Week 16: Contemplate death, and how to live

WEEK 16

Contemplate death, and how to live

We know at some level that we’re going to die. How deep does that knowledge go? We sometimes obsessively pursue health or beauty in an attempt to delay the inevitable. Even though we can take precautions, we still don’t have complete control. Katie found this out the hard way, seeing both of her parents die of cancer at a young age. Since then, she’s been focused on health, carefully monitoring her food intake and exercising daily. A long, prosperous life is a preferred indifferent according to the Stoics; they were more focused on quality of life over quantity. They didn’t think one’s quality of life depended on health or traditional notions of success. Instead, they thought it consisted of quality of thought and character. This week you will focus on ingraining this concept ever more deeply into your psyche.

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.¹ 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,”² 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,” as Katie says about her parents. 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.