The Future & Death

The future never fails to elude us – tomorrow always stays tomorrow. We try to catch it, but beyond the horizon there’s always another horizon. Still, we imagine that if we reach out long enough, we could eventually grasp it, and something akin to an existential eureka moment would dawn on us, whereby the entire cosmos would suddenly start spinning in our favour. This never happens of course.

Even if we cannot consciously articulate our thoughts about it, the future drives us. For instance, we do our weekly grocery shopping because we know that we will eventually grow hungry. But no matter how much we consume, hunger always returns, and in the same way, no matter how much we plan, we all know that the human body is a finite thing – we will die. Yet in much of the modern world, death remains a taboo. It is acknowledged in passing as a necessary, yet fundamentally tragic aspect of life.

I find this profoundly queer. Why do we feel this compulsion to satiate the insatiable, to outrun the inevitable, when we know full well that we can’t? However, Alan Watts’ transcription of certain branches of oriental philosophy offers a particularly satisfying answer. In this piece, I present my variation of Watts’ ideas by examining the following questions: why do we try and force the cloud of future to form a tangible, touchable shape, when it is immaterial and untouchable? Is our capacity to imagine that which does not exist at present an insurmountable burden that we are doomed to bear, or is there another way?

The Evolutionary Impulse

Before we may find a solution to this puzzle, we need to define its elements clearly, even if we run the risk of stating the obvious. Starting with the future: it is best expressed as something that motivates us to move, a kind of “going somewhere” feeling. Its opposite, therefore, is the absence of a reason to move – stagnation, an unchanging stillness. This idea alone may invoke existential dread. The word simply doesn’t feel good to say: stagnation. But what does it mean for a human being?

Consider our nature: we’ve evolved by adapting to circumstances, and therefore concepts of change and movement are synonymous with adaptation. But if we feel like we’re stagnating, our evolutionary programming makes us feel as though we’re failing to adapt. As William Burroughs put it: “When we stop growing, we start dying”. Hence, the opposite of future is death. When we stop adapting, we’re doing nothing to ensure our survival – nothing about the fact that we’re dying.

This framework relies on two assumptions: there must always be a danger and we must survive it. From the evolutionary perspective, that is, for the purpose of survival until procreation, the practical success of this mechanism is immediately evident. The unchallenged dominance of the human species may be credited to nothing, but the ingenuity granted to us by evolution, manifested clearly in our compulsion to survive. But now that we reign supreme, it’s worth asking: what has this obsession cost us, and what has it given in return?

Certainly, all metrics pertaining to physical well-being (available food, medicine, shelter, etc.) have unquestionably improved. We still face global dangers, nevertheless, and there are millions of people who still struggle with base survival. My observation is simply that even if we were to discover the answers to these questions, there will always be another problem to worry about and another danger to account for.

However, upon being liberated from the distractions required for base survival – when excess is more common than scarcity – we eventually find ourselves in an existentially awkward position whereby we are forced to confront our compulsion to survive. Consider how death tends to be processed on the cultural and individual levels in the modern world. It is perceived as tragic, and its opposite, youth – the embodiment of the future – is idolised. For instance, try to remember the last time the topic of death came up in a casual, upbeat conversation. Imagine the retail store ‘Forever 21’ were called ‘Probably won’t make it past 79’. They wouldn’t sell much merchandise. Not only because the former is catchier from a marketing perspective, but because there is an underlying message driving behaviour in modern society: death is bad.

Also consider the immense pressure that schools place on children, that they absolutely must worry about their future, and that they must succeed. Formal education is clearly important, but it should be framed in a way which is constructive. We often condemn those who are not academically inclined as being lazy or irresponsible, but formal education is rarely presented as something that is enjoyable for its own sake.

Alan Watts argued that the point of school is to study something you wanted to learn that you could not learn anywhere else. That is the reason for teachers – those who possess the knowledge you do not and are interested in passing it on to you. To him, going to school because it was “good for you” was an insane notion. I am sympathetic with this perspective. If you’re not interested in learning, you’re less likely to retain information and may even grow cynical towards learning altogether. This is the real tragedy.

For these reasons, confronting death in the modern world can be jarring because we do not live in a world that celebrates life – we live in a world possessed by the fear of death. Thinking about death forces us to realise that no matter how much wealth we obtain, how many experiences we accumulate, or what we achieve, individual survival is ultimately impossible. But in our consumerist world, the future is an imaginary carrot dangled at the end of the stick that promises us an escape from death. But Watt’s point was precisely this: we needn’t escape it.

Another Approach to Death

If we came to know that our death was imminent, say, within the week, how much of the future would matter? Any long-term plans lose all value, and even more immediate concerns are no longer pressing. Rent doesn’t matter if we don’t live past our eviction, and we can’t collect our retirement savings if we don’t live that long. While an immediate reaction to this kind of thinking may be negative, if the thought is probed at an appropriate pace and through an elegant method, it may lead us to something profound. If we see that survival is a battle, we must also realise that we’ve lost the moment we were born.

The future may be bright, brighter than our present circumstances, but to achieve it, we are beckoned to sacrifice what we have for what we might have. Our sacrificing so much for the future reveals an implicit belief that so long as we continue this struggle our livelihood will be secured; that we will find refuge from death. Yet, when we are faced with our fundamental finiteness, any hope for salvation ceases.

But perhaps this is exactly why pondering death now is the best time to do so, because maybe death itself is the salvation that we overlook in our desperate flight from it. Maybe the processed knowledge that we will die can snap us out of our delusion that the stakes are really as high as they can sometimes feel; that we genuinely need to worry, that we need to take care of this and that, or otherwise… Otherwise, what? We’re walking corpses!

This observation is liberating because it illuminates our existential foes for what they are. The future, the past, and death are ghosts. They cannot harm us just as much as we cannot touch them. We cannot experience death, since death, by definition, is non-experience. So, when we die, we cannot possibly be locked away in our coffins or scattered into the ocean with our ashes for all eternity. We simply cease to be, and that is freedom.

Seen this way, our existential battle for survival is more akin to a comedy than a tragedy. This is not to say that we ought not feel negative emotions when our loved ones pass away. Thoughts and feelings come and go however they please. Rather, that the idea of death need not torment us while we live, and that perhaps on both individual and cultural levels it could be seen as an opportunity to celebrate life instead of cursing the ghost of death.

Alan’s view was that if we see past these illusions, we can begin to experience our present, tangible reality completely, and stop trading the tangible for the intangible in our obsession over the future. His message is that we need not torture ourselves with the comically insane idea that we must survive and realise instead that life needs no justification. Thinking about the future can be truly useful only if we understand that living for its own sake is enough. Because what is a fulfilling life, but a life full of real experiences, and not thin air.