The days have stretched from post to post, and the nights are worse.

No doubts remain: I've a problem. When my brain becomes conundrum occupied and cannot find the requisite solution or even a semi-viable explanation on which to base the next step of attack... progress on other endeavors slows to a trickle. My fiction consumption rises, perhaps because I'm casting about for answers, but little else is accomplished.

My brain's been engaged in mono-focus overdrive these last few weeks.

The question: Death is the single most unifying experience of humanity. Why do we hesitate to bring our combined effort and will to bear upon it?

I think of my grandparents, my friend Jake's father, my grade-school English teacher Mr. Hafner, Dwayne Goettel, John Balance, Robert Moog, Francis Bacon, Linus Pauling, Susan Sontag, Robert Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon, Roger Zelazny... losses to the world, their ongoing, living influences absent from our collective future. All those patterns of existence stilled, stopped. Then there's you, and there's me. How do we let this continue?

I'm at a loss to explain why we still have not placed death's eradication at the top of our priorities. How is it trumped by making war, by hoarding gold, by pointless labor for pointless ends, by the same circles our feet have trod for tens of thousands of years?

Is our rut so deep we can see nothing but the sides of the pit we walk in?

Part of what we're witnessing is the tail-end of a battle between religion and science. Religion was our best prior attempt at minimizing death and its impact. We didn't have the tools to destroy death, but we had highly evolved human pliability of mind to believe death into the fiction of a heavenly state. Now our great golem walks with word upon tongue, religion a potent foe of the lengthening of our spans. There's a lesson here: just believing isn't the same as doing the work.

One could argue everything we see as human culture is a product of our reaction to death, and there may be some truth in this position, for without awareness of our eventual demise we would likely live in vastly different fashion. Knowledge of certain death drives short-term planning. It channels effort into areas of immediate gain and damns the consequences because you won't be around to worry about them. Our reaction to death creates waste and unsustainability. In our haste to live, we aid and abet death in its task.

Death is our great nemesis, the villain of the story. Here, in modernity, we have the tools to defeat it.

Why do we keep giving it the starring role?

Related: Culture Of Life