Idea Stage: Theory (what does this mean? Click here.)
Read time: 10 minutes
What does it mean to die young?
Many months ago, I was visiting New York City to attend an event of curious young persons who ask big questions. On the final day of the event, we gathered in Rockefeller Park just by World Trade Center One. Beyond the fact that the date was September 10th, there was something special in the air.
Gathered in a circle, we formally introduced ourselves, shared our family heritage and, if we wanted, spoke about our greatest fear. My brain racked through its memories and feelings with hesitation, despite my full well knowing what my greatest fear was from the moment of the prompt.
At the time, for many months, I had been experiencing profound, sporadic bouts of anxiety due to a fear of dying at any moment through some unpredictable freak occurrence. In other words, I had a fear of dying young and having been in New York City for five straight days, those feelings of anxiety had been multiplied.
New York City is chaos on a good day, and with a fear of dying by randomness, I felt unable to measure my surroundings. During my entire stay, I found myself actively measuring up objects and people. I was fearful of buses clipping me, bicyclists running me down, AC units falling on me, subway shooters, or worse. I didn’t intentionally think these thoughts but in those micro-seconds before a decision, I would often flicker with fear.
The thing is these were not new thoughts for me. In San Francisco, my previous home, for many previous months, I had felt the same. In any city, really, I found these feelings. Even in suburbia Virginia, I found myself anxious running along a sleepy 35 mph neighborhood road, fearful that the single car on the road would lose control and take me out.
As someone who has climbed abandoned water towers, taken mopeds through Asia, kissed a wolf, and traversed South America alone, I wondered what was happening to me. I had many questions;
• Is this part of growing old?
• Is this going to get worse?
• Will I always live like this?
It was frightening. I was only 23 and I was worried that I’d live the rest of my life in fear.
For answers, I sought deep meditation to figure out the root of my fear. Along the way, I discovered a lot - ideas on death, living, and expectations of life.
This is what I learned.
As I have come to articulate it, I had/have a fear of sudden, unwarranted death. Speaking to the title, a fear of dying young/prematurely.
At the core of my fears, I came to see the source being my over empathizing with stories in the news, as the internet has made premature mortality easy to conceive. We have all read enough stories to know that a spray of bullets knows no age. And with Facebook, who hasn’t had an old friend show up in their feed to the tune of condolences and prayers?
For me, all of this helped the idea of dying young deeply materialize in my mind. When I read that a 24-year old has died out of nowhere because of a mysterious brain tumor no one saw coming, it’s hard not to wonder if we are that next story.
There's something about the concept of dying young that is haunting. When these news headlines come out, as one has seen in Virginia recently, “12-year old jumps from overpass and kills 23-year old driver,” we all feel like we have been robbed. We have this gut feeling of senselessness and absurdity. And as I have come to learn, it seems the younger the person or the more random the death, the more intense our pain and sorrow.
If we are trying to ask ourselves why dying young is so soul-crushing to us, we have to look at these two factors, age, and randomness, to inform us because I’ve come to see it, these are the two key variables that influence our pain and sorrow (note - besides of course the subjective variables such as closeness to the person).
Breaking it all down - these variables influence our grief because:
By dying young, the person is robbed of the future, and the younger they are the more we feel they were robbed of.
By dying randomly, they are doubly robbed of the future, and the more random the event, the more unjust the robbery seems.
Being robbed of life and the future can be defined simply as: the loss of unlived life.
Let’s dig in more specifically on the idea of ‘unlived life’ because at its core, this is what we are mourning.
Defining and understanding ‘unlived life’
Unlived life is exactly what you think it is: friendships from school that never matured, tough breaks up that never happened, books that were never written, dreams that were never explored, art that was never created, and ideas that were never discovered.
Most importantly is that our entire society believes that life includes three well-defined stages:
Being young
Being an adult
Being old
We believe deeply in this model, and we as a society feel that each person is owed each stage of life upon being born. A proper life includes all three stages, and the more of that you ‘miss out on’ the more sinister the loss.
THE INFLUENCE OF LIFE AFTER DEATH
As I began to marinate on these not so revolutionary realizations, I went a bit deeper and discovered this:
I believe that we protect and prize our only given life because, despite our deepest convictions, we do not wholly trust with full faith that there is more after death and we are fearful that this is it.
Reading about the philosophy of death it becomes clear: humanity does not entirely believe in life after death, and when there is a death, a deep piece inside of us is grappling with the reality that this truly is the end for that person.
