Warren Ward from AEON website
Despite all our medical advances,’ my friend Jason used to quip, ‘the mortality rate has remained constant – one per person.’
Unless of course you are convinced that you have existed in past lives. Or are likely to be reincarnated into a new life. Then the quandary revolves more around the extent to which this is an incarnation/reincarnation of "I" [as you know yourself to be here and now] or the embodiment of a reality that is not able to actually be put into words.
Jason and I studied medicine together back in the 1980s. Along with everyone else in our course, we spent six long years memorising everything that could go wrong with the human body. We diligently worked our way through a textbook called Pathologic Basis of Disease that described, in detail, every single ailment that could befall a human being. It’s no wonder medical students become hypochondriacal, attributing sinister causes to any lump, bump or rash they find on their own person.
This reminds me of one possible take on an observation John Fowles made in [I believe] The Aristos. Human existence, he noted, is analogous to sitting at a desk awash with telephones. Big ones. Small ones. In between ones. They represent all of those different things above that can afflict our bodies. Our minds. We sit there waiting for the next one to ring...hoping that this time it is just one of the small ones. Or not more than one at a time. But we know that among the phones is the one that we dread the most. The one that, in ringing, ushers in the Big One. The physical ailment that culminates in our death. And, clearly, "a sense of meaning" here can be many different things to many different people.
Jason’s oft-repeated observation reminded me that death (and disease) are unavoidable aspects of life. It sometimes seems, though, that we’ve developed a delusional denial of this in the West. We pour billions into prolonging life with increasingly expensive medical and surgical interventions, most of them employed in our final, decrepit years. From a big-picture perspective, this seems a futile waste of our precious health-dollars.
That's how it works all right. Only, when the Big One has pounced on any particular one of us, the "big picture" can quickly be whittled down "in our head" to "me", "myself" and "I". Not the philosophy of death but our own.
What then of a "sense of meaning"? Why one and not another?
And what will yours be?