I think about my own death every day, multiple times. This thinking comes not from fear——I have purposefully cultivated this attention to the matter. However, to love death itself would be a sickness in my eyes. This essay is therefore not to be taken as an ode to death itself, but rather as an ode to the concept of death.

All our lives we live knowing that something called death sits on some inevitable, (hopefully) distant horizon. Some (the non-religious) see it as an end, while others see it as a gateway. Essentially every major religion on Earth is a system of thought built around denying death its finality——a conceptual way to bypass earthly fate. The three Abrahamic faiths have an afterlife, heaven or hell depending; the Buddhists and the Hindus have reincarnation. Those five religious persuasions represent the vast majority of the world’s population. I argue that those who see death as but a gateway miss out on life’s most important insight.

And that is coming from someone who was once deeply entrenched within the religious view of things. I grew up catholic, and was in fact devout——by far the most religiously devout of my family, and perhaps of the whole Sunday school I attended with my peers. I had a personal relationship with my God, I prayed often on my own juvenile accord, and I was firmly oriented within the eternal conception of life that the Catholic church espouses. I call it an eternal conception because in the Abrahamic framing of things after we “die” we pass on to either a blissful or tortuous everlasting life. Regardless of its quality, conscious experience after death is taken as a given, and although far different than the life we lived here on Earth, it is more or less a continuation of the life of the mind on into eternity. The lights of consciousness don’t falter, but shine forth upon the dim recesses of hell or the sprawling pastures of paradise. This perpetuation of mind is unsurprisingly the default position that the world’s religions have settled upon. Aptly called by Marx “the opiate of the masses,” a successful religion must answer confidently to life’s tragic riddle, and remove from view the hardest pill life gives us to swallow. Plenty of wisdom has come down to us from this world’s scriptures, but the core eternal framing they nearly all share is an easy, rather than wise take on life. That we live on forever in some form is a message suitable perhaps for young children, but far from appropriate for adult minds. This is not to say that I think accepting death is easy, or that I myself have truly done it the ultimate justice it deserves. In fact I’m inclined to doubt that one can ever truly embrace the idea of their own inevitable demise. I just know that we can work productively towards embracing it, so as to avoid living in delusion. And the idea of death is powerful beyond belief, for those willing to confront it. It’s ultimately a kind of sorcery, on account of how deeply it can revolutionize one’s everyday experience. But like all powerful things, its potency is a double-edged sword.

I was somewhere between 15 and 17 when I lost my faith in God. It was a gradual process, and it wasn’t able to occur until I had the appropriate philosophical faculties in place in order to fill the void that a loss of faith leaves behind. At some point thereafter, actually quite a while after I’d become agnostic with my thinking, the most important insight of my life took place. Around this time, during the spring of my sophomore year of college, I was undergoing the largest intellectual metamorphosis I’ve experienced, before or since. The shift in worldview which took place was so rapid and so profound that I have the distinct impression I essentially became truly conscious, and truly myself, for the first time then——right around my 20th birthday. It’s hard for me now to even really know who I was or what I had spent the first 20 years of my life thinking about, the change appears so drastic in retrospect. Why this all came about is hard to say, but its clear that the environment I was raised in was not conducive to the formation of my true personality, and so it took a year or so of living on my own far from home, trying certain drugs, meeting interesting thinkers, studying philosophy, and reading a few truly formative books for the authentic version of myself to become unbound from its developmental strictures. I imagine many people experience something of this sort around that time in their lives. Anyways, that’s the background I deemed necessary to explain the insight——as I said, the most important insight of my life. I don’t remember the day, location, or nature of the moment itself, I just remember the mental landscape and how drastically and vividly it all shattered, and then pieced itself back together into a far vaster expanse. The intensity of that shattering still resonates in the background of my every moment——at least the moments when I’m clear and quiet enough to notice it.

