LIVING A BLEAK LIFE
Locked into tight, unforgiving schedules laced with tons of wasted time, we have managed to bury ourselves beneath mounds of debt. We are so busy that we no longer see the big picture. A while back, a man on death row in Florida’s judicial system, lamenting about the magazines and newspapers piling up unread in his cell, refused to read about things that were genuinely meaningless in the grand scheme of things. He was staring death in the face, and because of that, he had conceived a new prism through which to observe life. Sontag discusses the social denial of death as the only tolerable remedy by a materialistic and Godless society. She argues: “For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled.
It can only be denied.” This denial is essential for the person who does not believe his life has a purpose. Arthur Schopenhauer, a 19th-century German philosopher, writes of the world’s weariness, its protracted glum: “Nothing else can be stated as the aim of our existence except the knowledge that it would be better for us not to exist” (Schopenhauer, 1966). Influenced by the nihilistic writings of Fried rich Nietzsche, can anything darker be expected from a philosopher whose embrace of “transcendental miserabilism” (Schopenhauer, 2020) reflected the dark specter of human vitality, the soul emptied of divine light. The nihilist lives somewhere between fearing death and dreading life (Schopenhauer, 2020). In that sense, a person loses his identity as a child of God, emptying themselves, as it were, of their dignity, their intrinsic value. Schopenhauer (1966) writes: “Those will be least afraid of becoming nothing in death who have recognised that they are already nothing now.” What a tragic outlook. To overcome this despair, advances Schopenhauer (2020), one must practice demonise or embrace the practical things of life, such as keeping the house organized, washing the clothes, and making the beds etc. These are meaningfully engaging but finite objectives that maintain the busyness of life, that gloss over the true essentials, that keep us moving along this miserable path. It is a coping mechanism embraced by many today because much of humankind knows, proposed Schopenhauer, “…that life is not worth living” (Schopenhauer, 2020). Schopenhauer’s nihilistic, pessimistic, and caustic philosophy, unpopular in the 19th century, has found renewed popularity in growing circles of developed countries (Schopenhauer, 2020). Not surprising, given the dramatic growth of atheistic and agnostic beliefs in Western culture. In 1988, roughly 70% of the Silent Generation and the Baby Boomers had strong beliefs about the existence of God. By 2008, that value dropped to 44%, and fell again to 26% by 2021. According to the study, younger generations have even a lesser certainty about God (Burge, R, 2021).