What's wrong with dying? | Lesley Hazleton | TEDxSeattle

The answer might seem simple, but in the hands of Lesley Hazleton the question takes us on a surprisingly humorous and thought-provoking journey into what it would actually mean to live forever. And whether we’d truly want to. A frequent TED.com speaker and 'Accidental Theologist,' Hazleton uses wit and wisdom to challenge our ideas not only about death, but about what it is to live well.

Lesley Hazleton has traced the roots of conflict in several books, including compelling "flesh-and-blood" biographies of Muhammad and Mary, and casts "an agnostic eye on politics, religion, and existence" on her blog, AccidentalTheologist.com. Her newest book, Agnostic: A Spirited Manifesto, celebrates the agnostic stance as "rising above the flat two-dimensional line of belief/unbelief, creating new possibilities for how we think about being in the world." In it, she explores what we mean by the search for meaning, invokes the humbling perspective of infinity and reconsiders what we talk about when we talk about soul.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx

So, I know most people
are terrified of death,

but I’m terrified of cocktail parties.

(Laughter)

I'm not much good
at the usual social chatter,

so if you put a couple
of drinks inside me,

there's no knowing
what I might come out with.

(Laughter)

Like what happened at one such event,

halfway into a second martini.

I got into a conversation

with an ardent fan
of the "end to aging" movement -

you know, the vision
of a radically enhanced life span

big with Silicon Valley billionaires
who think they should never die.

One of them was actually
boasting at the time

that he was taking
150 nutritional supplements a day

to ward off death -

an activity that must have consumed
the better part of an hour,

let alone the lining of a stomach.

(Laughter)

The guy I was talking with

didn't seem to think
there was anything weird about this.

He was about half my age -

less than half, in fact.

As his death was clearly more of
an imminent reality for me than for him,

he made the mistake of assuming
that I'd be living in mortal fear of it.

He seemed quite shocked that I wasn't.

In fact, he seemed to take my
equanimity of the prospect

as an admission of some kind
of failure on my part.

“How can you accept limits
that don't have to be there?" he said.

"Biotechnology could mean an end to aging;

it could even mean
an end to death itself."

And that’s when it came out.

(Laughter)

"But what's wrong with dying?" I said.

The question startled him into silence,

and the truth is it startled me too.

I'd never thought to ask
this specific question before.

I never put it quite so bluntly,

but now that it was out there -

hovering in the alcoholic
fumes between us -

(Laughter)

it seemed to cut
to the heart of the matter

because it's taken for granted
that we're all afraid of death.

Ask people if they are -

and I have asked,

though not usually at parties -

and most would say, "Yes, of course!"

and look like they'd rather be
anywhere but in the same room as you.

There was psychologist William James,

who called death "the evil background,"

and "the worm at the core
of human aspirations to happiness."

Or with poet Philip Larkin,

who was very good
at worms at the core of things

and wrote of lying awake in terror

of what he called
the "total emptiness forever."

But it turns out, I’m as bad
at things taken for granted

as I am at cocktail parties.

When something seems so obvious
it's beyond question,

that's when I tend to start questioning;

because what we take for granted

may really be what we haven't taken
the time to think through.

I guess you could say

I haven't had much option but to think
through the matter of my own death

since I've come pretty close to it
a number of times.

In the Middle-East, I was shot at
on a journalistic assignment,

bombed as a civilian,

threatened by right-wing thugs.

But the closest I've come
was entirely my own doing.

I lost control of a car

on turn three of a race track
in the American Midwest,

and with what seemed immense slowness

rolled over,

and over, and - yes - over again.

And as I rolled, a single sentence
reverberated in my mind,

like some kind of mantra.

"This", I kept thinking,
"is a really stupid way to die."

(Laughter)

My first reaction

when the car came to a stop
and I found myself still alive

was amazement,

followed by a surge of gratitude

to whoever it was
who invented the crash helmet.

(Laughter)

So, it only occurred to me later to ask,

"What exactly would have been
so stupid about dying this way?"

I mean, what might I consider
an intelligent way to die?

(Laughter)

Why was I even asking
such a question in the first place?

