Expecting to Die

Death comes to all of us, but knowing that isn't improving life

Photo by Fernando @cferdophotography on Unsplash

My colleague from long ago had a son, a young adult, who was convinced that he was about to die.

Apparently, he didn’t have any illnesses or other physical problems that should lead to death anytime soon, and he wasn’t exposed to outer conditions that would make his steps through life more dangerous than they are for all of us. But he just felt that he should die, that it was coming to him soon.

How do we deal with such a situation?

Well, I think there was a psychologist involved, but I wasn’t close to any of them, so I don’t know any details. The guy did get some treatment, at least, that’s what I know. He also got a lot of worries by his surroundings – his mother was very sad about it but tried to talk about it as something normal, something that just exists in life. She wasn’t asking for pity or help, she just occasionally mentioned something as a response to other talks, such as why she would need a day off or similar.

That’s how we deal with something abnormal: we try to make it normal.

Obviously, the son was suffering and didn’t have much quality in life. How much will you start doing and planning if you expect to die soon?

And for a young man, there’s a lot to plan. A full life ahead, many paths to explore, many things to try, people to get to know. There are also a bunch of expectations from the family, school, the society by large, that may be overwhelming for someone who wants to take it all seriously but doesn’t know how to do all that is expected from it, doesn’t know if he can do it all – or any of it.

Suicidal tendencies are higher for teenagers than for many other groups, at least so it is spoken about by tradition. I haven’t seen any recent statistics, but I can imagine that there are different groups of people who could have such tendencies, and the way statistics is being arranged will then reveal it or not. For instance, there could be a difference between people who are alone and people who are in a relationship, which nobody will know if that detail isn’t part of the statistical material or analysis.

I don’t know if that young guy was suicidal or merely anxious, which I suppose doesn’t need to go together. But I do know from myself and many other people I have met as teenagers or later in life where they were talking about that time and age, that life can seem very difficult, and it can lead to thoughts about ending it.

A large part of this is due to changing from looking at developing one self, often without even thinking about the matter, not understanding that this is what happens when a child is playing or a teenager is diving into their computer game or hanging out with their friends on the corner. Changing into a different life where other people want to decide a direction for them, or maybe not, which is just as bad: being uncertain about what life will bring can actually go hand in hand with a need for honest and helpful advice.

That part shouldn’t be surprising, should it?

Nevertheless, most advice the young ones get is based on a misled conception of what is important in life, something the young one can easily see through. It doesn’t take a mastermind to understand that the ideas of getting a “respectable” job, whatever that is in this social subclass, getting married, and living a “decent” life is all everything else than great.

It doesn’t take much thinking either to understand that some of the problems in society are directly connected with this way of thinking, the discrepancy between the perceived path to a good life and the actual effect of following that path.

For a young person who sees this but cannot get any reasonable and honest advice about what to do then, and who experiences that they are expected to give up everything in life they enjoy, only to get a bunch of things they don’t, perspectives can look quite dark.

And if they don’t feel skilled for this kind of life either, there may not be a visible other path anywhere in their horizon – no attractive goal of staying alive.

This all in a micro-societal perspective. The individual against the society that doesn’t respect the needs of the individual.

When we then add a macro-societal perspective of dark outlooks, I guess that any of us can sink down into thoughts about how this is going to end – and when.

Daily news about wars, hacker attacks, murders, explosions, shootings, crime of all sorts, and an outright insane behavior of the politicians that were supposed to lead our countries forward, make the world better, and provide a way for us to live our lives with a perspective of a better future, with options to pursue, things to enjoy – all that steps on whatever optimism each of us might have left. All of it reminds of that we are going to die.

With all that, surviving and thriving are not a matter of personal strength and skills, not a matter of what each of us want to do or at least, can dream of doing. Because all of that misery we hear about, all the time, makes it look like we are, indeed, destined to die soon.

I wonder why we build up our societies and interactions in such a way that they, by large, kill dreams and passify us, making most of us stop looking ahead and only try to survive in the now.

Of course, if we have given up all hope for the future, we may be easier to convince buying all sorts of things instead of saving our money, because what good will the money do for us when we are dead?

Passive people may also be easier to push around, as the revolutions that arise from a dream of a better future will be less likely.

My colleague’s son was ill, true, but I think that the society makes many people ill. Some to an extent where it is visible, because these people are more sensitive than the others, but the others too, just not necessarily expressing an expectation to die, but still giving up many hopes they may have had about the future.

We live in a time when ideologies have been on return for a while, so people are unreligious, no longer believing in any particular political direction, and even giving up on the idea of saving the whales, the environment, and the planet.

In such a time, we need a humanist approach more than ever. We really should start treating others better, so that they can start believing in the future by believing in something that will be part of the future.

Because, if nobody believes in the future, there won’t be any. Then we can all, for sure, expect to die, leaving nothing behind, no world for the next ones to enjoy.

As always, I’ll advocate for doing something good for at least one other person, each day of your life, with the attempt to making them a bit more happy about life.

We are all going to die, but we should spend some time living, truly living, with a smile and a sense of purpose and value, before we get to that.