Accept Death, Enjoy Life!

Favor Life

While always expecting death, enjoy life to the full, for we are only alive temporarily and dead forever. After we accept death reality, we see how death isn't scary but only meaningless, and how short life is. Letting the present slip through one's fingers while obsessing over death, only because we die eventually, is absurd (like abstaining from food only because we become full). It's better to live now than sit and wait for death, counting the years down. Death should "only" change one's plans: when young, have long-term plans; when old, have short-term ones; either stage, enjoy what you have.

The biggest mistake humanity has committed, costing it millennia of deviation from the natural path of civilization, is when humans challenged nature and chose not to start from where animals ended: once they became aware of death, they grew obsessed with it, treating their fantasies and recollections of their dead, stored in their highly-evolved brains, as FACTS to dwell on, and on ... while missing the real facts of life, without improving its quality for the living.

Death obsession, that many religious/depressed/apathetic/anarchistic/psychotic people have, is a sin, the only sin, indirectly killing life:

• Disruptive. You can't follow a single idea to the end without Death stopping you to say: "What's the use?" It becomes like a permanent hole in your head, or vessel, where nothing stays in.
• Disheartening. You lose motivation to pursue ambitions, commit to plans, or worse, respect rules, law and order, since you consider all these roads as leading eventually to death. Some respect rules only out of "fear" of eternal punishment, not because rules make life better. Their spoon-fed morality promotes death, not life; and rather than seek happiness they seek holiness, failing to define the latter or achieve the former.
• Time-Consuming. The number of possibilities to consider is endless, of how we may die and what happens after, as all are mere speculations, scientific or religious.
• Divisive. Even worse is sticking to one possibility we wishfully, stubbornly, illegitimately treat as and promote to a fact to defend, while ignoring the others, endlessly arguing and fighting over with other people, whose different wishes lead to different facts too.
• Misleading. Thus we both end up ignorant and superstitious, living in a nonexistent world, and "messing up" the existent one.
• Unnatural. The force of circumstance naturally forces us to think of other issues, necessities and pleasures, than death.
• Futile. You are always back to square one: "I can't conquer death, so I'll just live life."
• Depressing. It's called the Grim Reaper.

Protect Life

Once we accept death we realize how short life is that it needs to be protected, for us to enjoy every moment of it. Every second suddenly becomes so precious. Then, we find that fear and pleasure don't go together; thus we start taking security measures and precautions, to secure a safe enjoyable life. We face our fears of aging, diseases, accidents, mishaps, poverty, thefts, crimes, nature's anger, predators, viruses ... and virtually every cause of misery. We face our fears, one by one, but we don't dwell on them, as too much fear can dampen the very pleasure we protect. Examples:

• We make money for "living," some to spend, some to save, but we don't live for hoarding money we'll never use.
• We have regular checkups for our body's maintenance, but we don't become paranoid about every disease we hear about. We pay doctors to help us, not to "play on" our fears, making our life, that we put into their hands, miserable. We exercise, watch what we eat, whom we meet, sleep well, etc.
• We begin to value "life-related" knowledge (medicine, technology, environment, laws, rights, finance, etc.) and professionals (scientists, inventors, doctors, teachers, lawyers, officers, firefighters, etc.). Meanwhile, we ignore the so-called pseudo-sciences (which are not science at all) that only fill a hole in some people's heads.

Those who can't accept death value less/none of the above, as they have other pleasures and fears to occupy themselves with. Meanwhile, when they see someone simply accepting the reality of death and making the best of life, they mock them and ridicule their efforts to protect/prolong life, wrongly believing him/her to live only to "take precautions" while missing life. Ironically, the opposite is true: those they ridicule do love life more, except that their love is a responsible one. More ironic still, is when "the mockers rush to the mocked" for help, panicked by a disease or by death itself, when they eventually see it approaching: the reality they had refused to accept and prepare themselves for.

The ABCs of life starts with respecting life, that is more enjoyable when guided by reason. To fully abandon reason and embrace passion can be disastrous; nay, every disaster is possible then, when one turns into a car without driver, a human without brain. Think of all those at the moment driving recklessly, having unsafe sex, eating to death, or just crossing the street carelessly.

Enjoy Life

There are endless ways to enjoy life that we learn from experience, books, other people ... There are "always new" social, sensual & intellectual pleasures to taste, diversify and maximize, while keeping and relishing the "old pleasures" too. After accepting death, we begin to see life differently, wanting to stop and enjoy every second before it's gone forever.

We begin to refine, sophisticate and diversify our pleasures, gradually losing interest in those just addressing our animal instincts (although we never discard a powerful pleasure unless it has alternatives). We learn about other people's cultures, music, arts, foods, etc. and we respect their differences (race, age, beliefs, likes and dislikes, etc.) realizing they are humans like us who want to enjoy life that we temporarily share together.

We imagine how it feels to be another person, from another country/generation/race/gender ... by the act of empathy, through which we live multiple lives. Empathy needs freedom from personal, social and religious bias, and broad understanding of others, to enjoy being "someone else."

One of the greatest pleasures people miss for not accepting death is time-travel. They can't travel to the past or the future, just with imagination, because thinking of death and the many incoherent fantasies thereafter leave less room for life's pleasures. They don't care about future predictions or inventions, or their own legacy for future generations. Meanwhile, those who accept death "see" time differently: they love to maximize life experience, living more than one life, virtually stretching their lifespan through fantasy, sympathy, reading, traveling ... They love to know about our ancestors we came from, and our successors who will live in the faraway future, that we will never be around to meet.

Living once only and wishing life had been longer, we make up for the "missed lives" by traveling with our time-machine: our brain. Future studies and science fiction offer us free future trips with detailed itineraries. Futurology is not mere speculations or child fantasies; it requires more research than other sciences do, for precise predictions and viable long-term plans. Creating a "prototype" from a faraway future life or a past one relies on scientific facts and data organized together by strict rules and order. Studying human/natural history is differently thrilling too, however primitive life and people were then. However, time-travel is best when one is free and flexible enough to return to the present, that should always be favored (you may love to pet your "dino" as long as he is not angry; or you can share a future meal with strange-looking people, as long as you know what they eat!).

Visualizing the future and the past while living the present links the three parts of time, where we see time, life and the entire existence as a whole we are all part of. It secures and speeds up the present, helping us see a danger to avoid before it happens, try new technologies/lifestyles/social systems/ideas/etc. before they exist, and reclaim long forgotten ones. We can travel back and forth, stretching our lifespan, as there are always endless micro/nano/femto-seconds and even smaller time units we are yet to fill with life.

* * *

Our brain is nature's most precious gift, that it's a pity to squander on the unknown more than the well-known, wasting the days that make up the months, years ... and life. Is it time to wake up, before we run out of time? Let's live as best as we can and make death less painful, as much as we can. We all love to die with dignity, in a decent way, or at least to be prepared for an indecent one. Life is a one-way, one-day, short journey. Let's enjoy it, before we return home ... to nothingness again, where we came from, by being constantly ready to live, ready to die.

How to Accept Death

Refusing to Accept to Death

The Purpose of Death

The Purpose of Life