In the space of a few short weeks, the Covid-19 outbreak has flipped our way of life on its head. An unfeeling, unconscious, and invisible pathogen has ruthlessly undermined the large-scale human cooperative effort that we call modern globalized society.
Countries closed their borders, airplanes stopped flying, bars and restaurants shut, and millions of people lost their jobs. “Social distancing” and “self-isolation” rapidly entered into our lexicon, even though most of us had never used those terms four weeks ago. Over a third of the world is on lockdown, as of writing.
But perhaps the most significant change of all is that coronavirus has led so many of us to confront our own mortality head-on. This is a unique opportunity to make good of a really shitty situation.
The Immortality Project
It was Ernest Becker who first brought the idea prominently into contemporary mainstream thought that everything we do as humans collectively and individually, is underpinned by the terror of our own death. This idea is not new, but modern psychology somewhat neglected it before Becker.
In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Denial of Death, Becker postulates that humans create shared cultural worldviews and projects of personal significance to give our lives a sense of order and meaning. We do this to escape the fear of our own deaths. Becker calls these our immortality projects, and they apply at both the individual and societal level.
An immortality project is something we create or become a part of that is bigger than us or we think will outlast our own lives on earth. Examples are:
- Creating works of art
- Performing scientific research
- Passing on our genes
- Participating in religious practices
- Doing work we find meaningful
- Paying taxes to help run the country
- Contributing to society through work, volunteering, sports, etc
- Being part of a functioning society and/or nation
- Accumulating wealth that we can pass on
The coronavirus pandemic has rapidly and ruthlessly exposed the utter fragility of the human societal constructs that we cling to in order to escape the terror of death. Not since World War 2 has such a large chunk of the planet been confronted with their mortality simultaneously.
Everyday activities that imbued our lives with a sense of order and meaning have ground to a halt. Many of us aren’t working. Governments have imposed widespread restrictions on what we can do. We watch news reports of overwhelmed hospitals and see people of all ages succumbing to this virus. Order has quickly turned to chaos. Immortality projects are collapsing.
There Was Never Any Permanence
By creating shared cultural constructs and feeling like we’re personally contributing to them, we play a psychological trick to convince ourselves we’re doing something permanent in life.
These constructs are now in doubt and many of our personal contributions halted. The societal game we were playing is on pause. With a contagious, dangerous viral illness on the loose, the deep existential fear of death faces all of us.
Anyone familiar with Buddhist philosophy will tell you there was never any permanence in life to begin with. Accepting the flux of life is arguably the whole point of walking the Buddhist path.
The British writer and lecturer Alan Watts, who is best known for popularizing Eastern philosophy in the Western world, summed up the impermanence of life brilliantly in his book, The Wisdom of Insecurity:
Man seems to be unable to live without myth, without the belief that the routine and drudgery, the pain and fear of this life have some meaning and goal in the future. These myths give the individual a certain sense of meaning by making him part of a vast social effort, in which he loses something of his own emptiness. But you cannot understand life and its mysteries as long as you try to grasp it. Indeed, you cannot grasp it, just as you cannot walk off with a river in a bucket.
The subtitle of Watts’ book is “A Message for an Age of Anxiety”. It was written in 1951 when the Cold War brought about severe anxiety at a societal level due to escalating tensions and the threat of nuclear warfare between global superpowers.
Almost 70 years later, ‘an age of anxiety’ is exactly how you’d sum up what the world is going through with the coronavirus pandemic.
How to Accept Our Mortality
Confronted daily with the reality-check that is the fact of our own impermanence and mortality, is there a way to make good of this situation? How can we accept our mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic?
I don’t have all the answers, but here are some suggestions:
- Accept flux as an inextricable part of existence — no living thing, no relationship, no government, no society stays the same. Make peace with the fact that living means changing.
- See the good side of flux— life wouldn’t have evolved without changing conditions, scientific advancements wouldn’t be possible without change, reading the article on the Internet is the result of flux. Crisp autumn mornings, long summer evenings, comfy winter nights in front of the fire-they are all made possible because of change.
- Engage with the present — the present moment is all we really ever experience. Many of the societal constructs we create and participate in depend on thinking about and planning for the future. Reframe your attention to engage much more with the present and your mortality becomes less of a problem.
- Practice self-inquiry —spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle says “the secret of life is to die before you die”. What he meant was to investigate the nature of your own consciousness and see what you find out. You don’t have to like Eckhart Tolle or be religious to practice self-inquiry. Ask yourself who you really are underneath the ego—the set of images and thoughts you construct to give you, as a physical organism, some meaning in this world. You might be surprised at what you find out.