Death, and what really matters

Part 5 of Valentine's Logos

Photo by K. Mitch Hodge on Unsplash

(This is part 5 of Valentine’s Logos, originally written in 2024. Many people who read the original document would read only this section, because it’s the most emotionally real. It certainly makes sense on its own. When I was first writing the whole thing I debated starting with it. “Here’s the problem. This is what we’re solving. Let’s stay real about it.” My tone in how I talk about this stuff has changed a bit, but not my deep care for it. The earlier parts of this series are deeply important. But this is what it’s all for. This is sacred.)

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This section will be messier than the rest. It’s a prayer. A sketch of what is dearly precious to me. Why I wrote this series at all.

Everything else is maybe clever. Interesting. Logical. It’s an interwoven system. All this stuff about memes and how they work through the mind, and how minds work, and ways of shifting evolutionary pressures on memes both in people and in the world. Powerful tools.

But on its own, it’s just more machinery. It’s more of the dead thing.

I want to point at life.

Why any of this matters.

What problem I’m trying to solve.

It’s quite clear that how I name the core thing comes from my own personal quirks and past. I focus a lot on death. It’s very central to what I see. I have good reason to think I’m seeing something universal. And at the same time, when I name the core specifically in terms of death, I often get blankness or disorientation back. Some of that is obviously memetic defenses, but some looks to me like people encountering a straightforward frame difference. The true name of the gate I’m looking at is Death. But from wherever you’re standing, the true name of your gate might be different.

And also, some of what I’m asking for is help. I’m scared and overwhelmed. What I see is too big for just me to handle. Some of this is going to be me projecting my own preverbal traumas into (my perception of) the world. If you can tell something I’m naming is personal to me, or doesn’t apply to the world you see, maybe consider it might be a plea for help that I haven’t learned how to express clearly — maybe even to myself. I really do want the help.

But I’m seeing something real too. Please listen for that. Help us all name it more clearly, so we can see it together and make something profoundly beautiful and wholesome.

Precious remembrance

The problem — the big, core, most central issue across everything, best as I can tell — is that we lose track of what matters.

I don’t mean that I know what specific thing matters and we aren’t all taking it seriously enough. That’s forcing solutions. What I mean is, we waste our time and energy on things our hearts know full well don’t matter, while neglecting what our hearts know does.

It’s easy to bounce off of this point because of shame. Like there’s something wrong with us that we do this. And like the pressure to notice this simple clear point is a social weight that threatens Original Spin. I see lots of people reject the idea that this forgetting even happens. As far as I can tell, that’s from either misunderstanding what I mean, or from a kind of protection against coercion.

But I’m talking about the fact that clarity can dawn. That people can go on psychedelic trips and realize they’d been ignoring something important to them and they always kind of knew it. How in quiet evenings with friends, after a day of playing and working together, they can be sitting around a campfire or hanging out in the kitchen… and there’s a tenderness that can arise, where deep heartfelt truths can gently be spoken. Truths that were too difficult to admit before.

And nothing, as far as I can tell, makes this truth more poignant than death.

There is a roaring, heartwrenching silence, a devastating storylessness, that I’ve seen crash into bereaved parents again and again. Holding the ashes of their child, or looking into their child’s eerily quiet room. It’s cold, and clear, and far too much. And there’s no turning away from it.

In moments like that, there is no room for forgetting. Every harsh word or “Don’t bother me, I’m too busy” haunts the memories of those who survive the loss of their beloved ones.

But not all “trivial” things are foolish. The teasing, the little struggles about how to arrange things in the dishwasher, the way the departed were always harried and late… these become absolutely sacred memories. Agonizingly precious.

It’s utterly absurd to try to define what does and doesn’t matter. That effort is for the mind. The mind might be able to help honor what matters if it has relevant ways of naming parts of it. But the mind doesn’t understand the sacred. Something far, far deeper in us does.

I hope you can recognize the note I’m trying to hum here.

Terry Warner’s story

If I remember right, the book Bonds That Make Us Free is about this preciousness. This deep what-matters-ness.

