Die Another Day

Some thoughts on death from a millennial guy

This time of the year, the Western world celebrates death and pays respect to the death. The colorful Mexican Día de Muertos. The spooky American Halloween. Here in Poland, we get to take a day off on the All Saints Day to squeeze through traffic, scavenge for a free parking space near the cemetery, endure bad weather and leave flowers and burning lanterns on the graves of our late family members. It’s a grim occasion, which often leads to thoughts about one’s eventual death.

Recently, I think about death a lot more than I used to - my grandfather passed away a couple of weeks ago, and my mother-in-law is currently battling terminal cancer. Here, I share some of the more helpful and insightful thoughts I came up with.

---

Live and let die

Rob Henderson

described the differences between the brief funeral ceremonies common in the western world and traditional Chinese mourning rituals which span over the course of a few days. He also invokes examples of other traditional cultures in which the family remains in the presence of the corpse for several days. According to Henderson, the purpose of such rituals was to become fully convinced that a relative has truly and irreversibly passed away.

In western countries, death and the funeral has become medicalized and professionalized. For most of the time, the dead remains behind the the closed doors of the morgue, funeral home and casket, separated from most, if not all, of the family.

Lacking a complete experience of witnessing the dead leads to a cognitive dissonance: consciously, we see and understand that they are no longer around, but subconsciously, we still look for then. Sometimes, we even seem to have seen the dead person long after their death and funeral, which, according to Henderson, is an evolutionary misfiring, that switches our brains into a mode of searching for those who have simply gone missing.

I read Henderson’s post as a suggestion to try to restore the traditional funeral rituals, to make it easier for westerners to cope with losing their loved ones. But then I realized, that the western funerals are short for a reason: today, we die gradually, a lot slower than we used to. This allows us to experience and witness the death of our friends and family for months or years before the actual event.

In the old times, it was far more common for people to die suddenly. Men died more often as accident victims or war causalties. Women died more often during childbirth. Back in the day, the only thing you could possibly do in a medical emergency was to have someone mount a horse and ride to find a doctor in a nearby town. Now, everyone carries a device which allows them to summon an ambulance that will bring them to the nearby hospital within minutes.

Also, everything is a lot safer. Travellers are no longer raided by bands of robbers hiding in the woods. Cars undergo rigorous safety testing which verifies the effectivenes of their seatbelts, airbags and emergency braking systems. Machines and workplaces need to meet mandatory health and safetry regulations and certifications. We can scorn safetyism, the EU regulations, years-long FAA certification of new airliners and the fact that we haven’t put a man on the moon in 50 years, but for a common man, the world has become a much safer place.

The only person I know who was in a dangerous car crash survived, but remains in a coma. Back in the day, he would surely die, but modern medicine allowed him to survive. Hence, none of the people I got to know in real life have died in an accident.

Today, it’s common for older people to swallow a bunch of pills everyday. Thanks to advances in of mediacal diagnostics and treatment, they can control and live with chronic conditions. The same conditions, undiagnosed and untreated, would often cause sudden death back in the day.

Finally, neurodegenerative disesases such as Alzheimer’s and dementia become more common, causing our loved ones to slowly lose their memories, personality and conscience - everything that allows us to maintain social relationships with others.

It seems to me that the traditions of funeral ceremonies and a period of mourning are still more aligned with sudden death, but don’t really work with the modern way of prolonged dying.

During my grandparents’ funerals, I tried to force myself to feel sadness, but couldn’t - when all of them have suffered from various degrees of Alzeimer’s and dementia, I watched their personalities and memories slowly fade away throughout their final years. During their funerals, I felt like they were already gone for quite some time.

Maybe eventually we will get to see a new tradition: a farewell party for the old and terminally ill, who already have their diagnosis but are still physically and mentally able to meet their friends and family to share memories and say goodbye. A big event such as the opening act of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Bilbo Baggins’ 111th birthday, or something like a bachelor/ette party - one last crazy night with a group of close friends.

---

Never say never again

From a philosophical standpoint, dying is not necesarily limited to aging, diseases and accidents.

