"You have to know, not fear, that some day you are going to die. Until you know that and embrace that, you are useless."
--Tyler Durden, in Chuck Palahnuik's Fight Club
The ghosts of the future are far more haunting than the ghosts of the past.
I'm realizing this these days. Regrets can be distracting, but fear can be utterly paralyzing. And at least we have a chance to learn from our regrets. To put them into perspective. Regrets may help you to do the right thing--next time. Fear keeps you from doing anything at all.
Nothing wastes your life like fear.
I fancy myself as someone who has taken some risks in his life. Maybe more than most. I haven't always done the safe or sensible thing. And more often than not, it's paid off. Still, I sometimes catch myself shrinking away from doing something I should do because I let myself get scared of how it might turn out.
Why? What is there to be scared of, really? No matter what decisions we make in life, the ultimate outcome is the same for everyone. I realize some--maybe even most--people would see this as a pretty bleak view of existence best suited to moody chain-smoking Frenchmen swilling absinthe. Maybe. But personally, I find great freedom in knowing that no matter what I do, I'm still going to die, eventually. And then it won't matter, anyway. It frees me up to screw up every now and then.
It's what we manage to get done in the meantime that counts, anyway. And if fear keeps you from doing anything, than life won't count for much at all.
3 comments:
That's all very well and good unless the decisions you make entail costs.
Then your belief that we all end up in the same place makes it fruitless to put forth the effort.
We all end up in the same place long prior to death. We all convince ourselves that the decisons we made were the right ones. But being conscious - and I mean really conscious - of this fact makes it impossible to choose to do anything.
"And more often than not it's paid off."
Compared to what?
It isn't fear that paralyzes. It is your stated recognition that none of it really matters.
So why bother?
Compared to what?
It isn't fear that paralyzes. It is your stated recognition that none of it really matters.
I really don't have a response to that except to say that simply is not my experience.
"I really don't have a response to that except to say that simply is not my experience."
I don't think experience is the most reliable evidence in this case. Your life is a single data point with no control. Especially since the observer is the observed.
What about observing other people's lives. Psychologists like Daniel Kahneman and Tom Gilovich have shown people have a remarkable capacity for post-hoc justifying just about any decision. A task made easier by the aforementioned lack of independent trials in our learning through experience.
That is why we have science, so that we can step outside of our highly unreliable experience in order to say something about the way the world works.
Sorry - I know I am being a total assface. But it is important that I try and articulate this in response to your post.
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