Who will live and who will die?

“How many will pass away and how many will be born? Who will live and who will die?”

I had no idea of that couplet until I read this opinion piece in the NY Times.  It is a part of Yom Kippur prayers.  A day in which we remind ourselves that "No one makes it out alive."

There’s the obvious — the plastic surgery and the digital surgery and the obsession with achieving perfect quantities of tautness and plumpness and dewiness. But look through the death lens, and you’ll see our fixation on wellness and workouts in a new way. Look through the death lens, and Silicon Valley’s project to extend life indefinitely looks as foolish as Gilgamesh’s efforts to do the same. Look through the death lens, and Instagram and Twitter look like nothing more than numbing agents.

I am not Jewish. I am not religious either. Yet, my suspicion is that I think a lot more about my mortality and, therefore, what I want to do with my limited time, more than most religious do.  Such an atheist life should really not surprise anybody; as the Huguenot philosopher and historian, Pierre Bayle wrote, way back in 1682:

It is no stranger for an atheist to live virtuously than it is strange for a Christian to live criminally. We see the latter sort of monster all the time, so why should we think the former is impossible? 

Whether it is Ramadan, or Vaikunta Ekadasi; or any religious high holy day--and I don't really observe any of those days--those are all timely, regular, reminders that no one makes it out alive and, therefore, we better figure out our priorities before it is way late.

One of the biggest advantages with facing up to the reality of my coming expiration is that I am less and less interested in people whose words and actions seem to miss that perspective.  I have encountered one too many "god-fearing" people who refuse to feel the pain of others, and who refuse to help those in misery.   Of course, their behaviors bother me, but once they reveal who they are, I keep away from them.  They are not worth my limited time!

The author of that opinion piece quotes a Manhattan rabbi, Angela Buchdahl:

thinking about your death can bring you much closer to experiencing true joy. It “compels us to squeeze out every bit of life out of every day that we have”

That has been my experience too.  As I have blogged in plenty here, thinking about my mortality makes me appreciate the good people around me; the blue sky with puffy white clouds; the sparkling waters in the river and the ocean; the giggles of a child; ... it is an endless list of miracles.

Finally, even though I am far from religions, I sincerely appreciate the "atonement" that Yom Kippur reminds.  After all, both the religious and the irreligious err.  We humans make plenty of mistakes, big and small, which add up to a lot over the years that we live.

I apologize for all my misdeeds and to all those I have wronged.

A world of entertained fools

Do we really put our money where our mouth is?

The writer of a letter to the Statesman Journal notes that we are "a nation of fools":

We, the American people voluntarily pay professional athletes more than we pay the president. We pay entertainers more than we pay doctors and nurses and school teachers. We are a nation of fools. We are getting exactly what we deserve.

He is terribly wrong.  We are not a nation of fools.  We are a world full of fools.  People all over the world seem to want to be entertained 24x7, and are willing to pay gazillions to entertainers of all kinds.  What the hell is wrong with us?

This global pattern is one that Forbes wisely recognized in its latest listing of the world's highest paid entertainers:

Who the hell is Channing Tatum and why is he/she earning that much?  Now, that question by itself says a lot about how much I am willing to pay to be entertained!

A quick detour on this Channing Tatum.  Turns out it is a he!

The need to be entertained is so pervasive that ... hey, hey, don't go away.  Come back and read the rest of this post! ;)

Like I was saying, the need to be entertained is so pervasive that educators have for a long time complained that education has been degraded to edutainment.  Even church pastors have found the need to make their sermons entertaining so that the few who do come continue to do so.

It is almost as if serious inquiries, whether it is secular or religious approaches to understanding the human condition, have to compete against entertainment of various kinds: from traditional ball games, to video games, to movies and television, to ... Heck, apparently people will rather be so entertained by the freaky weirdness of a couple having nineteen kids that they would willingly support the "characters" now that the multi-million dollar contract has been canceled!

Perhaps entertainment is all about escapism.  To try to run and hide from that one thing that awaits us all: death.  The fear of mortality.  Instead of dealing with it, maybe people prefer to be entertained.  If only they knew how rewarding it is to read and think about death itself that there is no time for "entertainment"!