To which my only answer was:
intellectual vanity.

I mean, surely I was
far too intelligent to die stupidly.

(Laughter)

It seems that not only is my life
immensely significant to me,

but so too is my death -

even though if I was dead,

I wouldn’t be around to appreciate
the significance of that fact.

In fact, I won't be around
to appreciate anything at all,

which makes it a good thing
I'm not religious;

because then, apparently,
I would be around

in something called "the afterlife."

And this is, to put it mildly,
a sobering thought to live with;

since the idea is not only
that you never really die,

but that what you do in this life

determines your fate
in a hypothetical next one.

In other words,
the life you're actually living

has no intrinsic value in and of itself;

or actually, not in other words

but in the words of motivational
mega-pastor Rick Warren;

he of The Purpose Driven Life.

"Earth," he says -

and I'm not making this up -

"Earth is the staging area, the preschool,
the tryout for your life in eternity."

Life as a practice session?

I mean, that's one way
to utterly trivialize it.

And here’s another;

because what’s on offer from
the Silicon Valley apostles of immortality

really comes down to a secular
version of the same thing.

Even if for them you stay in your body

instead of evaporating
into some kind of disembodied state.

And so, we have
Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel

saying - and I quote -

"If people think they're going to die,
it's demotivating."

(Laughter)

There's more!

(Laughter)

"The idea of immortality,"
he says, "is motivational."

As one of those people absurd enough
to imagine she's going to die,

I find Thiel's glibness astonishing.

He reduces human existence
to the language of corporate management,

to motivational path.

He seems to think our lives are
invalidated by the fact that we'll die,

and he assumes that life
is a matter of what else but metrics;

its value determined by something
as easy to calculate as years.

In Thiel's world,
what gets us up in the morning

is not the enjoyment of the life
we're actually living,

but the hope that we'll go on
getting up in the morning forever.

I for one can think of
few things more depressing.

(Laughter)

(Applause)

Thiel's dream is my nightmare.

(Laughter)

And if you think about it a moment,

it might turn out to be yours too.

Let's leave aside
practical considerations,

like who can possibly
afford to live forever.

I mean, I guess that might be
less of a consideration

if you are a billionaire,
but only slightly less,

because any number of billions of dollars

is still barely a drop
in the financial ocean of eternity.

Instead, I'd ask you to think
what it might mean to live forever,

what it would be like
to just keep on going,

like that pink toy rabbit
in the old commercial for batteries,

banging away on its tin drum.

(Laughter)

And in fact, we do have some idea
of what it would be like.

It's there in the way we talk.

When we say we sat through a lecture

that just went on and on
like it would never end,

or we complain of incessant chatter,

or describe a bad movie as interminable.

Consciously or not,
we realize that without an end,

life would become a flat,
featureless expanse:

just one thing after another,
literally ad infinitum.

Endlessness would suck
the vitality out of existence,

eviscerated of meaning.

It would leave us with that sense
of tedium and pointlessness

that's the hallmark of chronic depression.

So the last thing I'd ever want
is to never die.

I have zero desire to live forever,

because immortality is not
something devoutly to be wished for,

on the contrary: it's a curse.

Think of Greek myth,

where Sisyphus is forever
rolling his boulder uphill,

never to reach the top.

Or of ghost and vampire stories,

where the walking dead are condemned
to spectral half lives without end.

Or even of a comic book
hero like Superman,

destined never to have
a regular Clark Kent life;

never to live, love and die
like a normal human being.

We need endings

because the most
basic ending of all is built into us:

our ability to die,

our mortality,

is a defining part
of what it is to be human.

We are finite beings within infinity,

and if we are alive to this,

it sharpens our appreciation
of the fact that we exist,

gives new depth to the idea
of life as a journey.

So, my mortality does not negate meaning,

it creates meaning.

It's what wakes me up to life.

It's what says,

"Appreciate it!

Don't take it for granted!

Write the next book!

Laugh with your friends!

Go explore!

Eat another dozen oysters!"

(Laughter)

Because it's not how long
I live that matters;

it's how I live,

and I intend to do it well -

to the end.

Thank you!

(Applause)