Part of our fear, I think, is that we don’t really know what happens. We prefer order and predictability, and the anxiety of not knowing for many of us is almost as bad as the actual reality.
While I think we’d all love there to be life after death, I did come upon some interesting frameworks to grapple with this directly. Upon my meditations on the topic, I realized something obvious, life after death is binary: either there is something or there is nothing.
Defining this more clearly:
If there is something (another life), then the journey continues and we’ll have plenty more questions and things to do.
If there is nothing, that is also okay, because we have all experienced nothingness before: the nothingness of death will be equal to the nothingness before life.
In other words, what was life like before you were born? Imagine that and that is what life would be like if there is nothing after death.
In a weird way, there is something really comforting about this. Knowing that we have experienced nothingness makes nothingness less intimidating. And considering that it’s definitely likely that this is a binary scenario (something or nothing), it kind of bears light onto all paths giving us what we crave: knowing.
I understand this idea will likely take a few days to marinate on, but if you find as much comfort in that idea as I do, then you may come to the same outlook on death as I have now where the idea of being dead isn’t so bad, but as originally discussed, it’s the fear of losing unlived life.
Supposing a world where we’ve all quelled our fear of being literally dead, let’s focus back on the original concept of losing unlived life.
REFLECTING ON ‘UNLIVED LIFE’
If you remember, ‘unlived life’ is best defined by our sadness associated with someone not having lived out their three ‘owed’ life stages and it’s accompanying experiences.
Being young
Being an adult
Being old
And to further break this down, the two universal variables that influence our grief are:
Dying young (the younger, the more robbed of their life stages)
Dying by randomness (the more random, the most unjust the robbery)
Taking all of this into consideration, I want to dig in a bit deeper on why losing unlived life is so bothersome to us. This obviously ties back to the idea just mentioned above in that deep down, we are uncertain about an afterlife, so to many of us, this is it.
And that’s scary to us.
We all live with this subconscious fear that this could be the only experience we have, our only opportunity to experience, our only opportunity to contribute, and dying young is cutting short what might be our only opportunity to do so.
And for those we love, and even for our unknown neighbor, we want them to have their fair chance too. This is why I believe, even in a meaningless universe, we still want to thrive because, if this is it, why not at least make it worthwhile?
Articulating all of this, it really comes down to the idea that dying young we feel robbed one of our one opportunity to experience and contribute, and this is what we fear, for ourselves and others, and what hurts the most when it happens.
This is really important. Our subconscious mind knows all of this and it influences our behavior.
HOW THE FEAR OF LOSING UNLIVED LIFE INFLUENCES OUR BEHAVIOR
How do you think people respond to this fear, the fear that it could all be gone tomorrow?
Well, frankly, for a lot of people, there are two key items here:
Fearful of losing out on unlived life, we try to hoard life as fast as possible
Everyone defines life differently, so whatever that is to them, they hoard that
Scared by the same headlines as I was, a lot of people will start to cram life experiences into their days. We’ve all heard someone say, “we’ll I’ll probably die before I’m 40 so I need to do a lot now”.
Many believe, it seems, that someday they will pass some magical threshold where they have hoarded enough ‘life’ and they’ll finally be content.
As mentioned, the really important part here is that ‘life’ can be defined differently by everyone.
For some people, life is about making a contribution, so they work really hard to write books, build companies, or create some type of legacy.
For others, life is about indulging into hedonism, so they have lots of sex, party hard, and eat lots of fatty foods.
Judgments aside, sprinting to either of those doesn’t seem exceedingly the right move, and we know it. These activities individually aren’t wrong but as you can imagine, sprinting to accumulate life experiences doesn’t have the effect people want because they never actually pass the threshold. There is always more.
When we do this, we end up spending life in pursuit of life, as it coincidentally passes us by. For the person who fears death and fears missing out on life’s contributions and experiences, this isn’t going to work.
REFRAMING THE IDEA OF LIFE
Thankfully, a lot of smart people have thought about this for a long time and have some good mental models for us.
Consider the point made by Marcus Aurelius, Roman Emperor, and inquisitor to death, who spoke something on this topic:
"the longest-lived and those who die soonest lose the same thing. The present. The present is all that they can give up since that is all you have and what you do not have, you cannot lose."
Marcus’ point here is that the present is all that exists and that the past and the future are delusions that only exist in our mind, which is true. This is obvious but can take a while for us to truly realize it in our behavior and actions.
The key point though that I want to apply to the discussion on death is that Marcus’ emphasis is on the now or in other words, the present.
So core to this is that emphasis: the present.
