Death and Technology

We now live in a highly globalized world, an age of technology, but have you ever wondered why technology was created? Well, technology was created with the intent of eliminating uncertainty and to provide convenience for our lives. The pervasion of technology into our everyday lives with the ultimate intention of eliminating all uncertainties from our lives certainly has achieved its goal, for now our lives has become much too certain. Our lives has become dictated by schedules, or timetables. Thats right, our lives are being run by the clock: Do you own your clock? Or does it own you? It is no longer you who determines where you should be at or what you should be doing, it is time. Everyday we find ourselves rushing to beat the clock, to stay on time, at the expense of our own lives. Day by day, we trade the time of our lives away for money. If time = money, and time owns us, does money own us too?

Our bodies are highly adaptable wonders, for example, if you do anything repeatedly, you can get used to that particular action. I'm sure the same can be said about adapting to live in a different environment. In this case, I'm talking about our bodies adapting to suit a environment with the convenience and ease of technology. We've become very dependent on technology to live our lives that we simply cannot do without it. While we are not yet totally dependent, we are slowly losing our ability to move and even to sleep without the aid of technology. This technological society exhanges our health for money, for example: Working long hours at the expense of sleep or meals, and sells it back to us in the form of medication, fitness centers and so on. Our bodies not only adapt physically, but mentally too. In the technological world where comfort and certainty is emphasized, our minds too have become increasingly afraid of the unknown, which is why we are constantly living in fear, fear of the unknown. We constantly ask ourselves: "How will this decision influence my future? Will I be able to lead a good life?", and thus, in pursuit of the 'good life', we sell our time, labour, thoughts, sometimes even our bodies for the sake of financial security.

Technology too tries to eliminate the ultimate uncertainty: Death. It is the ultimate goal of technology for us humans to find a way to become immortal. But think about this phrase: You never lived until you die. This phrase can be taken literally, I'm sure most of you have heard of people who had near-death or out-of-body experiences becoming totally different persons after. Ask yourself this: If you knew that you might die at possibly any moment, would you be living your life completely different? It's no suprise that most of us have not ever thought of death, or has thought of it but shrugged it off, thinking its more important to worry about the now. In this technological world, death is commonly denied rather than accepted. We usually try to save our sick with whatever cost for just a few more hours for them to live, we buy food ignoring the fact that animals have been slaughtered, we pursuit goals and ambitions that would not make sense if we knew of our eventual death.

Contemplation of death is extremely important to us because it reveals the unreality of our separate selves. Because the self that we define as our bodies, our names, our knowledge, our possessions, our self-image, will cease to exist when we die, that self is unreal and thus of extreme unimportance. To deny death is to deny life, Why? Because death is part of the life cycle, death is what completes our life. Living in this society, denying death and uncertainty; This fully insured, 100% guaranteed life that our social institutions suggest, channeled through the media, the schools, and often our parents, that is mapped out in advance to minimize uncertainty, is no life at all. Despite all our efforts to mitigate its uncertainty, life is fundamentally uncertain and out of control. Everyone senses on some level that our management of life is little more than a pretense by which we delude ourselves into believing in the permanence and stability of that which is neither. In this gigantic game of pretend, we feign belief in the normalcy of modern life, but no one really believes in it; hence the universal sense of emptiness and void underlying the adult world. From the very beginning, there is the feeling of living a life that someone else has planned out, a life that is not truly our own.

A life of uncertainty and learning from curiosity by taking risks is part of our natural instinct, instilled in our minds ever since we were babies. Instead of living our lives pretending we will never die, chasing goals, ambitions and false sense of satisfactions, live like you are going to die at any moment, pursue the things that truely matter, things that you can cherish on your deathbed, such as your own unique individuality, a free mind and an open heart filled with compassion for not only fellow humans but nature as well.