Life’s Horizon, The Universal Endpoint, & Death vs Dying
Wednesday Wisdoms for October 30, 2024
Welcome to Wednesday Wisdom, our 3x3 Newsletter where I distill worldly advice for better living with 3 quotes, 3 observations, and 3 questions.
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Life’s Horizon
🤨 Quote
“A living thing can be healthy, strong, and fruitful only when bounded by a horizon.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
Source: In Emergency, Break Glass
Observation 🧐
Life without death limits our ability to grasp reality.
It seems counter-intuitive at times that we would be able to provide more meaning to life because of its finite nature instead of an infinite existence.
But what the limit of our lives does is act like a flashlight in the dark, it focuses our lives and attention on things that we choose to focus on.
In so doing, these are the things that create value, that matter to us. There’s endless possibility in life, and without a horizon for our lives, we’d never be able to organize ourselves. Without this, there would be no stakes, there would just be endless exploration without value. Eventually the things we believed had value would fade and we’d just move on, always in search of something new.
As Saul Bellow once wrote, “Death is the dark backing that a mirror needs if we are able to see anything.”
Death is the backdrop we need in order to prioritize our lives.
🤔 Question
By knowing all life has a horizon, how do you prioritize your life?
The Universal Endpoint
🤨 Quote
“Just as age follows youth, so death follows age. Whoever doesn't want to die, doesn't want to live. Life is granted with death as its limitation; it's the universal endpoint.”
Seneca
Source: Moral Letter 30
Observation 🧐
What is it about death that we fear the most?
For many of us, we fear the unknown of it. We know our lives and the world around us. We fear losing what we know.
But at the same time, as Marcus Aurelius pointed out, death may very well be like before birth—nothingness, an unknown, something bc that we have no knowledge of and therefore shouldn’t fear.
Seneca takes a different approach.
“To fear it [death] is madness, since fear is for things we're unsure of; certainties are merely awaited. Death's compulsion is both fair and unopposed, and who can complain of sharing a condition that no one does not share?”
Because death is a universal action, because no one has ever escaped it, there is no point in fearing it because you know it will occur.
It is an inevitable waiting to be accepted.
We all share the same fate, and in Seneca’s eyes, should therefore not fear what we’re all going to experience.
🤔 Question
What scares you most about death?
Beneath the paywall this week we explore the wisdom of Christopher Ryan. Click below to support and get access.