Post-life

Some months ago, my friend – who is turning out to be a frequent source of unconventional wisdom these days – gave me some advice about managing anxiety. True to form, the advice was pretty much out of left field; when I first heard it, I was inclined to take it with a rather large chunk of salt. But as I think more about it, his theory sounds more plausible. I’ll paraphrase him here (although, due to my partial memory of the conversation, he’ll just have to grin and bear it if I heinously misquote him).

“A few years ago, I noticed that I was having quite a few panic attacks. When I spoke to my friends – who were also in their mid-20s at this time – it turned out that they were having similar experiences. For a while there, it seemed like everyone I knew was suffering from panic attacks. This made me realise that our mid-20s are a pretty intense time for such feelings.
This got me thinking: why is it, at this age, that anxiety hits people so hard?
I began to realise that this type of anxiety could be caused by our growing awareness of our mortality.
In our teenage years, we think that we’re pretty much invincible – and by and large, we are. But when you notice yourself aging a little bit, you begin to understand that this kind of attitude can’t be sustained. We all get older, of course; when we start understanding that we’re on a continuum with our elders, rather than being totally separate from them, we suddenly stop thinking of ourselves as a ‘special case’.
I stopped feeling anxious about the future once I began to think of mortality differently. When I was younger, I thought about the fact of death a lot differently than I do now.
In our teens, we find it hard to think of the fact of death in a genuine way. It’s simply that we don’t really understand it. We all have moments when we – even fleetingly – imagine what it would be like if we were no longer around.
The difference between then and now is that these imaginings of the end of our lives are based on a failure of imagination. When we are feeling very sorry for ourselves (for instance, when we feel unappreciated by our peers) we ask ourselves the question: ‘what would they do if I wasn’t here?’ This idea is based on the selfish idea that all children have – i.e. the world won’t be able to function without me.
Although it may not seem like it, this is a comforting thought. But it’s also a destructive one.
When we are young, we find it impossible to think of a situation when we are ‘not here’. This is because we can’t help seeing it from our own perspective.
Think back to when you were a child, when you were angry with a parent or friend for not appreciating you. You probably thought, ‘what would they do without me?’
If we travel forward in time until after our deaths, we sometimes tend to imagine people grieving for us at our funeral. It is a type of revenge fantasy. The people in attendance will be saying, ‘I wish I appreciated him when he was around.’ In this common childhood daydream, we are watching our friends as they mourn for us. We feel validated by this fantasy, because we are able to maintain the same perspective that we have in our everyday lives. We stick around as observers, just so that we can say, ‘I told you so.’
But if we can only think of death by including our own subjectivity, we have not properly faced up to it. The challenge of mortality, for an adult, is to think of life going on without you. This doesn’t mean thinking of life going on while you are watching it from a nice spot in heaven. The conventional Christian idea of an afterlife is flawed, because it can’t take the ‘self’ out of the equation. When we imagine ourselves in ‘heaven’, we are still ‘alive’ in the sense that we retain our own identity. It is a comforting denial of the fact of death, rather than an acceptance of it.
Thinking of death in a purer sense is more difficult, but it helps to dispel anxiety about our future. We have to be able to think of the time after we are gone as lacking our selves, not just our bodies. Getting rid of the ‘observer’ also rids you of the thought that your friends and family only have meaning in relation to you. Forcing yourself to imagine a state of the world where you no longer have a perspective to view things from may sound scary; however, I found that it was a very effective way to come to terms with the limitations of my own existence.
After I learned to jettison the notion of ‘afterlife’ as a time in which we can only helplessly observe the world, I found that my anxiety was no longer such a problem. You can only accept your finite lifespan once you realise that the end of life also entails the end of subjectivity.”

Not bad for a half hour at the pub, eh?