The author, Terry Warner, tells a story near the beginning. I think it’s very poignant. I’ll share it here:

[My wife] Susan and I named one of our sons Matthew, which means “gift of God.” During the early months of his life I would dance around his crib in my pajamas, singing. Some of the songs I made up as I went along, some I had learned from my mother, and one my grandfather had taught me many years earlier:

Matthew, Matthew was a fine old man,
Washed his face in a frying pan,
Combed his hair with a wagon wheel,
And died with a toothache in his heel.

Susan would laugh. It was the best of times.

Thirteen years later Matthew appeared one afternoon at the bathroom doorway and yelled, “When’re you going to get it fixed, huh, Dad?” The downstairs toilet had been broken for several days, which meant Matthew had to use the bathroom upstairs where I was changing the baby’s diaper.

I closed my eyes for a moment and took my time acknowledging his presence. My ears began to heat up a little. How dare he talk to his father that way?

I didn’t raise my voice. Instead I set the reeking diaper in the diaper pail and observed my son standing stiffly in the doorway, arms crossed, waiting for an answer. I said, very slowly, “I am not going to answer a question put to me in that tone of voice.”

“So you’re not even going to talk to your own son, huh?”

I did not say the next thing that came into my mind, which was, “I’m not going to talk to my son until he can speak respectfully to me.” Nevertheless, he responded with a defiant “Oh yeah?” in his eyes. For a fleeting moment this reminded me of his bright eyes and spirited bearing when, at the age of nine, he sang “Wells Fargo Wagon” in the university musical. How had that charming child turned into a teenager whom, for that moment at least, I would have been happy to have out of my sight?

Summoning up my patience, I briefly considered explaining how I had tried to fix the toilet that very afternoon—but then decided he didn’t deserve the courtesy of an answer. The growing pressure of my silence was making him squirm. “Fine!” he finally exclaimed, and he huffed out the door, through the house, and down the driveway toward the Hickmans’. Probably to use their bathroom.

“Oh brother!” I heard myself say.

Hadn’t I answered with perfect self-control? Hadn’t Matthew become even more impudent? What more can a father do when his son acts like that? I picked up the baby and told myself to forget about the whole episode.

Not half an hour later I heard Matthew talking with Susan in the laundry room. He was complaining that I was so far gone I wouldn’t even talk with my own children. Susan didn’t say anything in response—she didn’t even try to correct him! All I could hear besides Matthew’s complaints was the hum of the dryer and the clicking of the snaps on the clothes going round and round inside. Couldn’t Susan see he had her eating out of his hand?

I decided to get myself downstairs to make sure the broken toilet wasn’t overflowing. I didn’t want to give Susan and Matthew more evidence against me than they already had. On the way down I nearly tripped on a pile of clothes Matthew had left on the stairway landing. For a fleeting instant I felt like yelling “What are these clothes doing here?”

But I didn’t yell. Suddenly, quite unexpectedly, all my resentful thoughts gave way to silence. As quickly as I took my next step, I could see for the first time what I had been doing, as if light had broken through a crack in the ceiling of my mind. I had been looking upon my own son as my enemy! How could I have done that? How could I have been finding satisfaction in catching him in a fault? How could I have demeaned a person I loved so well?

I knew the conventional wisdom—you need to come down hard on a boy who acts defiantly, not let him get away with it, give him a swift kick in the pants, take away his privileges. But had I done any of those things, I would have felt worse than I did. The truth that mattered was not that he had been mistreating me—perhaps he had but that’s not what stopped me in my tracks. The truth that mattered was that I had been mistreating him.

A prayer for salvation

The horrendous heartbreak here is that we don’t know how not to forget.

People in Terry Warner’s position often have to learn self-forgiveness first. Knowing we’re going to slip up and be short with our loved ones, or fall back into our addiction, or otherwise fall short of what our hearts know is right and important. And not beating ourselves up about it. Original Spin sort of locks our forgetting into place this way, so unraveling it at least lets us recognize the real pain.

