Living each day in the delusional social world! It is not just high school, although that may be closest to the archetype…

Vanity of vanities! Everything is vanity! But since when has that stopped any of us?

There’s another question floating around on Quora: Does belief in an afterlife give meaning to the life we live now? Opinions are very divided. Some say of course, if everything ends with death there is no point in anything. Others say that if you have only one short life, it becomes more important, because it is all you have and not just a tiny slice at one end of an infinitely long stretch of time.

Emotionally, I dislike the “life is more important when short” argument. If someone told me: “We should go see this theater piece, it is very poignant because everyone dies at the end – they even shoot all the onlookers” … I would turn it down without hesitation. Poignant or not, if you aren’t around to remember it afterwards, it loses a lot of appeal instantly. But that is not my message today. No.

What I think is that to most of us, most of the time, it doesn’t really matter. We don’t really think about it, and we generally act as if death wasn’t a big deal, except just after some family member dies. After a while, we forget and go on with the usual stuff: Living in the delusional social world, where important things are not talked about and trivial things rock the world.

For the most part, we do what the people around us do, and they are for the most part very nearsighted. So when someone suddenly dies, they realize that their last words were perhaps a pointless quarrel about something small and banal, or that they used to resent this person because of something that now seems just stupid. But right up until yesterday, all of this seemed perfectly reasonable. This does not seem to be very different depending on religion or lack thereof. It is not like atheists usually think: “Well, it was just a piece of meat anyway. Besides I don’t have free will so I couldn’t have done anything different.” They feel the same way as others, for the most part, or at least the sane ones do.

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I also live for a great part in this delusional world, where small things seem bigger than large things, and where I live every day as if it is not the last (which, admittedly, it hasn’t been up until now, long may it last). I have reached the respectable age of 54 years. A few days ago I read that the retirement age in France is 60 years. I cannot imagine retiring in 6 years, but then I don’t live in France either. Here in Norway the retirement age is from 62 to 75, with the pension starting quite low if you are 62 and increasing over time. (Although long-time state employees are guaranteed 66% of their final salary when they retire, if I have understood correctly, even if they retire at 62.) Anyway, I cannot imagine retiring because of old age 8 years from now either. If I pick up a couple more chronic illnesses, perhaps, but they would have to be pretty serious.

But looking at it another way, now that I am this old, does it really make sense to study Japanese and French and mathematics on my free time? Even if I learn them, I will not have that many years to use them. Not to be defeatist or anything, what with most of my relatives living in the range of 80-90 years and staying reasonably sane until shortly before takeoff. But even that is not a lot. Shouldn’t I skip the foreign languages and concentrate on learning about the coming world, the afterlife etc? There are days when I think so, and lately the pendulum has been moving that way again. But it is unlikely to last.

Because even if everything that concerns this life is like smoke on the wind, it still feels real while we are in the middle of it.  Even to me, much of the time.