What happened was as follows. Leading up to this point, although I had already internally renounced the Abrahamic framing of “life -> afterlife” for all the obvious reasons, my mind hadn’t yet truly formed its own replacement for this model. Some lingering eternal sentiment was still left in the hollow space that the Abrahamic model had excavated within my mind at a young, impressionable age. I had already denied god, but in this moment of revelation, the true repercussions of denying the other main component of the Catholic package, namely the afterlife, came bearing down on me with all the pain and blessings that such a denial, once fully embraced, logically entails.

The story in the fewest possible words is that a denial of the afterlife is simultaneously an intense affirmation of life. In a single moment I went from seeing a human lifetime as being but an interesting prelude to some mysterious next chapter to seeing a human lifetime for what it really is untethered from the eternal timeline, with all expectation of an afterlife dashed. And when that eternal frame is removed from our conception of life, we are left with no choice but to develop an intense religious awe for being alive in this world.

For those who find it hard to imagine how consciousness could possibly cease to be, just think back to your earliest memories. They appear like stepping stones in a void, that gradually become more and more prevalent until uniting into a constant stream of conscious experience. Our first memories appear out of nowhere, like the first few stars to show up in the dusk sky. We stepped into life out of nothingness; why is it so hard to imagine that we will someday fuse back into it? Like invisible bookends propping up the collection of life’s moments, nothingness surrounds life as far as we can tell when being intellectually honest. Life is like a blinking open into experience out of a perfect nothingness, and all the scenes of our sacred time here flash before that open eye staring out into space, until some day the great lid slams shut, never again to open. How can one possibly see life for what it is if they live under the spell of the idea that consciousness is granted to us for all time? The greatest error one can make while living their single, fleeting life is to take for granted the gift of conscious experience. If we acknowledge death as impending and final, which I grant is no easy task, only then I believe can we see the true immaculate beauty of having been here at all. Life is not ours to toil in forever. The loved ones we shared this world with are not ours to hold forever. But what a miracle in the ephemeral blinking open into life, before nothingness again takes hold, that we got to look around and craft meaning with other fleeting passengers rocketing through a lifetime that none of us asked to be given.

For all those I’ve been blessed with knowing: there is nothing more difficult for me than acknowledging that you are not mine to cherish forever. There is nothing more difficult than truly believing that I will never again get to hold those that I’ve lost. But despite the difficulty of living a life under the crushing weight of those beliefs, I can say with confidence that I never knew how to truly love another human before I held this fatal framing of our existence. It was so easy to be frustrated with my parents when I was a child, for I thought these were minds with whom I was to exist alongside forever. Knowing now that our time together on this Earth may come to an end any day, the way I think of them has been radically transformed. What a gift to have had such loving parents in this one lifetime. What a gift to have had such magnificent, interesting friends. My love for everyone in my life blossomed into full form only once I dropped the eternal framing, and came to see them all as fleeting passengers through life, flung up out of nothingness into somethingness, only to plunge back into the void again some day. To my fellow humans: what a strange gift its been to have crossed paths in such an inexplicable world. I didn’t ask to come into being, but it’s been glorious to have been here alongside you all, albeit only briefly. I certainly won’t be asking to leave when my time comes, but then again, I won’t be expecting to stick around either.

As I say in this essay’s title, in no way do I find death itself beautiful. I find it horrible——horrible beyond belief. It’s simply unspeakably horrible that all those I’ve known, all the thoughts I’ve enjoyed, and all the places I’ve come to love will dissolve for me some day with the rotting away of my brain. But I’m ultimately grateful to have found not peace but some sort of tenuous and painful acceptance of this process. I grapple with it every day. It hurts a good deal and has made me far more anxious about the loss of my own life, or that of my loved ones, compared to back when I thought we all were going to be here forever in some form. But I can say with certainty, through the use of a kind of dark sorcery, that I have come much more strongly into life by affirming the finality of death and denying the eternal framing of our time here. By my conception, life is not a ray of light starting at some natal point and extending on forever——a gift never to be revoked. It is instead more like a miraculous net of pearls floating in the void, intertwining amongst itself, with each conscious mind as one of the insane points in space that happen for a period of time to be experiencing the gift of life. And the whole thing is scintillating like stars do when low in the sky——scintillating as minds are brought forth to glow brightly for a flash before fading back seamlessly into the darkness.