We're all going to die
Absolutely, totally we are all 100% doomed.
I’m not saying it’s going to happen right now.
But eventually, we all die. Right?
By this point, you’ve probably switched quickly from thinking ‘this entry is going to be some alarmist nonsense’ to ‘well, duh, of course we’re all going to die, why even bother pointing that out’.
How old were you when you first realised you and everyone you knew were going to die? A toddler perhaps? A small child? Likely it was so long ago you can’t really remember it.
For me, it was my early to mid-twenties. Which may have you scratching your head and thinking ‘don’t you mean that’s when it really hit home, not when you actually first realised it?’
No, literally until that point I thought there was at least a decent chance that I may never die. I was raised to believe that in my lifetime god’s war of Armageddon would occur, followed by a paradise Earth in which we’d never grow old or sick or die. Even those who died previously would be resurrected.
Resurrection, reincarnation, heaven, it all serves the same purpose. Is all religion an attempt to delude ourselves into believing that death is not the end? To avoid looking the tragedy of aging and death in the face?
I think the reason I stuck with the JW religion for as long as I did is that if it was true then the rewards were astronomical. But slowly yet surely I came to realise that the evidence for it was not as strong as I once believed, until finally I gave up on it for good. I enjoyed the freedom that came from this, but I missed the hope of everlasting life I once held as a child. I recall realising that the inevitable decline towards old age and death were inescapable, and thinking to myself 'welcome to the decay'.
I was also raised to see the world as one that was growing worse, a ‘time of the end’. ‘Surely, god has to step in to end this wicked system’ they would tell us, 'how can things get any worse?'.
The witnesses weren’t alone in their bleak assessment of the state of the world and it’s future. A 2015 UK survey found 51% think the future will be worse for young people, with only 16% saying it will be better.
It's a sentiment nicely summed up in NOFX's Generation Z.
Now I like NOFX. I like this song. The apocalyptically bleak outlook on the future married with punk rock just works. But it’s also almost certainly wrong.
The following tweet also caught my attention for being representative of the doomerism that seems so in vogue.
Today is the worst time imaginable in which to bring a child into the world... except for every other time that has ever existed in history! Over the past century human lives worldwide have improved by almost every metric you can think of. Factfulness by Hans Rosling would be a good place to start for any who don’t believe me. Our technology is one of the chief drivers of this. On the same theme, I think of this Louis CK clip nearly every day.
Don’t believe anyone who pines for some rose tinted past where we lived in harmony with nature. Most of us, if transplanted to a preindustrial agrarian society, would be screaming to return to the twenty first century within a week.
As a species, we are on the up.
As individuals, we all are on the decline.
There's no such thing as 'lived happily ever after' if you read the story to the end. There are no happy endings. Only endings.
I am talking of course about the ageing process, or senescence, that slow inescapable loss of health, vitality and physical attractiveness that, unless you’re killed by something else earlier, always proves fatal.
There is absolutely nothing positive about the ageing process. Everything that people list as positives of growing old (having grandkids, the wisdom of years, being more assured of who you are) would be equally positive without the mental and physical decline of biological ageing. I would much rather handle anything the youth of today are getting angsty about than have to deal with the horrors of the ageing process. It would be nice if our lives could end on a high point, like some greatest hits moment, but the grim reality is that the last years of many people's lives are among their worst.
As my gran said "ageing is not for the weak".
As Bowling for Soup put it, 'Getting old sucks, but everybody's doing it'.
Videos occasionally pop up in my youtube recommendations, the type with the hyperbolic ‘How(insert pet hate here) has doomed us all’. Climate, culture, economy, politics. All are trotted out as the big bad threat, and I don’t deny that some of these can be serious issues.
But more and more I’ve just been thinking ‘why would I fret about something that may potentially make my life more difficult, or in an extreme but unlikely scenario could actually kill me, when I’m faced with the inescapable threat of something that’s going to make my later years increasingly difficult and then definitely kill me!'