But that recognition isn’t enough. It’s not nearly enough.

We have countless ways of distracting ourselves from the real heart-wrenching grief of our predicament. Ways of numbing ourselves with entertainment, or rehearsing reasoning that taking good care of ourselves and enjoying things is important, or utterly freaking out and panicking, or flinging ourselves into the thrall of some meme that promises us a way out, or collapsing into dissociated despair.

But all of these deaden the sense of what matters. It’s the forgetting speaking for us.

The devastating truth is that we don’t know how not to forget this way, and it desperately matters that we remember.

It’s beyond our power to stay alive and awake in our hearts. Some things we do seem to help… but sometimes we will go cold toward what we love, and hurt it. That’s not okay. Not as a matter of shame, but as a matter of truth.

How can we solve this?

We don’t know. No one does.

It’s devastatingly important that we stay alive to this question, and the heartbreak of not having an answer. Even if we never have an answer.

Ignoring death

I cannot overstate the profound importance of death here.

I think there’s a deep reason death cuts through. Why losing someone we love can shock us out of the pointless sleepwalking we can fall into.

Other things can shake us up too. Falling in love, or having a child, or losing a job.

But death really plays a special role here.

Each single thing we cherish will someday die.

Almost everything we do today is about distracting ourselves from this heartbreak.

Right now, there’s this war between Israel and Hamas. Painfully little of what’s being said about it is kind. People are scared. Parents are grieving the murder of their children. That should be in every breath. But the loudest voices aren’t pausing to let silence weep. To poke one side — and I really could poke either one — the “Free Palestine!” protests I see and hear so often are not mourning the deaths of Jews. Sometimes they’re celebrating Jewish loss. They’re demanding actions to align with a plan while turning a deaf ear to the problems with that plan. It’s the voice of the cold thing that numbs the heart.

All that activity and noise makes for an incredible distraction.

When death touches us in a way we can’t ignore anymore, it breaks through our distractions — whether we’re ready for it or not.

From “Death Over Dinner”:

“You have two lives. Your second life begins when you realize you have only one life.”

Part of the horror of death is this clarity. That it is coming, and it will reveal the truth… and that we had not been preparing to hold that truth. We weren’t ready. And we could have been. And we always knew it.

I often reference “learning death’s lessons before death becomes our teacher”.

Best as I can tell, there isn’t anything more important.

When what we cherish ends, we’ll wish we had been more present for it while it was still here.

Sometimes we can tell that its end came sooner because we were playing games instead of loving what matters.

Shame doesn’t matter here. This isn’t about us being bad or sinful or falling short or whatever.

It’s that we’re hoping the frightening thing will go away if we close our eyes.

And then when it hits, we don’t see it coming.

And that matters.

Something is wrong

When I look around the world, it clearly has a wrongness.

It has much that’s absolutely wonderful too. Lots to be grateful for.

And people bicker endlessly about what is wrong.

But… I mean something simple and clear here. Something gnostic.

Why the culture wars? Why is everything cheaply made and with planned obsolescence now? What’s with homelessness in the USA? Why are the big powers of the world on edge and constantly pushing against one another? Why are all our internet tools designed to deceive and addict us? Why can health problems bankrupt individual Americans?

I have some answers to all these questions. I don’t mean to ask the mental version of them. I’m not asking for some technical analysis I lack.

What I mean is, why do we tolerate these things?

Can we even admit that something is wrong? Without immediately falling into the slumber of proclaiming and backing solutions, or collapsing in despair?

I mean the same note here as throughout this heartfelt prayer. That something matters, and somehow we keep forgetting, and we busy ourselves with so much nonsense, and the deadening garbage keeps piling up.

My second serious girlfriend was a Roman Catholic. She once told me she believed in the miracle of transubstantiation. So I suggested using blood glucose monitors right after communion to measure whether people’s bodies reacted to the communion wafer like a cracker or like meat. I was pretty sure she was wrong, but I figured that if she were right then this would lend scientific backing to Catholic teachings.