“Life” can be recursively defined as “living your life to the fullest”. Death is the ultimate end of all activity. But any moment when we realize that we won’t do any particular activity ever again can be defined as partial death:

I won’t have sex ever again.
I won’t drive my car ever again.
I won’t ski down a slope ever again.
I won’t get up and stand on my own ever again.
I won’t have a Thanksgiving dinner with my family ever again.

In philosophical sense, the terminally ill, and developmentally impaired unborn children can be considered as more dead than alive - their “never again” fairly outnumber the actual possibilities. The rising support for abortion and euthanasia shows that a growing part of society believes that a final, physical death could be a better solution for such people, as compared to their further existence in a very advanced state of partial death.

But the philosophical partial death is not limited to the old, ill and impaired. I remember the moment I first felt that I partially died. I was watching the 2006/2007 FIS Ski Jumping World Cup. I witnessed how a 16 year old Gregor Schlierienzauer instantly rose to the top ranks, getting really close to winning the prestigious Four Hills Tournament and the overall World Cup.

I was 17 at the time. As I watched the young prodigy’s breakthrough performance, I realized: I’ll never become a world champion in sports.

To be fair, I never had any ambitions to succeed in professional sport. But up until that very moment, I subconsciously felt: you can do anything, are young, you have all the time in the world. I realized that reaching mastery in a sport like ski jumping takes rigorous training since childhood, so that door is now closed for me forever.

Even children can partially die like that. The end of breastfeeding is possibly the first partial death we experience as infants. Then, as children learn new things and become capable of managing on their own, they lose the unconditional support from their parents in that respective area forever.

Two things to watch out for when thinking about partial death are pessimism and solipsism.

Pessimism may result in prematurely calling the time of partial death (I’ll never get a raise/promotion/marry/have kids/afford a car/home etc.) which turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Solipsism may cause us to detach from the reality and the bitter truth that we are partially dead and the options we thought we still have are not real.

---

No time to die

In Your Fear of Mortality is Bullshit,

David Pinsof

suggests that the fear of mortality is actually a fear of aging, weakness and low status.

Personally, I think that our fear of death is more driven by a common cognitive bias, the availability heuristic.

We rarely witness death in our everyday lives. But we often see it in thrillers, horrors and medical drama, which typically show tragic, sudden and unexpected death.

It’s hard to imagine the feeling of dying naturally at age 100. But it’s easier to imagine dying now, which, for a relatively young and healthy person, can only becaused by a sudden illness or an accident. It’s the shock and horror of sudden near-complete philosophical death: I won’t do almost anything ever again.

Assuming that this is how death from old age would look like is a fallacy. Aging is a slow process of losing physical and mental capabilities. It is gradual philosophical death - more and more doors close shut forever, year by year. I believe that for a very old person who already lost the capability to do almost anything, death is a lot less scary than for someone younger and still fully capable.

Some also fear that dying will be a physically painful process. But according to paliative care specialists, most terminally ill patients seem relaxed as they die, and their suffering seems less than the initial level resulting from their condition.

---

Diamonds are forever

During one of the walks with my then-3 year old daugther, we saw some kids playing volleyball. As I explained her the rules of that game, I mentioned:

- Back in the day, me and mommy also liked to play volleyball.
- When? When I was in mommy’s belly?
- No, a long time before that.
- So where was I then?
- You didn’t exist.
- … But where was I?

Turns out, it’s really hard to grasp the concept of nonexistence before birth if you’re a 3 year old girl. But even adults have a hard time understanding the nonexistence after death.

It’s easier to imagine a deafblind sensory deprivation state in which the conscience is sparated from the senses and the external world, doomed for prolonged suffering and boredom. We are terrified of the thought that this is what the experience of comatose patients could look like, as described in the song One by Metallica:

Darkness imprisoning me
All that I see
Absolute horror
I cannot live
I cannot die
Trapped in myself
Body my holding cell

Landmine has taken my sight
Taken my speech
Taken my hearing
Taken my arms
Taken my legs
Taken my soul
Left me with life in hell

I think that another type of fear of death is the thought that death could turn out to be a similar experience of being forever trapped in a deafblind limbo. The entire horror, goth and heavy metal aestethic binds death and darkness together. But this is just another availability heuristic cognitive error - the deafblind limbo state is just easier to imagine than nonexistence.

