Alan Harrington said “Death has become an imposition on the human race and is no longer acceptable."
Topic of death seems obvious and unappealing at the same time .Some people say that death is an important design meant to get rid of the old in order to make room for the new that may have been a stepping stone, a necessary rehearsal, and a way of spreading the diversity of informations. But what if we were able to create new rules, what if we master biotechnology, we create software that rights its own hardware, we start to change the rules of life, death will no longer be necessary, we could create a world without loss, without those encounters with grief. That may sound like a sort of manic fantasy. But I think that is what mankind has always through his art, is articulate his desire to be external, to be infinite. That is why we write poetry and build cathedrals to try to create transcendence as topographical statement. That’s why we eternalize beautiful moments, make gorgeous status and write amazing songs, we long to eternalize ourselves. We want to say, as Alain de Button said, “we want to carve our names, we want to say I was here, I exist, I felt something and I matter”.
I think man has a mind that soars out to speculate about atoms and infinity, who can place himself imaginatively at a point in space and contemplate bemusedly his own planet. This immense expansion, this dexterity, this ethereality, this self-consciousness gives to man literally the status of a small legend in nature...Yet, at the same time... man is a worm and food for worms.
There is the amazing concept of terror management theory that describe the ways in which the human being respond to the unbearable awareness of the mortal coil, like the fact that we know that we are born with a death sentence. To use our lives with an agitation to respond to death in a creative or destructive way. The explicit awareness that you are a breathing piece of defecating meat destined to die and ultimately no more significant than a lizard or a potato is not especially uplifting. It really set up the premise, what do we do? We are creatures that can ponder the infinite, that can contemplate infinity, that can ponder the origin of the ten trillions atoms that make us a sentient mind that we were cooked in the furnaces of stars billions of years ago and yet at the same time, we look at the mirror every day and witness our own decay over time. The human situation is absurd, but nonetheless there is a sadness inherent to our humanness, to that awareness.
