The 50th Law (with 50 Cent)

Particular stimuli will bring back associations with the person who has
died. This intensity of emotion will fade, but each time we are
reminded of the person we have lost, a small portion of that intensity
will return.
If we consider death as the crossing of a threshold that terrifies us
in general, the experiences enumerated above are intimations of our
own death in smaller doses. Separating from people we know, traveling
in a strange land, clearly entering some new phase of life, all involve
changes that cause us to look back at the past as if a part of us has died.
In such moments, and during the more intense forms of grief from
actual deaths, we notice a heightening of the senses and a deepening of
our emotions. Thoughts of a different order come to us. We are more
attentive. We can say that our experience of life is qualitatively
different and charged, as if we temporarily became someone else. Of
course, this alteration in our thinking, feeling, and senses will be

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strongest if we ourselves survive a brush with death. Nothing seems
the same after such an experience.
Let us call this the paradoxical death effect—these moments and
encounters have the paradoxical result of making us feel more awake
and alive. We can explain the paradoxical effect in the following way.
For us humans, death is a source not only of fear but also of
awkwardness. We are the only animal truly conscious of our
impending mortality. In general, we owe our power as a species to our
ability to think and reflect. But in this particular case, our thinking
brings us nothing but misery. All we can see is the physical pain
involved in dying, the separation from loved ones, and the uncertainty
as to when such a moment might arrive. We do what we can to avoid
the thought, to distract ourselves from the reality, but the awareness of
death lies in the back of our minds and can never be completely
shaken.
Feeling the unconscious impulse to somehow soften the blow of our
awareness, our earliest ancestors created a world of spirits, gods, and
some concept of the afterlife. The belief in the afterlife helped mitigate
the fear of death and even give it some appealing aspects. It could not
eliminate the anxiety of separating from loved ones or lessen the
physical pain involved, but it offered a profound psychological
compensation for the anxieties we seemingly cannot shake. This effect
was fortified by all of the elaborate and pleasing rituals that
surrounded the passage to death.
In the world today, our growing reasoning powers and knowledge of
science have only made our awkwardness worse. Many of us can no
longer believe in the concept of the afterlife with any conviction, but we
are left with no compensations, with only the stark reality confronting
us. We might try to put a brave face on this, to pretend we can accept
this reality as adults, but we cannot erase our elemental fears so easily.
In the course of a few hundred years of this change in our awareness,
we cannot suddenly transform one of the deepest parts of our nature,
our fear of death. And so what we do instead of creating belief systems
such as an afterlife is to rely on denial, repressing the awareness of
death as much as possible. We do so in several ways.
In the past, death was a daily and visceral presence in cities and
towns, something hard to escape. By a certain age, most people had
seen firsthand the deaths of others. Today, in many parts of the world,

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we have made death largely invisible, something that occurs only in
hospitals. (We have done something similar to the animals that we
eat.) We can pass through most of life without ever physically
witnessing what happens. This gives a rather unreal aspect to what is
so profoundly a part of life. This unreality is enhanced in the
entertainment we consume, in which death is made to seem rather
cartoonish, with dozens of people dying violent deaths without any
attendant emotion except excitement at the imagery on the screen.
This reveals how deep the need is to repress the awareness and
desensitize ourselves to the fear.
Furthermore, we have recently come to venerate youth, to create a
virtual cult around it. Objects that have aged, films from the past
unconsciously remind us of the shortness of life and the fate that
awaits us. We find ways to avoid them, to surround ourselves with
what is new, fresh, and trending. Some people have even come to
entertain the idea that through technology we can somehow overcome
death itself, the ultimate in human denial. In general, technology gives
us the feeling that we have such godlike powers that we can prolong
life and ignore the reality for quite a long time. In this sense, we are no
stronger than our most primitive ancestors. We have simply found new
ways to delude ourselves.
As a corollary to all this, we find hardly anyone willing to discuss
the subject as a personal reality we all face, and how we might manage
it in a healthier manner. The subject is simply taboo. And by a law of
human nature, when we go so far in our denial, the paradoxical effect
takes hold of us in the negative direction, making our life more
constrained and deathlike.
We became aware of our mortality quite early on in childhood, and
this filled us with an anxiety that we cannot remember but that was
very real and visceral. Such anxiety cannot be wished away or denied.
It sits in us as adults in a powerfully latent form. When we choose to
repress the thought of death, our anxiety is only made stronger by our
not confronting the source of it. The slightest incident or uncertainty
about the future will tend to stir up this anxiety and even make it
chronic. To fight this, we will tend to narrow down the scope of our
thoughts and activities; if we don’t leave our comfort zones in what we
think and do, then we can make life rather predictable and feel less
vulnerable to anxiety. Certain addictions to foods or stimulants or
forms of entertainment will have a similar dulling effect.

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If we take this far enough, we become increasingly self-absorbed
and less dependent on people, who often stir up our anxieties with
their unpredictable behavior.
We can describe the contrast between life and death in the following
manner: Death is absolute stillness, without movement or change
except decay. In death we are separated from others and completely
alone. Life on the other hand is movement, connection to other living
things, and diversity of life forms. By denying and repressing the
thought of death, we feed our anxieties and become more deathlike
from within—separated from other people, our thinking habitual and
repetitive, with little overall movement and change. On the other hand,
the familiarity and closeness with death, the ability to confront the
thought of it has the paradoxical effect of making us feel more alive, as
the story of Flannery O’Connor well illustrates.
By connecting to the reality of death, we connect more profoundly
to the reality and fullness of life. By separating death from life and
repressing our awareness of it, we do the opposite.
What we require in the modern world is a way to create for
ourselves the positive paradoxical effect. The following is an attempt to
help us accomplish this, by forging a practical philosophy for
transforming the consciousness of our mortality into something
productive and life enhancing.