I spent the last few weeks watching the FX series Shogun with my wife. Overall a strong, intense drama with solid acting. I did not care for the blunt seppuku and earthquake scenes. It gave me strong "Look how intense Japan is!" vibes. That being said I understand that foreign gaze is kind of the whole point of Shogun as we see important historical events through the eyes of a foreigner who is completely new to Japanese society.
Death is a prominent theme in Shogun. Death scenes are given extended screentime and characters seem eager to die for a greater purpose. Watching all those samurai slid their stomachs made me wonder how people could so easily sacrifice themselves for the greater good. My wife argued that for people in feudal Japan, their clan was their entire world and there was no imaginable life beyond it. It is therefore understandable that they would take their life if their lord demanded it. Rejecting such a request would mean being disloyal, which led to being outcasted. At some point in the series, main character Mariko says that there is meaning in dying an honorable death. This viewpoint is in stark contrast with everything I believed about death so far and made me rethink my relationship with death.
I have had a fear based relationship with death for as long as I can remember. As a teen I would lie awake at night, worrying about climate disasters and World War III. If an airplane flew over our house at night, I was afraid that it would drop an atomic bomb on my city. My fears were not exactly subtle back then. Nowadays I worry less about floods or nuclear wars (ironically since they are both more likely to happen now), but death is still on my mind. Lying in bed, I become overly aware of my body, my heartbeat, every little pain sensation and I wonder what the experience of dying would be like. It seems that death is always lingering somewhere in the back of my mind and I wish that it didn't.
Short intermission: One of my favorite songs from my those days covers the fear of dying. "Young Hearts Spark Fire" by Japandroids is a banger. I love the sincerity and raw emotion these guys put in their music.
It is not irrational to fear death up to a certain extent. The only certainty we have when we are born, is that life will someday end. It is thus death which makes life meaningful, because it urges us to make the most of every day. In that sense death is a beautiful thing. What makes it scary to a lot of people it that we don't know what follows after it. My personal belief is that nothing happens after we die. Everything turns to black and that is the end of it. There are many different beliefs about what follows after death. The afterlife being the most common one and reincarnation being my personal favorite. I would love to return on this earth as something inhumane. A cat on a farm, or a bird living by the shore. A sea turtle sounds like a pretty good deal as well, if I survive the walk from my nest to the ocean and not get eaten by birds on the way. I love to entertain the thought of a life that follows this one, but then I would be fooling myself. It is better to face what is the most likely scenario. A terrifying infinite nothing.
I am open to believe in an afterlife if I ever saw a sign. The only supernatural experience I have ever had happened two years ago on the day my grandmother died. She suffered from an agressive form of cancer and we knew she had only a couple of days left. Due to circumstances I was unable to visit her for one last time to tell her that I loved her. I went to bed on a friday night and had a dream where I saw my grandmother. I started crying and telling her how much I loved her, to which she replied: "You don't have to tell me this, because I know that you love me." She disappeared and I woke up in the middle of the night. Next to my bed there was a small nightlight and to my suprise the lamp was glowing up like crazy. Something that never happened before and never happened again since. After a few seconds the light went back to normal. I wondered if my grandmother had died in that moment. The next morning my mother called me to say that my grandmother died the night before. I told her I already knew it.
Apart from this one experience I have never seen signs of an afterlife existing. Since I have a scientific background I still treat this experience as an outlier, an anomaly. There could certainly be other explanations as to what happened that night. This anecdote is all just to say that I really am open to the idea of an afterlife, but the evidence to support this theory so far has been... insufficient.
Sometimes I wonder if my fear of dying has to do with me lacking clear goals in my life. When I was 18 I had an existential crisis. I started to feel tiny and insignificant in this universe. I was convinced that nothing I did really mattered. It could have led to a depression, but really it relieved me of a lot of pressure and performance anxiety I felt. I was a socially anxious teenager and often felt like I didn't fit in. The conviction that nothing in life really mattered gave me the freedom to not worry about what other people think. It gave me the freedom to slow down my pace and not feel pressure to accomplish anything. I gave up on setting career goals and just took life as it came. Living like that has been an overall positive experience for me, but in recent years I have come to realize that treating life as meaningless is unsatisfying in the end. For all the good things it brought me, it created an emptiness inside of me that I ignored for a long time. Now I struggle to fill it in.
Back to Shogun. Whenever I see somebody so dedicated to their cause that they are willing to die for it, I envy them. I envy them because I don't know if I could ever sacrify my life serving a greater purpose. If there is anything that can be said about samurai in 17th century Japan, it's that they had a clear sense of purpose. They knew what they were living and dying for. It must comfortable to know what your purpose in life is and trying to be the best version of yourself within that paradigm. Shogun made me wonder if my longstanding fear of death is a consequence of a lack of purpose in my life. I always thought that living as long as I can was the only thing to strive for. But what is the point of living long, if you don't leave a legacy that you and the generations after you can be proud of? What's the point of living long if you didn't fight for a cause that you truly believed in?
In hindsight, me starting this website a year ago was probably a first attempt at trying to find a purpose in my life. And while I haven't quite found my purpose yet, I feel like if I keep going down this road of being an active creator, rather than a passive consumer, I am going to find it eventually. I am going to find my cause 'worth dying for' and, who knows, maybe even fall asleep without worrying about dying.
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