Without death, life is not worth living

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An honorable member of the Coffee Shop Has Just Posted the Following:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/11...th-living.html

By Olivia Goldhill

6:05AM GMT 15 Jan 2015

Olivia Goldhill


Comments31 Comments





Ambitions may vary, but we all hope for the same death: lying in bed as old and wise as we’d ever wished to be, propped up on pillows, and surrounded by loving family. But I reckon the perfect death will lose its lustre if it’s a sure thing.


Scientific advances mean that, by the year 2050, cancer will hardly ever kill those younger than 80. According to David Taylor, Professor Emeritus of Pharmaceutical and Public Health at University College London, we will become steadily more effective at treating the disease over the next 35 years, until it becomes a rarity to die of the Big C before reaching old age.


At first blush this is great news, or at least it is for those of us born after 1970 who, according to Prof Taylor’s maths, now sit smugly behind the lines of the war on cancer. Break out the fags, let’s all jet off to some ghastly winter destination and fry. For if cancer doesn’t get us, what will? At the moment, from our mid-thirties on, it is the most common killer (at least until good old heart disease steps in several decades later).


Being able to ignore the spectre of death in our youth seems like an unqualified reason to be cheerful. But while the world would, of course, be a far better place if you or I didn’t die young, imagine the downside if nobody died before becoming a granny.


An eight-decade life enjoyed with complacency is not a life well-lived. Heidegger argued that we need the threat of death to motivate our every action. To live authentically, he wrote, we must recognise that every day and every hour could be our last. Without that motivation, we humans just tend to sit around waiting lazily for stuff to happen: no one gets started on their first novel; those annoying start-ups that generate billions and jobs for us all remain firmly unstarted. And when such youthful layabouts make it to their dotage and death does, finally, hove into view, are they likely to get going then? Hardly. Live slow, die old, will be the motto. Though there’ll be nothing new to read.

A more populist interpretation of Heidegger’s high-minded philosophy is branded across thousands of fridge magnets and inspirational posters: live for the moment. But it’s difficult to live every day as though it could be your last when the scientists insist that it won’t be. The Who’s My Generation may still be the classic soundtrack for a wild youth, but “Hope I die before I get old (though I know I won’t)” doesn’t have quite the same audacious ring to it.

The principal casualty of this new mentality will be instant gratification. Anyone who has indulged a smoking habit or given up a steady job to back-pack around the world has chosen immediate pleasure over a lifetime of safety – and we make those risky decisions because we know that the future may not arrive. Why sacrifice happiness today for future years of moderate contentment when a middle-aged death could destroy careful years of planning? Now, exuberant twentysomethings will have to focus on unlikely tales of pianos crashing through the ceiling or (actually surprisingly frequent) fatal donkey kicks in order to carry out their antics with any real death-defying relish.

We all pray that those we love will live long and prosper – but nobody wants to deal with the overcrowding that comes with curing deadly diseases. And expect divorce rates to spike as unhappy couples realise there’s no chance of death granting an early reprieve from a lifetime of monogamy. Or the same old jokes.

Only the morbid savour tragedy, but frankly only the odd could relish life without the piquancy of death hovering over vast swathes of it. The risk of death averts the risk of 80-odd years of life being taken for granted. To my 25-year-old mind, that’s a small price to pay.


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