The Meaning of Life

And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die!  -- John Donne



Death does not give my life meaning. 



Recently, Neil deGrasse Tyson was on Real Time with Bill Maher and was asked an audience question about which scientific breakthrough to which he was most looking forward. Maher jumped in and said, "Curing old age!" to which deGrasse Tyson replied, "I worry that if we live forever, we won't live our lives with such intensity." 



He went on to relate an anecdote form Einstein in which the great inventor, allegedly, was given the possibility of survival if he agreed to an operation but refused, stating, "My work is done." I couldn't find that anecdote anywhere else other than in deGrasse Tyson's imagination, so I'm not willing to concede that it's true. Indeed, what I do know is that Einstein wanted to find a unified field theory -- quantum physicists like Stephen Hawking are still looking for this. Einstein's work wasn't done at all. What could he have achieved with another century? DeGrasse Tyson will tell you that Einstein would have sat on the couch eating Cheetos if he'd had an unlimited life span. "I can always do it tomorrow," was deGrasse Tyson's hypothetical mantra of the immortal. What baloney. 



I happen to hope (and think) that I will be able to make it to a point in time in which my consciousness can become immortal. I've had that opinion now since 2005, when I was first exposed to Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near and learned the detailed science behind the hypothesis. In the time since, I've completed a Master's thesis, I've been awarded teacher of the year by my English department at the University of British Columbia, I've coordinated a program to help underprivileged people attain education, I started a program to get graduate students in the arts to pair up with teachers in the community to help give students a better idea of what an arts education leads to, I've written 4 books (3 published, 2 of them Bestsellers) I'm planning to have written 7 books by the end of this year, and I've done all this while teaching full time. I'd say that I am living my life with intensity.



Ray Kurzweil is living his life with a heck of a lot more intensity than I. He's won the National Medal of Technology, he's in the Hall of Fame for Inventors, he has approximately 20 honorary doctorates, he's written several books, all of them nonfiction and all about life extension, he's a prolific public speaker and, oh yeah, he's still inventing things -- he holds 24 patents and the number continues to grow. He's the name most associated with immortality and life extension, and I'd say he's living a life on intensity.



On the other hand, Steve Jobs famously used his own death as a motivation. I wonder sometimes if that wasn't a self-fulfilling prophecy. We still don't know how mental states affect our physical health, but there appears to be a strong link between stress and depression and declining health. There's no way that anyone can say Jobs actually caused his illness by fixating on his own demise from a young age, but I think we can safely say it didn't help matters. 



DeGrasse says he lives every moment of his life with meaning because he knows he will die. What? So, if you are going to die, your life becomes meaningful? Why? When you're dead, you're dead. Your accomplishments don't take on any more meaning because you died. People might celebrate them for a little while as they mourn you, as they did for Jobs, but you're not around to enjoy the show. I think we all would have liked to have seen what Jobs, Einstein, Tesla, Edison, and others of their ilk might have accomplished had they stuck around. Instead, we lost their talents, their years of experience, their intelligence, and their creativity.



Death isn't meaningful -- death is meaningless. 



Here's what it boils down to: death does not give my life meaning. Life, gives my life meaning. I remain motivated because I want my life tomorrow to be better than it was today, and I want the same for the people around me and for all of the people of the world. Improving life and making the world better isn't something we push off to the next day because, "oh well, we'll get to it." Improving life is something we want to do today, because its up to us to make tomorrow better. Assuming that there is a magical being in the next realm who has set up a perfect world for us after we die is just plain lazy. If we want Heaven, we have to build it, and I don't know about you, but I don't want to wait for it. I don't want to push it off until tomorrow. I want it to come as soon as possible. 

Life is the miracle. Life is meaningful. Not death. 



Death needs to die.