Death.

one day about 18 months after you were born you looked in a mirror and for the first time in your life you thought yo I think that might be me bro and a few years after realizing that you exist some absolute donut comes along and breaks the news that it's only a temporary Arrangement and so you spend the rest of your life knowing that in an unknown number of seconds it will be death o' clock and you will stop existing there are a few common things people do to deal with the weight of this knowledge

a boatloads of Narcotics B become so insufferably annoying that you will live on forever in people's memories or C devote your life to creating things that will Outlast you and if you don't have the nuts to commit to one of these options you can go for option D which is just nicotine and Netflix however no matter what you do Terror management Theory says that you do it because of a deep rooted fear of death in a whole bunch of studies between 1990 and 2006 Terror management theorists found that when made aware of their own mortality

people are more likely to buy Gucci flipflops show greater support for people with similar World Views show harsher judgments towards those who challenge their worldview believe in Gods avoid using sunscreen or scheduling medical checkups and support violence towards outg groups so if you find yourself arguing with trolls on Twitter after this video you know why but could it be true that the reason we work so many [ __ ] jobs with [ __ ] bosses and buy so many [ __ ] t-shirts and stamp our names on so many half-baked causes is because deep down

somewhere in the depths of our psyches we're just terrified of dying the samurai in feudal Japan lived by a code called Bushido it emphasized these principles the moral code was so strong that if they broke Bido get this they would dress up in white clothes write a death poem and then stab themselves in the stomach before having a friend decapitate them with a katana they would rather die than be oned the practice was called zuku and they did this for hundreds of years fast forwards to August 29th 1921 and a guy called Yukio SEI was

born Yukio was a bright student in school and he had dreams of flying planes for a living Terror management Theory would likely tell you it was because Defying Gravity gave him a sense of symbolic immortality or something but whatever the reason the boy loved planes and at the age of 17 he achieved his dream becoming a pilot in the Japanese Navy then a year later the craziest thing happened by 1944 Japan was losing ground in the Pacific and following orders from vice admiral takahiro onishi a 23-year-old yukoh led a squadron of explosive filled a6m zero

planes into battle and after citing a US escort carrier ship yukoh nose dived his plane into it and not just yukoh 3,800 kamakazi Pilots met a similar Fate on purpose despite knowing that the war was was already likely lost hey uh Terror management Theory what do you think about that uh or what about the monk who said himself on fire as a form of protest or the US Air Force guy who did the same thing in Washington this year all the millions of people who have died in medieval battle running head first into a literal

wall of Spears all the countless religious Fanatics who have sacrificed themselves for a cause they thought was bigger than themselves what about David Goggins who ran an ultramarathon with pneumonia and broken legs what about the Willing Martyrs what about Socrates who allowed the state of Athens to execute him on false charges of corrupting the youth when he could have just moved to a different city you know Socrates the same guy who purposefully married the most annoying woman he could find in order to challenge himself if self-preservation was the primary human motivator would any of these

things have actually happened no we don't want to merely preserve ourselves fundamentally we want to thrive to become powerful and free and most of the time death just gets in the way of that so of course we avoid it unless you're a Marty in which case it actually helps your cause and so you willingly choose it according to Nature a strong will to self-preservation was actually a sign of the distress and weakness of an organism so what about all those Terror management Theory studies it seems that no matter which way you spin it the knowledge

of our death is a corrosive on our souls but is the fear of death even rational yes it's purely rational and that's why it's nonsense hear me out animals are not rational and yet it's Bonkers to suggest that animals are afraid of death they're afraid of stuff that kills them sure but they're not afraid of death for without the ability to conceptualize the concept of death never occurs to them a deer is not aware of its own mortality it just knows that when a lion runs after it its day is about to get significantly worse

so it runs away all the Diplomatic deers already died off but humans humans are different we are uniquely aware of our own existence we have friends and family members who die and from our perspective they don't exist anymore and so we say ah yes at some point I to will be non-existent but what we miss is that it's impossible to be non-existent since to be is a statement of existence at the very moment that the light of your Consciousness ceases to shine there will no longer be anyone there for death to happen to you cannot

