RR Phantom
Location : Wasted Space
Job/hobbies : Cayman Islands Actuary
 |  Subject: When Facebook meets Nietzsche  Sat Jul 05, 2014 11:52 pm | |
| “Leave death nothing but a burned out castle” counselled novelist Nikos Kazantzakis, most famous for his book Zorba the Greek.
Kazantzakis’s 20th century encouragement to live life to the fullest provides an interesting insight into the troubled 21st century Greek economy but it’s really nothing new in our age of self-help, Facebook bucket lists and 100 places to bungee jump before you die.
"Party hard, dude and leave a good-looking corpse!" It's a cheap T-shirt sentiment.
What’s fascinating to consider, however, is if the trappings of a full life - wealth, the attainment of fame, power or regard, devotion to insane pastimes, weekend sporting achievement and travel to exotic places - mask a deeper fear of death?
Another Greek, the philosopher Epicurus, taught that preoccupation with these things often disguises a subconscious grasping for immortality, counterfeit as it may be.
Children are well known as our most common “immortality project”, yet Epicurus notes the same of the hunger for riches, titles or a library bearing one’s name.
Death has always been the most human of concerns, the gift of consciousness also providing us with the ability to imagine our own demise. Death is “the worm at the core” of happiness - but can it also be a spur to live without regret?
Nietzsche considered his “mightiest thought” the idea of eternal recurrence. In Thus Spake Zarathustra, he asks - and I paraphrase - what if you were offered the chance to relive every moment of your life, unchanged, over and over, for all eternity? Would you “gnash your teeth” in despair at such a fate or be happy in the knowledge of all the wonders you could re-taste?
Psychiatrist Irvin Yalom suggests “if you engage in this experiment and find the thought painful, there’s one obvious explanation: you do not believe you’ve lived your life well”.
Yalom also notes one of the most common answers from patients when he asks why they fear death is “all the things I haven’t done”. The counter to this, of course, is to ask what you can do so you won’t accumulate more regrets in the years to come.
A bucket list of trivial accomplishments might strike some people as a poor way of spending the “loan of life”, yet if it focuses us on the vitality of living and steers us away from remorse, reproach and disappointment for all the things we’ve left undone, doesn’t it lessen the “debt of death”?
Author William Martin is getting love on social media lately from the cuddly cat crew, yet as above, he's simply repackaging ancient wisdom.
“Do not ask your children to strive for extraordinary lives,” he says in his book The Parent's Tao Te Ching, "such striving may seem admirable, but it is the way of foolishness.
"Help them instead to find the wonder and the marvel of an ordinary life. Show them the joy of tasting tomatoes, apples and pears. Show them how to cry when pets and people die. Show them the infinite pleasure in the touch of a hand. And make the ordinary come alive for them.
"The extraordinary will take care of itself,” writes Martin.
I guess Daddy will have to burn down the castle.
http://www.smh.com.au/comment/when-facebook-meets-nietzsche-20140703-zstik.html |
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