Thoughts about life on a Friday

It is the prerogative of each generation to point out the hypocrisy of the one before. The social contract we enter into on birth includes the understanding that you will be subject to judgement.

Your life will be weighed by people with different values to you. The witnesses to your completion will have a different perspective from you. Its uncomfortable to think about the fact that your life story will have an ending.

How will you face this judgement, at the end of your life? Will you hope to argue your case from beyond the grave? Will you seek redemption when your body has broken down? What's the best strategy to be remembered as kindly as possible?

Our obsession with how we're judged by others is a side-effect of this cultural awareness we have in our minds. So much of what we think about is what other people are thinking about.

It takes up so much of our conscious thought. Or maybe it is this capacity for abstract thought, thinking about thinking, that is the conscious part of us. Seeing ourselves in the perceptions of other people gives us our self-awareness. You do just about everything else without needing to think too much.

This shared consciousness we have with others forms this connection of awareness that will ultimately survive your death. And you know this. This is the basis of all religious thought, a subject that completely revolves around ideas of immortality, what survives beyond your death.

Deep inside ourselves, we somehow instinctively understand this, even if we don't have the right words for it. That's why we're completely obsessed with what other people think about us. We form our identities through a contrast between the within and the without. And the within often includes the people whose opinions we care about.

That's why loneliness is such an insidious trap to fall into. Its almost like a disease that feeds itself, an ever steepening slope of retreating within yourself. Something's wrong, you sense its out there. Its the end of your awareness. Death. When you realise you're spiralling, you should try to find a handle and pull it out of there. Its almost never too late to change your approach.

How will we face our deaths? In the myriad ways that we've been taught to think about this, we cannot help but become anxious about. Sometimes when we're occupied or distracted, we can forget about this momentarily. Sometimes when there's a good dream going on that can occupy our minds, we prefer to stay asleep.

How you will be remembered is how your story will survive you..
Who are you? That question can only be answered by gazing at the reflection of yourself in others, in knowing what they think about you.

Maybe you'd like to think of yourself as kind and loving, or competent and wise, a good lover or a brave hero. This is the story you're trying to tell yourself, and hence other people. The people who witness your life will hold in their heads their image of you that survives beyond death.

You know this even if you didn't quite know how to say it. Culture and language teach us how to say our parts in this story about ourselves. Sometimes words are frustrating tools to use. You care about what other people think of you. You want attention. You start feeling anxious about death when your mind has too much time to think.

The joke is that even while you think about all these things, you have barely any awareness of the body that you're supposedly made of. You're rarely aware of your breathing, of your heartbeat, of your digestion and your metabolism. That's not the stuff that makes up your awareness. You hardly spend any mental time thinking yourself or feeling yourself.

Maybe 'you' are not really who you think you are. What is your identity? Are you merely that body, or are you that echoing story about yourself that you will be remembered by? Is the reflective, self-aware conscious side of you not physical, but mental? 'You' are information. 'You' are an image.

How you will have lived is a story that ends with the chapter on how you will die. And 'you' will survive your own death. The story of your life, no matter how trivial you may believe it to be, will forever be echo'd, dispersed and embedded within the universe.

And every day we labour at crafting this little story. Desperate and obsessed, rarely taking the time to sit back and think things through. Afraid if we don't keep busy, we'll run out of time.