The Day I Die

 

the day I die

will be hot and sunny

rainy

or maybe partly cloudy with a 20% chance of showers in the afternoon

 

the weather doesn’t matter

 

the point is

I’ll be dead

 

afterwards the world will be a little bit worse

and

(let’s be honest here)

also a little bit better

 

the Earth will keep on spinning

 

a soccer mom rushes the kids to school

an old man forgets his dentist appointment

it won’t matter that I’m not there

 

regardless of the weather

good or bad

sun or rain

I won’t enjoy it

or complain

 

come to think of it

my death won’t matter very much at all

 

except to me

 

because I’ll be dead

 

 

 

a yappy dog

Yappy dog: yap yap yap yap yap yap yap

Sleepwalker: Do you have a dog?

Yappy dog: yap yap yap yap yap yap yap

Sisyphus: No

Yappy dog: yap yap yap yap yap yap yap

Sleepwalker: Why not? Dogs are so cute. A dog makes your life complete.

Television: drone drone drone drone drone

Sleepwalker: What about TV? Do you like to watch TV?

Television: drone drone drone drone drone

Sisyphus: I can’t say I care for TV. Watching TV seems like a waste of time to me.

Baby: wah wah wah wah wah wah wah

Sleepwalker: Then you need children. Life is meaningless if you don’t have kids.

Baby: wah wah wah wah wah wah wah

Sisyphus: I’ve never wanted children.

Sleepwalker: I don’t get it. If you don’t have a dog, don’t watch TV, and don’t have children, then how do you kill time?

Sisyphus turns away and silently continues rolling his boulder up the hill.

infinite life

Sisyphus: (pauses from rolling his boulder) What’s wrong?

Red Pine: I feel depressed. My life has no meaning

Sisyphus: Why is that?

Red Pine: Because I’m immortal. Centuries ago I made the mistake of drinking the magical cinnabar decoction of eternal life, and now I’ll never die.

Sisyphus: And that’s a problem?

Red Pine: You don’t get it. If life is endless, everything becomes meaningless. I have to keep doing the same things over and over for all eternity. Everything seems pointless and boring.

Heidegger: Red Pine is right. Awareness of death focuses the mind on life. We only value life when we realize that it’s finite. We begin to live when we start to die.

Sisyphus: So life’s finitude makes it valuable. But does death make life meaningful?

(Sisyphus continues rolling a boulder up the hill)

an idiot’s tale

Macbeth:
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Proteus: I keep going back and forth on this problem. No matter how much I think about it, I can’t figure out why we’re all here. What’s the point of it all? How do you endure the senselessness of it all?

Macbeth: An idiot’s tale might be meaningless, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t entertaining.

Proteus: So you’re content with a life that’s nothing more than a nonsensical story.

Shakespeare: In the hand of a master, the idiot’s story can rise to the level of art.

Proteus: So a person’s life can become a great story?

Shakespeare: Even then, it’s still pretty meaningless. All art is nothing more than consolation in the face of death. By distracting us from the void, it temporarily consoles.

Castiglione: But what if life itself becomes a work of art? Why can’t a living work of art have meaning?

the meaning of life

 

Kierkegaard: Life must be understood backwards!

Sisyphus: So life doesn’t mean anything while we’re living it?

Proust: Precisely. Our experiences can only come together in a meaningful form as memories. As long as we’re experiencing events, we’re too caught up in the swirl of life to make any sense of them. Only when we have the leisure to look back and think about the past do our minds organize it into something meaningful.

Sisyphus: When we look back in time, we become observers of our own life. Does this mean that life only has meaning to the people who observe it, but not to those who actually live it?

Kierkegaard: Hmmm. That’s what my assertion would seem to imply.

Camus: Then life essentially has no intrinsic meaning. So-called meaning comes from the outside, and is imposed on life in retrospect.

Nietzsche: In that case, my life just means anything that I want it to mean. The meaning of life becomes completely subjective and … meaningless.

with one face I laugh, with the other I weep

Janus: With one face I laugh, and with the other I weep!

Sisyphus: So laughing and weeping are the same thing?

Janus: Of course they're opposite, but in a way they're also the same. 

Sisyphus: How so?

Janus: Aren't all of our emotions simply distractions from the matter at hand? We love or hate, feel happy or sad, but in the end these are just a kind of self-delusion. Because our minds are spinning in circles, we feel like we're accomplishing something.

Sisyphus: When in reality….?

