What is being Alive?

A thought on what it means to be alive from death's perspective.

If you could live forever, what would you do?

Since trying to survive and maintaining your body is not a priority in this case, you will probably try to do things you would normally not do - like an adventure or sports activity that can no longer kill you - like eating all the delicious things in the world, as much as you can - like watching and reading everything that you have ever wanted - like traveling to all the possible places you have ever wanted - but for how long will it satisfy you?

Sooner or later you are bound to get bored, and every sunset you see will be lesser and lesser magical each time.

Then what will you do? Perhaps you will try to find new things and quirks that you never thought of before. But for how long can a new thing remain new?

You will certainly be living for eternity but what will make you feel alive?

These questions came to me while watching the sitcom “Ghosts”, where a bunch of ghosts are just lingering around, having lost interest in all things around them. For them, the only entertainment is the couple who lives in that house now. Luckily they can interact with the wife, so that gives them an outlet for conversation, and that’s how the show progresses. The moments shown in the show where the ghosts actually seemed to live were very human and heart-warming moments, where they discover something about their dead or living family or feel like they have found a new family out of the current ghosts and the living couple situation.

It seems like human relationships are the ones that keep them alive even as a ghost.

So our relationships with other people are what makes us worthy of being called alive. Or is it something more?

The ghosts seemed to regret a lot about the things - things they could not do or miss not doing more of. It seems like they are still dwelling on the past, which aptly makes them a ghost. So maybe being alive is something opposite of that. It is living life day by day and doing what seems right at the moment.

Living every moment as it comes, and not dwelling over what could have been, keeps us alive. Right?

There is one problem - it seems slightly bookish and does not tell us how to be alive. Then let’s try to define the opposite of being alive - death. What is death? It is like a peaceful long sleep. As pleasant as that sounds, we don’t want to die. What stops us from dying or preventing ourselves from dying is the fear of it. Once we get over the fear and the pain, it seems very peaceful. In fact, Sadhguru says in his book Death, that life and death are intertwined, you live as you take a breath in and die as you let it out. So simple yet so true that it is hard to ignore. Death and Life are with us all the time, the only problem is that we involve ourselves so much with Life that we forget that Death is there too. It will come to all of us one day, and yet we choose to ignore it as if it's something that happens to other people, not me.

What does death teach us about being alive? That it is not permanent, and probably a punishment if it becomes permanent. The most comfortable life imaginable will become a prison for you once you have to live it forever. There are no ups without downs. It just becomes a plain never-ending vast surface.

Hence, I do not see a point in people selling this idea of living forever. The goal, if any, should maybe to leave this life as peacefully as possible with no regrets. If one lives with the realization that death will happen to us, and we cannot possibly know when, we might feel more alive. This happens in movies all the time, where there is a terminally ill person, starting to live their best life, once they get to know they are going to die. Why do we need such reminders?

Being alive is living with the possibility of death.

If death comes today, at this time, I should be ok to leave it all behind. Surely, it might be sad and untimely, for your friends and relatives, but will you really feel all that after you die? Who is to say? But we do know that we will live the current day and current moment the best we can if we stop worrying about living forever.

I would like to mention one of the episodes of Ghosts sitcom - S2E4 "The Tree". The serious notes of this episode talk about how the death of a tree does not mean its end, it provides a chance and space for new trees to sprout in its place. Essentially, your body dying means that something else will take place of it. It will all eventually end, but something new will come and the cycle will repeat. That is life and death happening together at the same time, and tying everything together.

So am I Alive?

The problem with human civilization is that we are not migratory like birds, that change their place as the weather changes. We have to live in one place and plan everything in order to survive. At first, it was only about planning for the coming winter, but it quickly changed to planning winters ahead, then winters that your children will face, and their children will face. Making it certain that life goes on forever through our offspring might be evolutionary, but the civilizational constructs we built around it certainly changed the scale at which we think about it.

Hence we plan, and we must plan for our next paycheck, and the one after that, and the one after 10 years, and the one after we reach 80 years of age. Although we can never be certain of how long we will live, we have to be certain of something - that if we survive our life should be at its best. So far so good, I do not have any problems with planning. However, it comes at the cost of the present, and when the cost starts scrapping away too much of the present, it just seems foolish.

Why are you giving away your present doing a job you don’t like to buy a piece of technology that is just a slightly upgraded version of the current one you have? When you finally get it, will it be worth the conversation you missed with your family or the time you could not give for that hobby? If you are happy with it, then there are no issues, but people rarely are. We have made our struggles so much larger in scale striving to live a life larger than us, while we remain minuscule on the scale of time. Do we really need that life? Does it make us feel more alive or more dead? These are the questions I feel everyone needs to ask themselves and answer for themselves.

In this social media world, we rely a lot on others to tell us what to do - from making coffee the right way to dealing with our emotions the right way. We have got AI telling us even how to write and express ourselves. That is one of the reasons that I am writing now without any AI writing help. It is bad enough that we are reliant on it for so many things, there needs to be something that lets us be who we are, be original, be alive. Life cannot be about doing everything to impress someone or the other, it has to be what you want to accomplish as a human being. It cannot be measured in terms of money or social status, it has to be something that matters to you, something that is you, something that makes you feel alive. Nobody can tell you what it is. Maybe you will spend your whole life trying to find it. Maybe you will live trying to find it, and death will come more peacefully. The reason why this is difficult to grasp as a concept is that is brings a sense of uncertainty in our lives. Some people have more appetite for it and some have less. But if we trust our evolutionary process there must be some reason that this appetite has survived. Maybe it is this appetite keeping us alive.