The sunny side of Death
How will the world be different and better when you're gone?
This is arguably the only true important question in our life. Yet we avoid thinking about it.One, because it's hard. Two, because it's scary. Three, because we have no fucking clue what we're doing.
And when we avoid this question, we let trivial and hateful values hijack our brains and take control of our desires and ambitions. Without acknowledging the ever-present gaze of death, the superficial will appear important will appear superficial. Death is the only thing we can know about certainty. And as such, it must be the compass by which we orient all of our other values and decisions. It is the correct answer to all of the questions we should ask but never do. The only way to be comfortable with death is to understand and see yourself as something bigger than yourself; to choose values that stretch beyond serving yourself, that are simple and immediate and controllable and tolerant of the chaotic world around you. This is the basic rule of ll happiness. Whether you're listening to aristotle or the psychologists at Harvard or Jesus Christ or goddamn Beatles, they all say that happiness comes from the same thing: caring about something greater than yourself, believing that you are a contributing component in some much larger entity, that your life is but a mere side process of some great unintelligible production.
And entitlement strips this away from us. The gravity of entitlement sucks all attention inward, toward ourselves, causing us to feel as though we are at the center of all of the problems in the universe,that we are the suffering all of the injustices, that we are the one who deserves greatness over all others. All alluring as it is, entitlement isolates us.Our curiosity and excitement for the world turns in upon itself and reflects our own biases and projections onto every person we meet and every event we experience.
Our culture today confuses great attention and great successes, assuming to be the same thing. But they are not. You are great. Already. Whether you realize it or not.
This is arguably the only true important question in our life. Yet we avoid thinking about it.One, because it's hard. Two, because it's scary. Three, because we have no fucking clue what we're doing.
And when we avoid this question, we let trivial and hateful values hijack our brains and take control of our desires and ambitions. Without acknowledging the ever-present gaze of death, the superficial will appear important will appear superficial. Death is the only thing we can know about certainty. And as such, it must be the compass by which we orient all of our other values and decisions. It is the correct answer to all of the questions we should ask but never do. The only way to be comfortable with death is to understand and see yourself as something bigger than yourself; to choose values that stretch beyond serving yourself, that are simple and immediate and controllable and tolerant of the chaotic world around you. This is the basic rule of ll happiness. Whether you're listening to aristotle or the psychologists at Harvard or Jesus Christ or goddamn Beatles, they all say that happiness comes from the same thing: caring about something greater than yourself, believing that you are a contributing component in some much larger entity, that your life is but a mere side process of some great unintelligible production.
And entitlement strips this away from us. The gravity of entitlement sucks all attention inward, toward ourselves, causing us to feel as though we are at the center of all of the problems in the universe,that we are the suffering all of the injustices, that we are the one who deserves greatness over all others. All alluring as it is, entitlement isolates us.Our curiosity and excitement for the world turns in upon itself and reflects our own biases and projections onto every person we meet and every event we experience.
Our culture today confuses great attention and great successes, assuming to be the same thing. But they are not. You are great. Already. Whether you realize it or not.
"Bukowski once wrote, we're all going to die, all of us what a circus! That alone should make us love each other, but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by life's trivialities; we are eaten up by nothing."
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