I see this fear in dark humor web comics with a dark panel at the end which means that the protagonist is dead, and those about ghosts floating forever in space:

Polish sci-fi writer Stanisław Lem included a great description of the horror of the eternal deafblind limbo in one of the stories from his Star Diaries: The space traveller protagonist, Ijon Tichy, meets a man who “invented immortality” by finding a way to extract human conscience and store it inside a crystal that can survive eternity, up to and including the Heat Death of the universe. He shows Tichy the crystal in which he immortalized his wife, killing her human self to use destructive brain scanning methods required by the process. Tichy is horrified that the woman’s conscience might be eternally trapped in the deafblind limbo inside the crystal. Eventually, he decides to spend a huge amount of money to buy the crystal. Then, he destroys it.

We can partially deal with this cognitive error by imagining things that are actually closer to death. The nonexistence after death is the same nonexistence we “experienced” before birth, as famously explained by Mark Twain:

I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.

Death is often called an eternal sleep, because both death and sleep are about losing consciousness. We experience this every night as we fall asleep, and we already know that as we sleep, our conscience is not stuck suffering in the deafblind limbo state for several hours - it’s just inactive. There is no reason to imagine that to be otherwise in case of death.

---

Tomorrow never dies

A key feature of most religions is the belief in heaven, or equivalent happy place as the final destination for the soul and a reward for a good life on Earth. Yet, for many of us, the dream of eternal life is the fantasy of immortality and extending our current lifespan infinitely.

The most desirable, and also least feasible version of this dream is eternal youth. Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon book series and Netflix show present a more realistic vision: uploading your digital mind into a cloned, younger or even upgraded version of yourself.

Present human cloning research is limited to embryos used to harvest stem cells that can be used for growing tissues and organs and as treatment for serious diseases. But since cloning Dolly the sheep in the 90’s, many species of large mammals have been cloned. A few companies offer dog and cat cloning services, allowing their owners to reincarnate their beloved pets. Human cloning seems technically possible, but is not attempted due to ethical reasons alone.

Creating and independent clone seems farther from achieving immortality than mind transfer, but only at first glance - mind transfer is ridden with the same onthological issue as teleportation.

In both cases we’re talking about a hypotherical device with two connected pods. A man enters the first pod and the process is started. After a while, a “thing” emerges from the second pod. The “thing” looks like the man, talks like the man, considers itself the man and has all of his memories. But the man who entered the first pod was killed or disintegrated in the process.

Who/what emerged from the second pod? Did they transfer the man, or create a copy and destroy the original? Move, cut-and-paste or copy-paste-delete? The Netflix show Living with Yourself depicts the ridiculous events that would ensue if the original was not removed after creating the copy in such process.

The premise of The Fly, a classic sci-fi horror, is based on another common problem of cloning and teleportation: inadvertent creation of a genetic hybrid of two living organisms that happened to be in the first pod. As frightening as this can be, this process already exists in nature. Creating a genetic hybrid of two organisms of the same species is possible for large mammals and even humans. Moreover, implanting embryos created this way in the uterus and allowing them to grow into human beings raises no ethical concerns. The procedure is (arguably) inexpensive and is available to almost anyone capable of finding an opposite sex person eager to participate in it along.

Obviously, this is the good old sexual reproduction.

Thus, having and raising your own biological children is the only available method of prolonging your biological existence. It is the closest thing to eternal life you can possibly get now, at least until human cloning or mind transfer technology becomes available.

Parenthood is a unique opportunity for playing God, by creating a human in your own image. This is probably why most often we want to have children of the same sex as their own - with opposite sex children, the image becomes more blurry.

The sons born in American elite families are sometimes given the names of their fathers, with a suffix like Jr or II/III, as seen in European royal dynasties. A son bearing his father’s name, following his father’s footsteps, taking over the helm at his company and inheriting his social status may indeed seem like a reincarnation of the successful man his father had become before him.

But regardless of their children’s and grandchildren’s sex, name and life choices, a dying parent know that a tiny part of them lives on within their descendants, and if the next generations continue to reproduce indefinitely, that part might essentially live forever.