Between the newly forged Kim-Putin military pact and the recent increase in activity along the DMZ, things are looking worse than they have for a while on the North-South Korea front. Could it explode into a hot war? I’d still bet against it, but it’s far from impossible. Am I worried? No, because ageing is vastly more likely to kill me anyway.
I recently saw a photo from a climate protest with a young woman holding a sign that read ‘You’ll die of old age. We’ll die of climate change’. Two thoughts struck me.
One was that she’s probably wrong. It’s not beyond the realms of possibility that she could die in a climate related event, but it's actually less likely than it was a century ago. She’s hugely more likely to die of old age, and judging from the increasing average human lifespan, probably at an older age than generations previously.
Second, aren’t those both shit options?
Does the fact that ageing is something we will all suffer (unless we die early) make it any less tragic? I guess, a little. Between a child dying and an elderly person succumbing to the perils of old age, I'd say the former is the more tragic. But I can't shake the feeling that there is still something deeply wrong about the latter too.
Gerascopobia: An abnormal or incessant fear of growing older or ageing. I think I have it.
Is this rational to be scared? Unlike other phobias (flying, water, heights etc) it is near impossible to overstate the negative impacts that the ageing process will have on us, nor to exaggerate the chances it’s going to kill us.
On the other hand, does it’s utter inevitability mean that it’s not rational to be scared? A fear of lung cancer, gangs of shady looking young men or being hit by a car can lead us to make sensible life choices to avoid danger. But a fear of ageing doesn’t help you avoid ageing, so why worry. As one poster put it, you’ll inevitably suffer from old age when you reach it, so why suffer twice by worrying about it now?
No one wants to get old. But no one wants to die young. Right now those are our only options.
Unless, there was another way...
I'm sure that sounds irritatingly cryptic for now, but over the past two months I've had a sudden change in the way I view ageing and death.
Why? That's going to take a lot more space than I have time for here. It's going to take more entries. Four of them in fact, and I'll be spacing them two days apart so I'm not filling your friends feed with huge walls of text.
I’m not saying it’s going to happen right now.
But eventually, we all die. Right?
By this point, you’ve probably switched quickly from thinking ‘this entry is going to be some alarmist nonsense’ to ‘well, duh, of course we’re all going to die, why even bother pointing that out’.
How old were you when you first realised you and everyone you knew were going to die? A toddler perhaps? A small child? Likely it was so long ago you can’t really remember it.
For me, it was my early to mid-twenties. Which may have you scratching your head and thinking ‘don’t you mean that’s when it really hit home, not when you actually first realised it?’
No, literally until that point I thought there was at least a decent chance that I may never die. I was raised to believe that in my lifetime god’s war of Armageddon would occur, followed by a paradise Earth in which we’d never grow old or sick or die. Even those who died previously would be resurrected.
Resurrection, reincarnation, heaven, it all serves the same purpose. Is all religion an attempt to delude ourselves into believing that death is not the end? To avoid looking the tragedy of aging and death in the face?
I think the reason I stuck with the JW religion for as long as I did is that if it was true then the rewards were astronomical. But slowly yet surely I came to realise that the evidence for it was not as strong as I once believed, until finally I gave up on it for good. I enjoyed the freedom that came from this, but I missed the hope of everlasting life I once held as a child. I recall realising that the inevitable decline towards old age and death were inescapable, and thinking to myself 'welcome to the decay'.
I was also raised to see the world as one that was growing worse, a ‘time of the end’. ‘Surely, god has to step in to end this wicked system’ they would tell us, 'how can things get any worse?'.
The witnesses weren’t alone in their bleak assessment of the state of the world and it’s future. A 2015 UK survey found 51% think the future will be worse for young people, with only 16% saying it will be better.
It's a sentiment nicely summed up in NOFX's Generation Z.
Click to viewNow I like NOFX. I like this song. The apocalyptically bleak outlook on the future married with punk rock just works. But it’s also almost certainly wrong.