I am not alone ... in thinking that I don't want to live past 75

This is an awful time to blog about this topic, one might think.  I could even be accused of being insanely awful and insensitive: It has been only days since the friend's father passed away, and the treatment protocol for my mother's fracture after her fall is yet to be sorted out and, yet, I blog about this?

I would argue otherwise.  Such contexts are valuable opportunities to think about our own fragility and what we want to do with our lives, with how much ever useful time we have remaining.  During such crises, we have evidence right in front of us, unlike when one is happy vacationing in Tahiti.  The insane person is the one who contemplates about his own mortality when vacationing in a tropical paradise.

A couple of weeks ago, when everything was so well, during a conversation with cousins, they asked me when I started thinking about eating and living healthily.  "For almost twenty years, I would think" I told them.  We talked more about healthy lifestyles and I suggested that they think about advanced directives too.  After all, things can go bad at any age, at any minute.  Which is also when I told them that as far as I am concerned, I am on a twenty-five year countdown.

They were shocked.

But, to me, the shock is that most of the population don't seem to have thought about their own mortality and don't seem to have an idea of the ideal age they would want to die--with well thought out arguments.  How can that be!  We plan for retirement. We plan for vacations.  We even plan on where to go for a dinner with a few others.  We don't plan for our death, which is the only certain thing ever?

As I noted in this post, 75 seems like a wonderful age for me to call it quits:

I have experienced a good life, have seen quite a bit of this world, and have met a mix of good and bad people.  A quarter century more seems a luxury at this point.  And when that end comes, I look forward to a good death, without machines and tubes and chemicals to keep me "alive."

For that matter, as I wrote there, it is completely ok if the end happens today too.  What a wonderful life I have had!

It was, therefore, a pleasant surprise to read a lengthy essay in The Atlantic with a title that says it all: "Why I hope to die at 75."  The author, unlike me, is a somebody:

Ezekiel Emanuel is director of the Clinical Bioethics Department at the U.S. National Institutes of Health and heads the Department of Medical Ethics & Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania.

As I often remind myself, it is not what I say because the world cares about who says it--and I am a nobody ;)

So, what is Emanuel's logic?

Its specificity forces us to think about the end of our lives and engage with the deepest existential questions and ponder what we want to leave our children and grandchildren, our community, our fellow Americans, the world. The deadline also forces each of us to ask whether our consumption is worth our contribution. As most of us learned in college during late-night bull sessions, these questions foster deep anxiety and discomfort. The specificity of 75 means we can no longer just continue to ignore them and maintain our easy, socially acceptable agnosticism. For me, 18 more years with which to wade through these questions is preferable to years of trying to hang on to every additional day and forget the psychic pain they bring up, while enduring the physical pain of an elongated dying process.
Seventy-five years is all I want to live.

No different from my own reasoning!  As I wrote in another post:

When we realize there is only a limited amount of time, we are then able to easily rank some as important and others are not worth even a tiny second of our lives.
If the latter, we stop caring for sports in which people get paid gazillions to entertain us. We stop caring for movies that are formulaic.  We don't care for unprofessional colleagues. We end marriages and we divorce. Life is way too short for these.
I would rather spend time, and money, on what truly matters.

Anyway, you don't want to know what I think, and would rather hear from Emanuel:

By the time I reach 75, I will have lived a complete life. I will have loved and been loved. My children will be grown and in the midst of their own rich lives. I will have seen my grandchildren born and beginning their lives. I will have pursued my life’s projects and made whatever contributions, important or not, I am going to make. And hopefully, I will not have too many mental and physical limitations. Dying at 75 will not be a tragedy. Indeed, I plan to have my memorial service before I die. And I don’t want any crying or wailing, but a warm gathering filled with fun reminiscences, stories of my awkwardness, and celebrations of a good life. After I die, my survivors can have their own memorial service if they want—that is not my business.
Let me be clear about my wish. I’m neither asking for more time than is likely nor foreshortening my life. Today I am, as far as my physician and I know, very healthy, with no chronic illness. I just climbed Kilimanjaro with two of my nephews. So I am not talking about bargaining with God to live to 75 because I have a terminal illness.

Precisely!  I am way more of a health-obsessed guy than most other people who would want to live well into their old age.  As a student once joked, if I want to die at 75 then I should stop doing the healthy stuff and take up smoking instead!

Even as I healthily work towards that countdown, for now, like any mortal, all I want is for my mother to be on her feet soon.