“I’d rather be dead than sing ‘Satisfaction’ when I’m 45.”
— Mick Jagger. Still singing satisfaction at age 81.
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Stubborn and Patient
I am stubborn and patient. The curse of stubborn and patient people is to die unsatisfied. I don’t want to.
I look to role models to help guide my life, but most stubborn and patient role models are defeated in this regard. I think of Paul Dirac, Leonardo de Vinci, and Albert Einstein who all died unsatisfied in some respect.
“I have offended God and mankind because my work did not reach the quality it should have”.
— Leonardo Da Vinci (MacGuill 2017)“I have nothing to talk about. My life has been a failure.”
— Paul Dirac (Kragh 2016)“I am happy because I want nothing from anyone. I do not care for money. Decorations, titles or distinctions mean nothing to me. I do not crave praise. The only thing that gives me pleasure, apart from my work, my violin and my sailboat, is the appreciation of my fellow workers.”
— Albert Einstein
No one mentions that Einstein’s fellow workers, whose appreciation he valued, shunned him in his later years.
The End of Your Life
Few seriously contemplate the end of their lives. I suppose if most people were asked they’d say, “What’s to think about?” Somber lectures on mortality don’t motivate anyone.
Certainly young people don’t think about the end of their lives. The concept of stepping out doesn’t seem to have much relevance for someone who’s just stepping in.
Now that I’m a therapist, I wonder about teenage depression and teen suicide. These are different for young people than for old people. Depression is a strange thing, and suicidality requires a twisted state of mind. Contemplating one’s mortality is part of growing up, but depression and suicide are rarely educational.
The notion of my own death as a real thing existed for me because I became enthralled with rock climbing without knowing it was dangerous. I had no teachers, mentors, or role models. I had not read any books. Like a baby approaching a road, I just headed up the cliff with a rope around my waist.
A baby would have known better. I somehow thought I was safe because I was there intentionally. I succumbed to my own enthusiasm and the misguided impression that merely trailing a rope behind me ensured my safety.
Unlike my local scrambles, this was a real cliff, 300’ tall. I started thinking clearly when I was a hundred feet off the ground. It was a rude awakening that scared the hell out of me.
The experience instilled and cured me of a fear of heights, both at the same time. After that I loved the dizzying heights. It was the feeling that was key.
I’ve since wondered how that experience changed me. It’s not enough to say that it put the fear of death into me. It changed me in other ways too. It gave me an appreciation of life; an appreciation of the moment.
After that experience there was a barrier between me and my Middle School classmates. There was a barrier between me and most adults. Everyone seemed to live as if they could not see the hour glass of their lives. People who do extreme things tend to be more circumspect.
Outdoor adventure schools foster this kind of thinking, and their advantage lies in this. Something having to do with becoming serious and responsible, though they don’t advertise dancing with death. My experience showed me the emptiness of traditional schooling, as death isn’t on any syllabus.
I didn’t attend any outdoor adventure school, but two of my older friends did. They introduced me to rock climbing but weren’t attracted to it themselves. They also didn’t become outdoor enthusiasts, never had the same near death experiences, and didn’t gain the same appreciation. You have to come close to death to take it seriously.
Close Encounters of the Mortal Kind
Sickness doesn’t do it. Covid-19 collapsed my lungs and put me in intensive care for a week. I was given a dire prognosis, but I didn’t feel close to death and I knew doctors are prone to exaggeration. Feeling death is a compelling experience. The terminally ill have a greater appreciation for life, but just being seriously ill is not enough.
Once you get old you’re not going to play games with your life. Too many people depend on you and you’re attached to your health.
Your chance to appreciate death is when you’re young, uninvested, and immortal. It’s when you’re shaping your life that such knowledge is most useful. Courting danger is a young person’s sport.
Life is one of those things you have to plan for long before you can see the end of it. One of the self-defeating goals of Western culture is making this knowledge hard to get. We have not yet realized that by making life safer, we make people less insightful.