The following tweet also caught my attention for being representative of the doomerism that seems so in vogue.
Today is the worst time imaginable in which to bring a child into the world... except for every other time that has ever existed in history! Over the past century human lives worldwide have improved by almost every metric you can think of. Factfulness by Hans Rosling would be a good place to start for any who don’t believe me. Our technology is one of the chief drivers of this. On the same theme, I think of this Louis CK clip nearly every day.
Don’t believe anyone who pines for some rose tinted past where we lived in harmony with nature. Most of us, if transplanted to a preindustrial agrarian society, would be screaming to return to the twenty first century within a week.
As a species, we are on the up.
As individuals, we all are on the decline.
There's no such thing as 'lived happily ever after' if you read the story to the end. There are no happy endings. Only endings.
I am talking of course about the ageing process, or senescence, that slow inescapable loss of health, vitality and physical attractiveness that, unless you’re killed by something else earlier, always proves fatal.
There is absolutely nothing positive about the ageing process. Everything that people list as positives of growing old (having grandkids, the wisdom of years, being more assured of who you are) would be equally positive without the mental and physical decline of biological ageing. I would much rather handle anything the youth of today are getting angsty about than have to deal with the horrors of the ageing process. It would be nice if our lives could end on a high point, like some greatest hits moment, but the grim reality is that the last years of many people's lives are among their worst.
As my gran said "ageing is not for the weak".
As Bowling for Soup put it, 'Getting old sucks, but everybody's doing it'.
Videos occasionally pop up in my youtube recommendations, the type with the hyperbolic ‘How(insert pet hate here) has doomed us all’. Climate, culture, economy, politics. All are trotted out as the big bad threat, and I don’t deny that some of these can be serious issues.
But more and more I’ve just been thinking ‘why would I fret about something that may potentially make my life more difficult, or in an extreme but unlikely scenario could actually kill me, when I’m faced with the inescapable threat of something that’s going to make my later years increasingly difficult and then definitely kill me!'
Between the newly forged Kim-Putin military pact and the recent increase in activity along the DMZ, things are looking worse than they have for a while on the North-South Korea front. Could it explode into a hot war? I’d still bet against it, but it’s far from impossible. Am I worried? No, because ageing is vastly more likely to kill me anyway.
I recently saw a photo from a climate protest with a young woman holding a sign that read ‘You’ll die of old age. We’ll die of climate change’. Two thoughts struck me.
One was that she’s probably wrong. It’s not beyond the realms of possibility that she could die in a climate related event, but it's actually less likely than it was a century ago. She’s hugely more likely to die of old age, and judging from the increasing average human lifespan, probably at an older age than generations previously.
Second, aren’t those both shit options?
Does the fact that ageing is something we will all suffer (unless we die early) make it any less tragic? I guess, a little. Between a child dying and an elderly person succumbing to the perils of old age, I'd say the former is the more tragic. But I can't shake the feeling that there is still something deeply wrong about the latter too.
Gerascopobia: An abnormal or incessant fear of growing older or ageing. I think I have it.
Is this rational to be scared? Unlike other phobias (flying, water, heights etc) it is near impossible to overstate the negative impacts that the ageing process will have on us, nor to exaggerate the chances it’s going to kill us.
On the other hand, does it’s utter inevitability mean that it’s not rational to be scared? A fear of lung cancer, gangs of shady looking young men or being hit by a car can lead us to make sensible life choices to avoid danger. But a fear of ageing doesn’t help you avoid ageing, so why worry. As one poster put it, you’ll inevitably suffer from old age when you reach it, so why suffer twice by worrying about it now?
No one wants to get old. But no one wants to die young. Right now those are our only options.
Unless, there was another way...
I'm sure that sounds irritatingly cryptic for now, but over the past two months I've had a sudden change in the way I view ageing and death.
Why? That's going to take a lot more space than I have time for here. It's going to take more entries. Four of them in fact, and I'll be spacing them two days apart so I'm not filling your friends feed with huge walls of text.