Our entire model of pain and life owed to each human (youth, adulthood, old age) is built on imagined quantities of time. Being young, adult, and old, are completely made up framings of time and life.
These are all things we know, but we forget it. Time is not like an old movie film where the clips still exist after they have played. There is no reel in life, there is only a perma-state of what is happening at this moment.
One of our greatest mistakes as humans is that we imagine that there is some giant gap of time between life and death.
Humans have two states: life and death. What comes after life is death.
Since life is in the present, what comes after the present is death. In other words, there is no gap of time between life and death. It is just the present, then what comes next, which is death.
My grandfather put it best, “the only thing separating life and death is a short phase of transition.”
Look around your room, this is life. This is now. But on the immediate other side of this is death. There is no gap of time or space.
This could seem depressing to some, but I do not find it so. It’s reality and liberating. It drives home the point that Aurelius mentioned, that the present is literally all we have. Whether you are 90 years old or 20 years old, we are all just “one short phase of transition” away from death, and the idea of losing unlived life is not entirely what it may seem.
CLOSING THE LOOP - DYING YOUNG, LOSING UNLIVED LIFE
As mentioned, the core of our pain when someone dies young is that we feel they were owed the three stages of life:
Being young
Being an adult
Being old
And by dying young, they are robbed of that, and if the death was random, the pain is even more grave as the robbery of life feels even more unjust. These pains are worsened because deep in our insides we have low trust/faith in an afterlife. We are protective of what we have and we feel owed it.
But as was lightly touched on by Aurelius, an old man and a young man in death lose the same thing - the present, as that is all that exists and all we have to lose.
As much as we feel owed a future, we are not, and truly, the future hardly exists, it is only now.
Here’s the truth, though - I won’t sit here and harp on some soapbox about living in the moment. I can hardly do it myself. Obviously, that would be ideal, and it’s what most annoying gurus would say, which is nice, but at its core, it’s hard to not believe we are owed an adulthood where we grow old with friends and family. The aging of our body and its ripening around 75 years old really sets that expectation, and frankly, nothing we do will ever make the loss of someone young and near to us not result in utter emotional destruction.
With all of those realities set, the musings in this piece I do believe bring some tangible value in understanding the sources of our pain, better understandings on death/dying, and at least an understanding of how not to deal with the fear.
While, as I mentioned, nothing will truly be able to give us ultimate strength in the moment of a death, there are a few tactics I have employed that may help with irrational anxieties and the post-trauma of having lost someone.
1. Managing Expectations
There is a common expression that the gap between reality and expectations are the origins of discontent. In this context, we expect all people are owed youth, adulthood, and old age. Unfortunately, we are not, and all we have is the present.
Daily reminders of presentness and appreciation of it are the best one can do.
2. Value Added Judgements
Deriving from Buddhism, there is a frame of mind that works to remove the learned judgments we have on things. For example, we look at weeds as ugly and bad. But really, a weed is just a plant. Buddhism works to look at a weed and see it not as good and not as bad, but as a plant that can be beautiful.
There is a famous Chinese proverb that discusses this.
• A farmer’s horse runs away. The whole village tells him how unfortunate that is. He says maybe.
• The next day the horse comes back with five other wild horses. The whole village tells him how lucky he is. He says maybe.
• The next day his son, while trying to train one of the horses is thrown from the horse and breaks his leg. The whole village tells him how unfortunate that is. He says maybe.
• The next day the military comes to recruit for the draft and his son doesn’t have to go. The whole village tells him how lucky he is. He says maybe.
The application of this idea is to find greater contentment in the present moment, as that is all we have. This would be working to view negative moments as neutral with calm, and just as equally so the good moments.
3. The Myth of Sisyphus
20th-century philosophy, Albert Camus, wrote a story called the Myth of Sisyphus where a man is banished to the worst punishment of all time for his sins: rolling a stone up a hill for eternity without ever reaching the top.
The meaning is that rolling the stone up the hill forever is the worst punishment of all. But as Camus argues, “Our fate only seems horrible when we place it in contrast with something that would seem preferable."
In other words, if Sisyphus is able to forget about all of the other places he wishes he could be, then it isn’t so bad.
I’ve used this frame of mind when I find myself in my worst moments and they immediately improve. Stuck in traffic, I just think, “well I don’t really have any other fate” and your outlook can help but improve. On a bad date, I just think, “well this sucks, but I am here so I might as well own it.”
And so forth.
That’s the most I am willing to share. This piece was a thorough inquisition into the fear of dying young rather than subjective solutions. The answers are for your own finding.
Best wishes.