Doctors cannot solve the riddle of existence for us

I think about death a lot.  Not because I am pathologically obsessed with dark thoughts; far from that.  Death being inevitable is not an existential crisis either.  Thinking about the coming death--of parents,family, friends, myself--provides clarity about the life that I want to live.  In many ways, death gives meaning to life, which otherwise is absurd!

Thus, the blog-posts in plenty about death.  Read them carefully, and you will find that the posts are not about death per se, but are my thoughts on how to live one's life. Whether it is about visiting with parents or not burdening the children, that clarity results from an understanding that we all have expiration dates that we carry; thankfully, those dates are hidden from us.

Of course, most of us do not want to die.  If only we can live a little bit longer.  Extending life has been a quest, I suppose, ever since humans started thinking.  Like the Tom Cruise character in Vanilla Sky, we have all been mumbling or yelling "ellie", by which he is referring to LE--Life Extension.  Over the past 200 years,  we have dramatically increased the average life expectancy at birth, and reduced the chances of dying from ailments that easily killed our ancestors.  We even defeated small pox, and rounded up the last of the virus into test tubes that are in secure locations!

Yuval Noah Harari writes about all these and more in the context of the novel coronavirus.  Harari raises an important question:

When the vaccine is indeed ready and the pandemic is over, what will be humanity’s main takeaway?

That question is practically a Rorschach Test.  How you answer it says a lot about how you think about life and death, and the meaning of your existence.

Harari writes:

In all likelihood, it will be that we need to invest even more efforts in protecting human lives. We need to have more hospitals, more doctors, more nurses. We need to stockpile more respiratory machines, more protective gear, more testing kits. We need to invest more money in researching unknown pathogens and developing novel treatments. We should not be caught off guard again.

We will, of course, do all that.  Maybe we will even reduce our military by a couple of stealth bombers and instead use that money to stockpile on medical masks.  We will throw as much resources that we can into LE.

But, shouldn't we also spend some to help us all deal with the mystery of our existence?  The puzzle that haunts us?  As Harari notes: "We have to own up to our transience."

Neither Harari nor I imagine that humans will take up that question of our fleeting existence.

The present crisis might indeed make many individuals more aware of the impermanent nature of human life and human achievements. Nevertheless, our modern civilisation as a whole will most probably go in the opposite direction. Reminded of its fragility, it will react by building stronger defences. When the present crisis is over, I don’t expect we will see a significant increase in the budgets of philosophy departments. But I bet we will see a massive increase in the budgets of medical schools and healthcare systems.

We will waste yet another opportunity that presents itself as a crisis.  Colleges will further decimate the humanities, and instead invest more in science and technology!

Harari ends his essay with this:

Doctors cannot solve the riddle of existence for us. But they can buy us some more time to grapple with it. What we do with that time is up to us.

Up to us.

I know what we will do with the time: Watch sports, porn, baking shows, ... everything other than owning up to our transience and making sense of this absurd life!