Weekly Review Issue No.9
On death anxiety, exotic green comets and being reminded of the cosmic scale of things
Hello! Welcome back to another Review! If you are new, welcome. If after reading this, you think someone else might enjoy it, please feel free to share it!
This week for me
The optometrist saga continues!
I mention it again because I thought it was a poignant, but ultimately unimportant example of how we tend to Blindly Trusting Professionals, even though you feel in your self you are right.
So what happened was, after getting a new prescription and contact lenses, I proceeded to have a terrible week of blurry eyesight in my right eye. Something had happened! Did I damage it? What’s going on?
When I went back for a follow-up, I asked: this right eye is lazy I understand that, but my vision has gotten worse, whats going on?
“Well it will be worse, it’s lazy” they said.
I had to kind of accept that, but it didn’t feel right at all. We continued on, that was that. Nothing more to say.
Except when it came to writing up the prescription, it turned out that when they had provided me with sample lenses to try, they had put the wrong stickers on the lenses. I was wearing my left lens in my right eye! 😵💫
No wonder I couldn’t see right. I wasn’t making it up. I wasn’t being sensitive to a background problem. This was a significant problem.
Profuse apologies ensued and everything was corrected as normal. But it left a question: why do we doubt ourselves in the presence of a professional? Why does it sometimes take herculean confidence to say, no sorry that’s not right, you’re wrong here.
Answers on a postcard/comment section please! 📨
Onto the links!
Research on the edges
👴🏼 Death Anxiety across the Adult Years: An Examination of Age and Gender Effects
The age effect presents a paradox: Why should young people, with their whole lives ahead of them, be overly concerned about death but older individuals, much closer to the end of their lives, express less anxiety? Most previous accounts of the age effect have focused on declining death concern among the elderly. Thus Kastenbaum suggested that “People become less anxious [with age] because (a) death does not threaten as many of our values, and/or (b) there is a continued developmental process through which we ‘come to terms’ with mortality”. According to Kastenbaum, coming to terms with death may represent a “final task” of psychological development.
This is a very interesting paper that tries to unpick the effects that death anxiety has on men and women. So much to unpack, and there is never one thing really, which for me makes for interesting exploration! Let’s take the plural over the simplistic!
🫣 A special way of being afraid
Larkin identifies this dread of the ‘‘total emptiness forever’’ as ‘‘a special way of being afraid’’. It is ‘‘special’’ in part because it transcends any and all efforts to specify precisely what particular aspects of our lives and our unrealised possibilities—‘‘the good not used, the love not given,’’ etc.—are being lost. These unrealised possibilities are certainly also targets of remorse, regret and perhaps even fear. But the fear of non-existence—of not being anywhere—stands alone as something less concrete and, for Larkin anyway, more terrible.
A good, personal philosophical exploration of the fear of non-existence. Something I think comes up a lot for people when you start to dig into their fears of dying. Facing the prospect of total annihilation is a pretty good reason for not wanting to talk about death. So this is good to unpack.
💫 Exotic green comet not seen since stone age returns to skies above Earth
Discovered last March by astronomers at the Zwicky Transient Facility at the Palomar Observatory in California, comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) was calculated to orbit the sun every 50,000 years, meaning it last tore past our home planet in the stone age.
Every once in a while the Guardian, or other newspaper will write a short piece on something that just firmly puts everything we do back into its place. There is so much coverage of the one-in-hundred year droughts, or the changes to the climate that haven’t happened since however-many-hundreds-of-thousands-of-years. So when you read something like this, that we’re all just floating through space slowly, it can be reassuring in a way. It reminds me of the fact that between the time that Pluto was discovered as the ninth planet in 1930 and was downgraded out of the classification as a planet in 2006, it hadn’t even completed one orbit of the Sun…
🪐 On Cosmic Heroism: Variations on Thoughts from Ernest Becker’s Book: The Denial of Death
Human beings have two possibilities from which to choose: Either this organic world teeming with life has positive meaning or it has negative meaning. We have before us hope or hopelessness, optimism or pessimism. Just how we choose to view the universe and our role in it is critically germane. If you understand anything at all from this essay, understand this: The fact of death cannot be altered by any security-promising system in the world, neither by science, nor by psychology, nor by institutional religion. For us to cope with death, even to see death as a natural good, we will be obliged to reach beyond the limits of human reason into the metaphysics of the unknowable, or so Becker writes, not as a theologian but as a scientist of human behavior. As complicated and obscure as this thought may strike you, if we do not transfer to, or place our trust in, ultimate and mysterious goodness, we have little left but despair, fear, and pessimism.
Tying the existential and the cosmic together then is this fantastic piece on Ernest Becker, who wrote the Denial of Death,probably the most influential book in my ‘death career’. Quite meaty but worth reading.
🎧 Listen
A playlist from me this week. One track from a previously recommended album, but otherwise a selection of things I’ve been listening to in January.
Quite interesting to have two tracks of a similar vibe - Abakus (from 2011) next to William Orbit (from 1993). I think generally doing revival sounds is not a very good idea, but sometimes its acceptable.
🤔 Last thought
See you next time. Thanks for reading ☺️
“We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.”