Fearless Resilience in the Face of Death
Robert Greene’s Recommendations on End of Life
Robert Greene’s Recommendations on End of Life
In 2018, Robert Greene, the famed author of such works as the 48 Laws of Power, The Art of Seduction, and Mastery, as well as others, released his magnum opus which he deemed, The Laws of Human Nature.
The book itself takes a deep dive into 18 “laws” or common psychological hurdles each of us will, at one point or another, see in another individual or ourselves. The book is a fascinating look at the life cycle of a human and the multi-faceted levels for which the psyche holds.
The book ends with a chapter on our own mortality, one of the hardest lessons we can ever learn. Writing over 2,000 years ago, Seneca the Younger, the Roman statesman and philosopher wrote, “It takes the whole of life to learn how to live, and…it takes the whole of life to learn how to die.”
Death is hard to accept. It is painful to lose someone and know you will not see them again. More often than not, the act of dying is more painful than most think. Greene, knowing the challenges individuals face when confronted with death, has devised five ways to prepare ourselves for the loss of others, as well as the inevitable end of ourselves.
Below are five exercises from Greene’s The Laws of Human Nature to help us become more comfortable with our own mortality.
1. Understand, Death Exists and We Should be Aware of It
Greene refers to this as “Make the Awareness Visceral”. Death is scary because it is unknown, possibly the greatest unknown to any of us. It also isn’t seen daily for most people. This adds the flare of the abstract when speaking of death.
Whether we realize it or not, we ask ourselves somewhere in our mind questions like:
-Is there a heaven and a god?
-What comes next?
-What if nothing comes next?
Because death and what comes next is so beyond our comprehension, we turn death into an abstract thought. As Greene writes:
“Out of fear, we convert death into an abstraction, a thought we can entertain now and then or repress. But life is not a thought; it is flesh-and-blood reality, something we feel from within. There is no such thing as life without death.”
So how do we combat this?
By visualizing death and meditating upon it.
“Making death a familiar presence, we understand how short life is and what really should matter to us. We feel a sense of urgency and deeper commitment to our work and relationships.”
By visualizing and becoming more acquainted with death, it loses some of its control over our lives.
2. Life is Shorter Than You Think
Seneca writing 2,000 years before Greene, reminded the world of how short life is in his essay, On the Shortness of Life:
“The present time is extremely short, so much so that some people are unaware of it. For it is always on the move, flowing on in a rush; it ceases before it has come, and does not suffer delay any more than the firmament or the stars, whose unceasing movement never pauses in the same place. And so the preoccupied are concerned only with the present, and it is so short that it cannot be grasped, and even this is stolen from them while they are involved in their many distractions.”
Greene, taking inspiration from Seneca’s writing on the topic, states:
“We must think of our mortality as a kind of continual deadline, giving a similar effect as described above to all our actions in life. We must stop fooling ourselves: we could die tomorrow, and even if we live for another eighty years, it is but a drop in the ocean of the vastness of time, and it passes always more quickly than we imagine. We have to awaken to this reality and make it a continual meditation.”
Perhaps the biggest mystery about our own death is not what comes next, if anything, but when it will come.
Each and every day we wake up with no knowledge to whether or not it is our last day. When we are younger, we push boundaries and explore the world. We do not mind risking our lives more when we are younger than as we age.
Why?
Because as we age, we are more heavily confronted with our own mortality. We become more aware through different signs. We watch our parents and friends age, we see ourselves aging, we switch jobs, we vote for new presidents, we visually see things changing.
With all of this, we can begin to get sad, or we can choose to take advantage of the time we have. We can use that to invigorate us to live life. We realize that there is not time to waste, that we must live while we can.
3. We’re All Mortal
Regardless of how we all feel from time to time, we are in fact mortal and all have an end-date, one which we unfortunately do not know. Everything around us, friends, family, animals, nature, everything, even our own planet, will one day cease to be. The dilemma is very unique, as Greene states:
“We are the only animal truly conscious of our impending morality.”