---

The living daylights

All this thinking about death allowed me to stop being afraid of the inevitable death in old age. I understand that aging will slowly rule me out of subsequent life activities, providing me time to process and accept each partial philosophical death. I hope that in my final days, my possibilities will be severely limited, such that my imminent demise will not cause grief or horror. And if I end up suffering from dementia or Alzheimers, I don’t think I’ll be self-aware enough to worry about imminent death anyway - problem solved. I also believe that the process of dying will be less painful than the diseases I might have to face beforehand.

However, I am still afraid of sudden, unexpected death. But this is not an overwhelming kind of fear, but more of a simple risk awareness, which leads me to rational risk averting decisions: drive slowly and carefully, wear a helmet when riding unstable vehicles, get regular medical check-ups, eat well and stay away from dangerous places and countries.

I understand and accept that with aging, I will continue partially dying and no longer be able to perform activities available only for the young. But on the other hand, I know that the list of such activities is fairly limited: professional and/or extreme sports, finding a life partner, having children… that’s basically all that comes to my mind. Most other interesting activities and entertainment - recreational sports, travel, dining, music, culture, meeting people, expensive cars and hobbies - require only basic levels of physical and mental fitness. I believe that taking good care of myself will allow me to enjoy these all the way until late retirement.

We sometimes say that an old person lacks energy to do something. But it seems like the physical capabilities in old age are more often restricted by the lack of mobility.

According to physical therapy specialist Kelly Starlett, the dimensions of physical fitness are independent, and even those who achieve peak athletic form like running the marathon or lifting super heavy weights may also suffer from the lack of mobility. He also explains how there is no biological deterioration mechanism that would condemn everyone to eventually lose mobility, it’s all due to lack of movement. Proper activity and exercise can therefore postpone the partial death resulting from the loss of mobility, possibly indefinitely.

---

Moonraker

As time goes by, we don’t just lose options and opportunities. We can gain new ones as well. Work, saving, investment and new technology may turn something that once seemed impossible or horribly expensive into a real possiblity.

Until very recently, the cost of travelling to space and the requirements for astronaut candidates were both astronomical. This bitter truth quickly led me, and all other kids who based their whole personality off of the Space Shuttle at the age of 4, to another moment of philosophical death: I’ll never go to space.

But today, you no longer need to be billonaire or a perfectly trained, educated and physically fit Air Force pilot to become an astronaut. Tickets for suborbital spaceflights on board of the ships flown by Jeff Bezos’ and Richard Branson’s space startups cost around the same as a house. And on one of these flights, William Shatner (for non-nerds: captain Kirk from the Star Trek original series) became the world’s oldest astronaut at the age of 90.

Recently, we saw the amazing landing of Elon Musk’s SpaceX Starship booster rocket. The Starship, when fully operational, will not only allow manned Mars missions, but is also expected to lower the cost of launching payloads to low earth orbit by a few orders of magnitude, to just a couple hundred dollars per pound.

With all this recent progress in spaceflight, I strongly believe that in 30 years, a newly retired IT specialist from Poland should be able to afford some kind of a thrill ride into space.

---

The world is not enough

Severe illness and injury from accidents also lead to partial philosophical death: I won’t see / stand up / be self-reliant ever again. But today, bionic prosthetics, exoskeletons and brain implants allow them to regain some of their capabilities, resulting in philosophical resurrection.

Ted Gioia from the Honest Broker recently noted the lack of progress in VR and Metaverse development despite huge investment and pivots from major tech companies. But I believe that sooner or later, immersive VR will become a reality, and generative AI will become an enabler of that. This will unlock possibilities and experiences not imagined by even the brightest sci-fi authors. And these will be available for literally anyone, since little to none physical capabilities will be able to access it - even bedridden patients can use digital devices, and the fully paralyzed ones can now control them via Neuralink implants.

Hence, I am planning to spend the end of my retirement as a young, fit avatar in a premium VR similar to Black Mirror’s San Junipero.

And when I receive my terminal diagnosis, I hope that, like Bilbo Baggins, I’ll still be able to say goodbye to my friends and family, before embarking on my final journey accompanied by my loved ones and health care professionals.

---