Practice like a Stoic: 16, Contemplate death, and how to live
It's about quality, not quantity
[This series of posts is based on A Handbook for New Stoics—How to Thrive in a World out of Your Control, co-authored by yours truly and Greg Lopez. It is a collection of 52 exercises, which we propose reader try out one per week during a whole year, to actually live like a Stoic. In Europe/UK the book is published by Rider under the title Live Like A Stoic. Below is this week’s prompt and a brief explanation of the pertinent philosophical background. Check the book for details on how to practice the exercise, download the exercise forms from The Experiment’s website, and comment below on how things are going. Greg and/or I will try our best to help out! This week’s exercise is found at pp. 105-108 of the paperback edition.]
“No man can have a peaceful life who thinks too much about lengthening it, or believes that living through many consulships is a great blessing. Rehearse this thought every day, that you may be able to depart from life contentedly; for many men clutch and cling to life, even as those who are carried down a rushing stream clutch and cling to briars and sharp rocks.” (Seneca, Letters to Lucilius, 4.4–5)
Seneca’s advice to not unnecessarily delay death is sharply at odds with much of the current zeitgeist. We don’t want to talk about death, we don’t want to see dying people, and we engage in fantasies of immortality by way of uploading our minds to computers. We do all this while ignoring mounting problems that we could actually tackle, from the poverty of hundreds of millions of people to looming environmental disaster fueled by our greed and obsession with consumption. And yet it is precisely because Stoicism strikes such a different chord that it has become popular again. We intuitively grasp that there is something not quite right in the way we are conducting our lives, and the Stoic diagnosis of what is wrong is clear: We put too much value on the wrong things (externals), while at the same time not valuing enough what we should (our character and integrity).
Seneca is not saying that a long life is not preferable, other things being equal. He is attempting to recalibrate our system of values: it is not length that is important, but what we do with the time we actually have. Anglo-American writer Susan Ertz famously quipped that “Millions long for immortality who don’t know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon,” reiterating Seneca’s point. You should worry about whether you are living a good life in the Stoic sense (something you can control), and not about how long your life will be (something you can’t control). Elsewhere in his letters, Seneca observes that it is odd that people talk about young people dying “prematurely.” In a universe governed by a web of cause and effect, there is no such thing as early or late—everything happens when it happens, as a result of things that happened before. We do not have knowledge of much of the universal web of causation, so we cannot tell what will happen and when. It makes sense, then, to not lose our tranquility of mind over what we don’t know and to focus our energy instead on the here and now, where we can act in order to make this a better world. One way to remind us of that is, as Seneca suggests, to think about death every day—not to be morbid, but to internalize the idea that death is a natural and inevitable process. What counts is what we do before that moment arrives.
Seneca’s advice has implications for contemporary conversations about how we should handle the end of life, as individuals and as a society. Notice his comment on people who desperately cling to life even when they are about to die. As animals, we are endowed by natural selection with an instinct for survival at all costs. But as thinking beings we are unique in the biological world. We are the only species (so far as we know) whose members are capable of reflecting on their own demise, preparing for it, and acting accordingly. Seneca says that we “die every day,” meaning that we inch in that direction from the moment we are born. Death, then, truly is the ultimate test of our character.
The operative word in your assay to me is " greed".Me Me Me More More More!.In my retirement community people in their eighties and ninties are having surgeries and medical treatments just so they can spend the rest of their lives attached to walkers and wheelchairs never once venturing outside the building to breath outside air.If you want to be immortal be a blood and organ donor while you can ,be a mentor to our children or just enjoy nature .Massimo you know who said this "You have gone aboard,made your voyage,come to harbor : Disembark "
Worrying about our death less and accepting that it may come any day will make us less anxious over it. At the same time, perhaps paradoxically, thinking philosophically about death (rather than worrying) will help us focus more on what truly matters. In the end we are all the same and all we have to show for our lives is what good we did.
I find it harder to contemplate the death of my loved ones, especially the idea that they may be taken from me before we reach old age. At my end there will either be an afterlife or nothingness, but living with the absence of someone dear to me is harder to contemplate! (I know this is more related to other weeks’ topics than this one to an extent since it’s more about loss/pain than my own death.)