Janus: When in reality we're just deluding ourselves that what we're doing really matters. That's why I can laugh and cry at the same time. It's really just the same thing.

Dog: You're not the only ones who try to keep busy. I love chasing my tail!

there are two kinds of people

Sisyphus: My dear Seneca, I hear that you have said that all of humanity can be divided into two camps. Please explain.  

Seneca:  Yes, I used to say that there are just two kinds of people, but after giving it some thought I've realized that they're basically the same. The first type of person is fickle, bored, and constantly changing his mind. He longs for change, then misses whatever he's just left behind. He tosses and turns like an insomniac, hoping that if he squirms around long enough he can eventually fall asleep. He changes everything about his life until eventually he decides to stick to one thing.

Sisyphus: And what brings about this decision? Wisdom?

Seneca: (Laughs) Not at all! He's eventually worn down by old age, and too tired to change anymore.  

Sisyphus: I hope that the second type of person is happier that that wretch!

Seneca: I'm afraid not. The other half of the human race suffers not from fickleness but from inertia. This sort of person is too sluggish to live as he would like, so he just keeps everything the way it already is. 

Sisyphus: Both sound pathological. What causes us to be like this? 

Seneca:  Strangely, these two disorders both have the same cause - dissatisfaction with oneself. One sort of person hates his life, so he constantly tries to change it. The other has such low self-esteem that he doesn't even attempt changing anything.

Sisyphus: And which is better? Which path in life should we choose?

Seneca: It doesn't matter. Both are just marking time until they eventually die. It's just two faces of the same coin.

Sisphus: (sighs) I think I'll get back to my boulder. As long as I'm struggling, I don't have to worry about these sorts of problems.   

we are born to die

Serenus: Where is the need to compose something to last for ages? Why not stop trying to prevent posterity from being silent about you? You were born to die, and a silent funeral is less bothersome. So if you must fill your time, write something in a simple style for your own use and not for publication: less toil is needed if you study only for the day.

Sisyphus: But isn't our toil the point? Putting effort into something that we value is what makes life worth living. If we arrange life so that there's no pain and struggle, what's left?

Serenus: Why do you need to struggle? You should enjoy the sunshine, a poem, a glass of wine…  Isn't that enough to live for? Why struggle unnecessarily? In the end, you die anyway, so why make yourself unhappy running back and forth in a meaningless frenzy?

Sisyphus: If that's how you feel, I don't see the difference between your life and a dog's life. Every day I push my boulder up the hill, and that's what makes me feel human. Of course I realize that everyone dies, so whatever we do might seem meaningless in the end. But I don't care about posterity and eternity - I'm living in the present. And right now, it's the struggle that counts! If I didn't have my boulder, I wouldn't be any different from a torpid mongrel enjoying the sunshine on a pretty day. 

Serenus: You have your boulder. I have a glass of wine and an amusing book. Any objective observer would say that my life is better than yours.

Sisyphus: I can't talk now. I have to push my boulder back up the hill.

my uncle is dying

My uncle is dying. Two years ago the doctor predicted that he only had six months to live. He was furious that his doctor had been so blunt, and his anger made him determined to prove the man wrong. At long last the end finally seems near. My uncle doesn't want to die, and for months he's been fighting for his life with all his strength.

Even though my uncle hates and fears death more than most people, he recently signed a living will. This took everyone by surprise. He was jolted into taking this step by a recent stay in the hospital, where he was confined to an oxygen tent. He decided that if he had to spend the remainder of his days trapped in an oxygen tent, that sort of life wouldn't be worth living.

If he has to live in an oxygen tent, life is meaningless. If he's weak and dying, but not in an oxygen tent, life is worth living. For him, the dividing line between a worthwhile and worthless life seems to be mobility.

What is it about life outside the oxygen tent that's worth living? Is it simply mobility? Is moving around the meaning of life? There seems to be more to it than that. In his case, struggling against the disease seems to give his life meaning. 

Maybe each of us has to find a struggle that will give us a reason to stay alive. 

are you living someone else’s life?

Are you living your own life? Or are you just living someone else's life?

We think that we're free to do what we want, but in fact we're hemmed in on all sides by customs, habits, expectations, and conventional wisdom. How many of us are living the life that we really want?

With so much pressure from family, friends, and society, how can we even know what sort of life we want? Is an authentic existence possible? Or are all of us doomed to waste our short time on earth living a phony life imposed on us by others?