Tonight I’m feeling anxious about the possibility of an immense economic collapse. I’ve been reading about lots of people being laid off. Most of us with 401K’s are afraid to even look at our quarterly statements. The country is running out of fossil fuel and there isn’t anything realistic to replace it.
And then I stopped and thought: These things are not certain and they might not be nearly as bad as I fear, yet I am sitting here worried about them. On the other hand, I am a human animal who is guaranteed to be dead in the next 70 years, probably a lot sooner.
How is it that I can wake up worrying about such uncertainties, yet rarely am I nervous about my own certain impending death? How can we find time to fret about uncertain things (like the economy) and even little things (e.g., cleaning the house and whether the city will fill potholes on my street) yet we rarely contemplate our own deaths. Even when we consider writing a will or buying life insurance do we feel shudder and sweat that we are doing these things because we’ve all been given death sentences. We are so incredibly good at distracting ourselves.
We fret about so many things (big and small), but we aren’t concerned about our own impending certain death and the deaths of our close friends and family? I’m being haunted by a post I wrote two days ago. [1] Maybe we do panic about our deaths, even when we don’t articulate that panic. Maybe it’s true that we are so terrified about our own deaths that we’ve invented and erected elaborate cultural scaffolds designed to distract ourselves from our animal natures. You know, things such as cosmetics and clothes to hide our animal imperfections and limitations. And abstract cultural concoctions such as “love” and “romance’ to distract ourselves from our animal passions. And, of course, there is religion to keep us from fretting about death itself.
Many of these gimmicks and cultural inventions are billion dollar endeavors, of course. That’s how important it is to distract ourselves. The immense amount of money we spend on frivolous distractions, for instance, is only one measure of the fear that we fear. Perhaps that’s why we are such suckers for an entertainment industry that so often gives us only a constant and mindless stream of bright and shiny things. This deep need to distract ourselves explains why televisions are on for eight hours every day in so many households. That need to distract ourselves explains (in part) why we shop with such energy for things we don’t need. And, of course, the amount of time and energy people pour into religion is legendary.
And what kind of monster am I to be such an iconoclast? Not that I can stop my own thoughts that run through my own head, but how can I possibly be so arrogant as to have faith in my public “mission,” my public iconoclasm?
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