The Atheist Deals With Death (with Mark Manson)

I have recently finished Mark Manson’s wonderful comedic book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck and I just wanted to document some sections that dealt with the problem of death.

Since this blog mainly focuses on the approach to living from an Atheist’s perspective I thought it would be very helpful to post some of these paragraphs on here.

1. The Acceptance of Death leads to a Fuller Capacity to Live Life

“This acceptance of my death, this understanding of my own fragility, has made everything easier - untangling my addictions, identifying and confronting my own entitlement, accepting responsibility for my own problems - suffering through my fears and uncertainties, accepting my failure and embracing rejections - it has been made lighter by the thought of my own death. The more I peer into the darkness, the brighter life gets, the quieter the world becomes, and the less unconscious resistance I feel to, well, anything” (Mark Manson, 209).

Death is not what the religious would want us to believe. We hear this all the time, if you die tomorrow, might as well pillage and destroy today. But that is not what makes human beings happy. What makes humans happy is helping and building, not harming and destroying - this is how we build societies and families and a legacy, ultimately. This leads to the 2nd point:

     2.    Death is Inevitable, Why Terrorize Life While we Have it?

Bukowski once wrote, “We’re all going to die, all of us. What a circus! That alone should make us love each other, but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by life’s trivialities; we are eaten up by nothing” (208).

     3.    Legacy is the Most Important Facet in Life

“Confronting the reality of our own mortality is important because it obliterates all the crappy, fragile, superficial values in life. While most people whittle their days chasing another buck, or a little bit more fame and attention, or a little bit more assurance that they’re right or loved, death confronts all of us with a far more painful and important question: What is your legacy?” (205).

All of these lead us to understand why we should study philosophy. You can achieve a sense of eternity if you are capable to express yourself through information and embody immortality. We are a collections of neural frameworks that respond to reflexes and imagine consciousness for themselves. Although consciousness is also a very difficult concept in and of itself, hence we will not be discussing it here. But this is also the postmodern belief. Language is an eternal if put on a source that can not be eradicated. And in a digital era, information is difficult to delete, hence we all achieve a form of immortality.