impasse: as soon as the ambivalence of life and death and the symbolic reversibility of death comes to an end, we enter into a process of accumulation of life as value; but by the same token, we also enter the field of the equivalent production of death. So life-become-value is constantly perverted by the equivalent death. Death, at the same instant, becomes the object of a perverse desire. Desire invests the very separation of life and death."