We're all gonna die!

"On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero."

Chuck Plahniuk in Fight Club

According to an awful misreading of an obscure ancient calendar, today is the day the world ends.  With all evidence thus far pointing to the failure of that prediction, I feel like it's nonetheless useful to take today and meditate on death.  Obviously, that's not exactly a comfortable procedure, but the careful consideration of one's eventual death has a long and wonderful tradition in pretty much every major religion.  This is especially prominent in some forms of Shinto: some monks will meditate for days in front of the mutilated corpses of small animals.

Interesting grotesque trivia bits aside, the simple fact is that the only particular event in your entire life of which you can be absolutely assured is your death.  You can't be sure that you're going to eat dinner tonight, and you certainly can't be sure that you're going to get married or get promoted or go to that thing you love or play that awesome game or finally write the next great American novel.  The only event you can be sure of is your decidedly inevitable death.

You can be sure that at some point, your heart will stop beating, your neurons will stop firing and your body will begin to decompose.  If you're reading this, it's a pretty solid bet that this will happen within the next fifty to one hundred years.  Understandably, some people get pretty thoroughly depressed by this thought.  After all, who in the world really wants to die, except crazy Jesuit missionaries and people who need serious psychological help.

However, I for one think that it's a kind of happy thought.

For one, there's a kind of unifying principle to the fact that everyone dies.  We're all going to do it eventually, so in a sense waiting for death is one of two or three universal human experiences, right up there with being born, living and actually dying.  Really though, if you ask me it's a kind of beautiful thought: everyone from Henry VIII to Henry Ford and Vladimir Putin either did die or will die.  That's an experience that you and I share with each other, Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Thomas Jefferson, Mary Shelley, Cleopatra, Spartacus and every other human being who has ever walked this planet.  That's cool in a sublime, humbling kind of way.

Secondly, it gives us cause for joy.  We only have so much time here on the planet, the eventual and inevitable fact of our death guarantees that.  Therefore, it only makes sense to choose to be happy whenever and wherever possible., since the only thing you can really be sure of is that you only have a limited time in which to be happy.

Not my best argument, but it works for me.

Anyway, it's been wonderful, and I'll see y'all next week.

J.R.M.C.