You are going to die. Sorry, was that not what you wanted to hear? Well, listen, we need to have a
serious talk about death. Most humans generally assume that death is the worst thing that can
happen to someone. Indeed, across all cultures and civilizations throughout time, the fact remains
the same - death is the thing that we humans fear the most. We might not think about it much of the
time, but somewhere pushed far back into the subconscious, that fear lurks in the depths.
We might fear the death process itself, that we might be afflicted with pain and loneliness in
our final hours; and then when actual death occurs, we are returned back into the dust
from whence we came, and that’s that. A human life, forced into one final moment of suffering,
and then snuffed out forever. This fate, or something similar,
awaits all humans at some point or other, no matter what happens to us. We live on the event
horizon of a black hole, and at some point that barrier is crossed, and we fall into nothingness.
The Epic of Gilgamesh is considered as the oldest surviving work of literature, and was
written in 1800BC in ancient Mesopotamia. Over 12 stone tablets, the story tells us about Gilgamesh
and his friend Enkidu. Both are two-thirds god and one-third human, and so both are mortal.
Gilgamesh is an oppressive and harsh ruler, and never really thinks about death until the
gods sentence Enkidu to die. When this happens, Gilgamesh is distressed, and is quickly consumed
with fear about his mortality. He wonders about the forest, rambling about how, at some point,
he will ultimately die as well. In fact, the idea of death frightens him so much,
Gilgamesh embarks upon the quest for eternal life, and seeks Utnapishtim, an immortal man.
Gilgamesh undertakes a long and dangerous journey, until finally, he finds this immortal man,
and asks him for the secret to eternal life. The man was granted his immortality because
he survived a Great Flood that was supposed to destroy all humans. To test Gilgamesh’s
worthiness, Utnapishtim commands him to stay awake for six days and seven nights.
However, as soon as he had finished speaking, Gilgamesh had already fallen asleep.
Gilgamesh, who had come here to conquer death itself, found that he couldn’t even conquer sleep.
He accepted that he had failed in his quest for eternal life,
and went back home. It seemed that even Gilgamesh could not escape the jaws of death.
Viktor Frankl was an Austrian neurologist. In the early 1930s, while Frankl was still a medical
student, he organized free counselling sessions to address the high numbers of student suicides,
and in the year following his sessions not a single student committed suicide.
Later in his career, he worked in a psychiatric hospital, and over the four year period he was
there, treated 3,000 suicidal women a year. When the Second World War came around,
Frankl worked in the only hospital in Vienna that was still admitting Jews, and helped
mentally disabled people avoid the various Nazi euthanasia programmes. This was until Frankl was
deported to a concentration camp himself. While he was at the camp, he noticed three
distinct reactions that were experienced by all the Jewish inmates. Firstly, there was
the initial shock upon arriving at the camp and experiencing its conditions for the first time.
Then came the indifference after living in the camp for a while and adjusting to their lives.
Finally, some or most inmates experienced a detachment from their selves, their sense
of morality became twisted and deformed, and even those that survived the camps became disillusioned
about their freedom. It is difficult to imagine the suffering that Frankl must have endured at the
concentration camps, existing right on the edge of the event horizon, and where one wrong move could
push him over the brink and into the dark. In 1945, Frankl was liberated from the
concentration camp, and learned of the deaths of all his immediate family members,
except his sister. Frankl had experienced firsthand the disillusionment he had described,
and the hope that had sustained him threatened to disappear forever. That same year, Frankl began
work on his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, which detailed his experiences in the concentration
camps under Nazi Germany, and also his ideas of how one can find meaning in their lives.
This would become logotherapy, which is based upon the idea that humans are primarily motivated by a
search for meaning. Viktor Frankl, who had quite literally lived through Hell on Earth, concludes
that meaning is found within every moment of our lives, even through suffering and death.
If we were immortal, Frankl writes, then we could legitimately postpone every action forever. It
would be of no consequence whether or not we did a thing now. But in the face of death as
absolute finis to our future and boundary to our possibilities, we are under the imperative
of utilizing our lifetimes to the utmost, not letting the singular opportunities pass by unused.
So after failing to pass the test for eternal life, what happened to Gilgamesh? Well,
when he arrived back to his kingdom, he looked up at the massive walls that surrounded it, and had
a sudden realization. The walls, built under his leadership, would endure for centuries to come.
Even after Gilgamesh was dead, the walls would still stand to remind
people that he was there, once upon a time. Even though humans are mortal, we can transcend
our mortal limits through our actions, and what people will remember us for when we are gone.
It was only after his quest for immortality that Gilgamesh realized that the meaning of
our lives comes precisely from the fact that our lives are finite in the first place! That
our lives are only meaningful because there’s an ending! Some deadlines can be missed without
serious consequences, like that essay that’s still half-finished or the email you’ve been
putting off. But for the most important actions in our lives, our dreams and ambitions, if we
fail to complete them while we are alive, then we will have wasted our one opportunity to do so.
Death is terrifying, but if Viktor Frankl, who lived under Nazi Germany for Chrissake,
can still hold hope that we can find meaning in our lives, even in the face of death,
then what’s your bloody excuse? And yet we still manage to convince ourselves
that the decks were stacked against us from the beginning. Like rolling a trillion sided dice,
and landing on the same number as two and a half million other people. That’s roughly the
probability of you being here now. Yeah, that sure sounds like some cosmic bad luck to me. We are the
meaning makers. Our existence gives us purpose. If you were immortal, then it really would be
the case that nothing matters, but you’re not. You have one lifetime. What are you going to do with it?
Thank you very much for watching, peace and love, and I’ll see you in the next video.