She got very upset with me about it. We had a big fight over it.

And I now believe I was in the wrong here.

My logic was sound. But somehow I lost track of my connection with her, and my attunement to her needs and fears, in favor of logic.

Logic doesn’t matter. It’s a tool.

What had me forget?

What has us all forget when it matters?

What makes our arguments and ideas seem so, so precious to us that we’re willing to ignore when another soul cries and begs for us to please, please stop what we’re doing?

I have guesses. About autopilot and memetic takeover and distrust of others hacking us and something ephemeral about us having let our courage atrophy.

But I look around, and something is wrong.

We aren’t collectively acting from the nobility that our hearts clearly know.

We’re doing something else.

We allow something else.

Why?

This is not a game

When people get a terminal diagnosis, something happens to their experience of the world. Death becomes real to them in a way it wasn’t before.

I have clear guesses about why. Death is a mental abstraction for most people. The mind’s inability to deal with self-reference makes “death” something a mental icon “will go through”. But it’s quite something else for it to become real in first person.

Dying people repeat many of the same regrets. They regret not loving better, spending more time with those they love, letting the people in their lives know how much they matter to them. They regret working so much and caring so much about money or promotions. They wish they’d let themselves experience life more, going on that trip they’d always dreamed of or taking a leap with that one person they could have fallen in love with or whatever. They wish they’d let themselves enjoy their curiosity more, and learned about those things they’d always wondered about.

It’s the same things, over and over again.

Why do we wait? Why wait until it’s too late to realize these things matter?

When I point this out to people, their mortal haze sometimes makes their minds try to find the list of things dying people regret, and then figure out how to attend to each of them.

This is more of the same madness. More numbness, more self-forcing, more machinery.

The point is that there’s a clarity. We already know what matters.

When touching the fresh grave of a loved one, there’s a realness. It’s extremely vivid. The stories can’t matter anymore. The pain is too naked, reality too real.

It already matters this way.

What’s devastated in those moments of grief is precisely what lets us feel the truth right now.

We can already tell.

Desperation doesn’t help

I want to scream and cry when I feel what people do with this. When they just barely touch it.

The fear of AI turns into panic and depression and coercive manipulation. Less Wrong isn’t a home of wholesomeness.

I don’t want you to take what I’m saying here as a battle cry.

Or if it is, it’s to rescue the heart. Not to fight something out there.

I don’t know what’s required for us to remember what matters. But I keep seeing folk use passionate effort as fuel to fix what’s wrong as a reprieve from the heartache. Or using terror instead of heartbreak and courage.

Please, just listen. Help us pray.

Why engineer the mind?

Nothing matters more than what matters most.

And we can tell.

That’s a deep law.

I want us to answer the call to what matters. To hold dear what is truly precious to us.

I have clear guesses about why we don’t. They’re not complete, but I think they’re pretty key.

I think we forget in part because our minds became more powerful than we realized. By some mystery, we were graced with these brilliant tools — but we didn’t (and still don’t) understand how they work.

So we didn’t fully inhabit these minds.

And so other things took up residence instead. Used our minds for their own purposes.

I’ve been calling those other things “memes”.

Those things have been using us to build their world. Their world sort of tolerates us, like a dairy farm tolerates cows, because they still need us. But it’s not designed for us to flourish — because our flourishing would actually be harmful to many of them.

If we want this to be our world, we have to say “No more.”

We have to learn how to inhabit our minds, and set very clear boundaries with the squatters: they can stay, and will even be fed and supported, but only to the extent that we can tell they serve what truly matters.

Everything I’ve said in this document is with an eye to this aim.

The whole thing spells out a strategy. A sketch of what could become a plan.

But this — this dear heartfelt prayer, this wish for us to please take death and what matters seriously — this is the problem I care about.

Please take what I’ve said here as a consideration. Something to stir clarity, and to help us more clearly articulate the problem.

Not as something to champion.

But as a way to help us all figure it out together.