This is a hard reality that many of us forget or choose to turn a blind eye to. Death is painful. Anyone who has lost a loved one can tell you just how painful it is, physically and emotionally. But this does not mean we should reject, or can reject the notion that we, like everything else, will one day pass. By visualizing that we too will die, we become more comfortable with the discomfort of death. As Greene writes:
“The specter of death is what impels us toward our fellow humans and make us avid for love. Death and love are inextricably interconnected. The ultimate separation and disintegration represented by death drive us to unite and integrate ourselves with each other.”
You can fight and dispute a lot in life. But there is no disputing whether or not we will die. It is a fact we need to accept and embrace, making the most of the time left to us.
Alive Time versus Dead Time:
Robert Greene once taught Ryan Holiday the concept of Alive Time vs Dead Time. As Holiday describes it:
“One is when you sit around, when you wait until things happen to you. The other is when you are in control, when you make every second count, when you are learning and improving and growing.”
This concept is critical to maximizing one’s life. It is a reminder that we do in fact control our lives more than we think. We may not be happy with the manual data entry job we have, but if we can listen to a book or podcast while doing it, we’re maximizing our time.
The concept is about taking back control of our lives via the time we have. We take back control with alive time. We are pulled along through life with dead time.
As Epictetus wrote of the Dichotomy of Control all those years ago:
“Within our power are opinion, aim, desire, aversion, and, in one word, whatever affairs are our own. Beyond our power are body, property, reputation, office, and, in one word, whatever are not properly our own affairs.”
4. Life is Filled with Adversity — Embrace It
Naturally, people try to avoid pain. Whether it be emotional pain such as suffering from the end of a relationship, the passing of an individual, or the end of a job, our lives are all constantly filled with emotional adversity which results in pain. Just like physical pain which we try to avoid, we also attempt to avoid the emotional pains that come with life.
“There is much in life we cannot control, with death as the ultimate example of this.”
But these will come regardless of how much we try to avoid it. The only way to avoid it is to not live, and that is not a worthy life.
“We can accept that life involves pain and suffering, and we use such moments to strengthen ourselves and to learn.”
The Stoics believed that death was outside of our control, that it was a natural progression to life. Much of our pain and frustration comes from the fact that we refuse to admit the hard reality that life is filled with pain.
Epictetus stated that it was not events that hurt us but the opinions we place upon those events.
Epictetus and the Stoics instead turned the pain of adversity on its head and developed the mindset of accepting fate, whatever fate they received, and embraced it. This can be summed up in the idea of amor fati, or acceptance and embracement of fate.
Reminding himself of this, the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote in his Meditations:
“The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”
Buddhists too believed that life begins to ease once we admit to ourselves that it is suffering.
5. Life is Bigger Than Death
Greene recommends that we look at our lives and understand that death is just a “threshold” which we all must cross at one point or another. Death brings clarity to our lives and the time we devote to certain pursuits.
Remembering that death lingers over each and every one of us, it frees us from our day-to-day worries and allows us to look more fully at what we’re doing, looking at our actions, our pursuits, and our troubles.
“We are reminded of our smallness, of what is much vaster and more powerful than our puny will.”
Remembering that death will take us at one time or another, it will
5 Quick Takeaways
It’s hard but through practice we can begin to accept the harsh reality that is death.
Death is a reality to life. Death brings about meaning to our actions. It will, at one point or another, come for all.
Life is shorter than we think so take should take advantage of it and embrace life while we can.
We’re all mortal and therefore too will at one point or another pass away. But by keeping this as a foremost thought, we can use this to motivate our actions and the urgency of those actions. We can reclaim our time through Alive Time versus Dead Time.
Life is filled with pain and adversity. We choose whether or not we will let it break us. By embracing adversities and attempting to learn from them, we can better ourselves and create more ease and growth within our lives.
We are just a small part of a much vaster life. Thinking of our small place in the universe can help to re-center us when frustrated.
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