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Becoming Responsible
It’s unclear how one develops responsibility or even what it is. For most people, responsibility is determined by their power and those who depend on them, but neither of these are clear. Most of the stories I hear as a therapist reflect peoples’ irresponsible behavior.
Safe and protected people are neither informed nor proactive. They do stupid things like becoming addicted and electing tyrants. It comes down to taking life seriously, and most people don’t. They may think they do, and you may think you do, but I suspect you don’t.
If you’re a caretaker, you might think your caregiving delimits your responsibility. This seems to be a cultural paradigm so that further discussion is unnecessary. But in a world of greater powers and distant connections there is no clear defining line as to where our power stops.
People who don’t take their lives seriously won’t take responsibility for the lives of others. Responsibility may seem unrelated to satisfaction, but both rely on there being a sense of meaning. You take responsibility because what you’re responsible for means something to you. Similarly, you are satisfied because what you have accomplished is meaningful.
It is ironic that as human civilization becomes more powerful, individuals become more insular and less responsible. This chain of events will lead to continued crises.
Dying Satisfied
Responsibility is the only reliable standard of satisfaction. Dirac and da Vinci were wrong in judging themselves on standards for which they were not responsible. Einstein was also wrong to the extent he struggled with both doing what he felt was meaningful and relying on the appreciation of his colleagues.
If Einstein was responsible for being appreciated, then he should have respected more what he meant to others. And if he was entirely concerned with what was meaningful to himself, he should not have been concerned with what he meant to others. As it was, Einstein’s fellow workers would not have been affected if his life had ended when he was 30.
Turn this inside out and ask, are you responsible for achieving your own satisfaction? Was da Vinci responsible for producing work of satisfying quality? Was Dirac responsible for achieving success according to his own standards? Were either of their standards reasonable? I think not.
The only people I knew who died satisfied were always satisfied. They were satisfied as their lives progressed. One was a Caribbean fisherman and the other a New England community activist. Both were recognized as insightful but neither were celebrities. To be celebrated was contrary to the meaning of the lives these two people led.
These people had short-term goals, not unachievable goals, and they were satisfied at every step. They didn’t need to prove themselves and they didn’t need to succeed at everything. Their success was not a measure of their value.
I worked for Charlie Townes in his astronomy group for 8 months. I didn’t speak much with him during that time, but his easy going interest in everything was obvious.
His positive attitude was like the elephant in the room. No one spoke about it because, it seemed, no one quite understood it. In spite of what he accomplished, we might learn the most from his attitude.
“I feel that very rarely have I done any work in my life. I have a good time. I’m exploring. I’m playing a game, solving puzzles, and having fun, and for some reason people have been willing to pay me for it. Officially, I was supposed to retire years ago, but retire from what?”
— Charles H. Townes (Carrier 2007), inventor of the laser.“Many people don’t realize that science basically involves assumptions and faith…We must make the best assumptions we can envisage, and have faith.”
— Charles H. Townes (2005)
It seems that dying satisfied means living satisfied. Any dissatisfaction you harbor now will be with you at the end.
References
Carrier, Scott (2007 Jan 29). “Charles H. Townes: What I’ve Learned.” Esquire. Retrieved from https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/interviews/a111/esq1201-dec-wil/
Kragh, Helge (2016). Simply Dirac. Simply Charly. Retrieved from https://pressbooks.pub/simplydirac/chapter/diracs-legacy/
MacGuill, Dan (2017 Nov 22). “Are These Leonardo Da Vinci’s Surprising Last Words?” Snopes.com. Retrieved from https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/da-vinci-last-words/
Townes, C. H. (2005 Mar 9). “Press Conference Statement by Prof. Charles Townes.” TempletonPrize.org. Retrieved from https://www.templetonprize.org/laureate-sub/townes-press-conference-statement/
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