be dead that's an oxymoron you can only ever be alive your own death is quite literally not your problem people who live in fear of Their Own Death go their whole lives afraid of something that never happens to them your death is outside your jurisdiction the only thing that's your problem is your life and what you do in it but Angela if my death isn't my problem why don't I just down 8 pounds of stellar and break 100 mph on the back roads this is why we have suffering so that we don't sabotage our ability

to thrive by doing something stupid like dying and as Einstein said dying is like a super counterproductive Ive bro suffering allows us to avoid death without having to do a cost benefit analysis of every single action that we take instead when we stand on our brother's [ __ ] Legos again a neat little Instinct called pain tells us that that was not a beneficial event so we remove our foot from The Little Death Cube suffering and pleasure make it possible for animals to survive so that they can continue thriving without even knowing what survive actually

means and then you have humans built on the same wet Tech stack as animals except with this one extra module that means we now know that we die and yet we still experience suffering and pleasure just the same as our ancestors and the combination of these two pieces of knowledge that we suffer and that we also die has led us to the conclusion that suffering is meaningless we know we aren't suffering for Eternal redemption or heaven and as Nars put it [Music] life suffering indicates to an organism that current events are hindering their ability to

thrive and pleasure indicates the opposite therefore if we suffered but we were not aware of death and therefore could not directly avoid it this would make sense alternatively if we were aware of death and therefore could directly avoid it but did not ever need to suffer this would also make sense The Human Condition is that we are aware of death we directly avoid it and yet we suffer as well this does not make sense or at least we can't make sense of it as evidenced by the fact that suffering and mortality take center stage in

every major religion you could even see much of the religion and philosophy of history as attempts to address the coexistence of suffering and death we had some religions in the west that say We'll happily suffer because we will not die then some religions in the East said we'll happily die because we will not suffer then those who un alive themselves say I just simply refuse to suffer and die so I will just die and then I will not suffer so how do we reconcile the two religions tend to either reject death and accept suffering or

reject suffering and accept death I tend to prefer those that reject death because I don't believe your death is your problem anyway However the fact that your suffering is your problem is not up for debate at all so good luck rejecting it and as nval said it's easier to achieve your material desires than to renounce them I think the reason humans have struggled to justify the coexistence of suffering and death for so long is because we haven't fully digested the knowledge of our mortality we know that it will happen but we can't imagine it we

imagine being aware of Eternal nothingness or picture a black screen forever but we're still imagining Consciousness we conceptualize dead as a sort of state that we can be in even though we will not be at all all but we simply can't picture that as a result we see our deaths as a Bad Thing something confusing and scary and we avoid thinking about it at all costs we might logically know it will happen but we emotionally reject it even thinking about it makes us feel uneasy as evidenced by those uh TMT studies but if you really

give death your full attention and don't shy away from it you realize that your mortality is a state that you are currently in not some distant scary event that might happen in the future just like the deer Evolution has programmed us to be so afraid of the stuff that kills us social exclusion hunger violence so ask yourself if you really accepted your death and embodied your mortality without an ounce of emotional resistance would you live differently if you saw life itself as a suicide mission and were okay with that what risks would you take would

you really be afraid to talk to that cute girl at the bar or or ask for a raise or start that new business opportunity would you really see life as pointless or would the stuff of Life become the point of life and what about suffering would you run away from it or accept it as the price of admission would you fear it or would you Revel in it as a reminder that you're still alive it's worth asking yourself this because it happens to be true life is a suicide mission it's already going to kill you

and until you accept that without flinching you will resort to self-preservation you'll be timid afraid risk Avers you'll sit on the fence and sacrifice what could have been had you lived with the urgency that mortality demands the conveyor belt of time is steadily moving you toward death and one day soon you'll be 70 and you'll see it on the horizon that's the moment that it will feel real and that's the moment it will be too late to do anything about it until you know that you will never experience your own death you will never fully

Digest your mortality and until you digest your mortality you will never fully live there's a famous quote that says don't take life so seriously you'll never make it out alive but I see it differently I say take life seriously I say engage because you will never make it out at all [Music]