Death is always close to us; if we don’t breathe for an extended period of time, we’ll die; if you get shot, you’re dead; if a tree falls on you, it is highly likely you’ll die, etc. That begs the question: if death wasn’t always there, then would there be life? In a way, without death, there is no meaning to life because you would have forever to do whatever you wanted, and at some point everything would be boring, and I don’t mean that kind of boring when you are laying in bed, and you can’t go do anything because you’re grounded or something. I’m talking about the kind of boring where you’ve literally done everything you could and couldn’t do until it got boring. 

This article is about death and life and whether life has meaning without death and if death has meaning without life. Taking that into consideration, my first question was, does life have meaning without death? Some of my interviewee’s thought that life would have no meaning without death, but others thought that even if you were immortal, if you did enough good things, that would be memorable; life would have meaning because you could watch how something you did could affect people for a long time in the future. Noah Gold (Athletic Director of Mendocino High School) said, “I think that they are as entwined as they can be; you cannot have one without the other. If death is inevitable, then life better have some meaning. If we were immortal beings, then life could be pretty pointless.” Jack Herbert-Graves said, “I feel like you can still find meaningful things to do in life, but then comes the question that if you’re never going to die, you can wait however long to do things. But if you’re immortal, I still feel like you can do good things that will last as long as you can.”

I also wanted to know if our mortality affects our morals. This was my second question, and I had very different answers from the interviewees, two of them saying that it doesn’t while one of them said that it could. Noah said, “Let’s put it this way, if I know I only have one lifetime I wouldn’t want to be incarcerated or locked up where I couldn’t appreciate it.” But he also had another view to the question of which was “If you want to play the game that I’m immortal, well then I think that morality could become gray in the sense that if you’ve been on the planet 200 years, playing it safe for that long might get boring, and because your immortal, I could see how you might morally do things that you otherwise would never do because of boredom.” Ozzie Koubek said, “I feel like it wouldn’t change your moral compass; I mean it’s kind of hard to imagine a society where no one’s dead because you can’t comprehend it. It’s kind of a weird thing to imagine as a mortal being immortal.” Even if we were immortal, the fact of it is that you will probably keep your moral compass and since everyone wouldn’t age with you, so everyone was immortal, it would be easier to cope with the fact that you can’t die because you’ll never be alone.

My last and most important question is, do you fear death? And they all agreed that they fear death. I think Noah Gold had a very personal answer to this question and here it is: “Really honestly yes, I am not in a place where I feel as if we are all just beings of light, and when it’s my time to go into the light that I’m gonna be fine with that; I’m still at a point in my life where I try not think about it that much. The idea of not being here anymore I don’t like, and I’m not comfortable dwelling on it. It is scary to me, and I’m hoping that changes.” Noah makes a really good point in what he said, and I think most people can agree with him. I did some research and I came across this little article by Fred Feildman on a Philosophy site that gave me a bit of insight on why most of the population believe in Religion, and it says this “A number of thinkers have suggested that there is some important connection between death and ‘the meaning of life’. A person who thinks that death is not followed by any sort of afterlife may think that death makes life meaningless. Schopenhauer sometimes seems to have expressed this view. Others who believe in God and immortality may see it this way: God placed us here on earth in order that we may either sin or achieve our salvation. If we sin, we are punished with eternal damnation. If we achieve salvation, we are rewarded with eternal bliss. A person who accepts this picture might say that if there were no God and no afterlife in which to receive reward or punishment, then life would be (to quote Shakespeare) ‘a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.’”

In the end I would say that life doesn’t have meaning without death and vice versa, because if you can do everything you want forever then you wouldn’t want to do anything. I do in fact think that our mortality does affect our morals because we don’t have that long to live, so there’s a limitation of “I don’t want to waste my life away in prison or jail, I would rather live my life to the fullest without being confined by walls.” Lastly, I do fear death and as I said I think it’s a fully natural thing to fear it because we have no way of knowing what comes after it, and there’s no way to ever find out until we finally reach the finish line.

Works cited 

• Feldman, Fred. Death and the meaning of life. Death, 1998, doi:10.4324/9780415249126-N011-1. Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Taylor and Francis, https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/death/v-1/sections/death-and-the-meaning-of-life.