My fears are less about death than about my own ‘unlived’ life

By David McElroy · July 6, 2020

I’m afraid of dying.

It’s not that I fear the process of dying or what happens after death. It’s not that I fear there’s nothing that lies beyond this world after my body is still and cold.

My fears aren’t about the next world. My fears are about this life — a life that I haven’t yet lived. A life that I’ve half-lived, like a man sleepwalking through an experience that should be filled with love and joy and the ecstasy of mortal existence.

I’m afraid of dying before I ever really live.

I hate what my life has become. Every choice I’ve made seemed to make sense in the moment, but the choices have brought me to a place of unhappiness. Depression. Emptiness. Regret. Hurt.

I hate the experience of living the life I have created, but I don’t want to die. I love this world too much. I love what I know my life could be. And I hunger for the life that would allow me to die in peace one day — knowing I had loved and created joy for those I love.

I seem to live like a man who doesn’t want to go on living. As I’ve become less happy and more despondent about elements of my life — the life I’ve created through my choices — it’s harder to push myself to take care of my health. It’s harder to want to rise to the things I’m capable of. It’s harder to even care enough to get through each day.

But don’t mistake that for suicidal ideation. I’m desperate to live. I’m desperate for life to mean what I’ve always known it could mean. I’m desperate to be the man who God created me to be and to bring love and life to others.

But I don’t quite know how.

For weeks now, I’ve needed to go see a doctor about something which is easily treated. It’s something that won’t affect me in the least if I take care of it. But it’s something that could kill me if I ignore it.

On the way home from work, a long-time friend asked me why I was so unhappy that I would have ignored the problem so long. I scarcely knew where to start. I didn’t want to blame anybody else, because I am responsible for what I have and don’t have.

I asked him to remember what we wanted and expected when we were much younger, not just materially, but in terms of the people around us. Then I described what I expected of myself back then — what I expected my life to become — and I contrasted it with where my choices have brought me.

The gap between my realistic expectations in the past and what I’ve let myself become is painful for me. I’ve allowed myself to slip into a life which seems like some strange version of purgatory on Earth. It’s not quite living, but it’s not quite death.

Back in 1935, Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger created a paradox of a cat in a box. He was trying to describe his view of quantum physics during conversations with fellow physicist Albert Einstein. He asked Einstein to imagine a box with a cat inside and then he imagined a scenario in which a random atomic action could cause the cat to be poisoned or not.

To oversimplify Schrödinger’s argument, he said that the cat was both alive and dead. The cat existed in a state of what he called “superposition.” Once you opened the box, the quantum state would “collapse” and the cat would be either dead or alive. But until a human looked, the cat was both dead and alive.

I am Schrödinger’s cat.

I’m living in this box, but it’s unclear whether I will actually live my life or die without ever having lived.

To Schrödinger and others who argued the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, it’s the action of the observer which causes the wave function to collapse into a normal space function — for one of the two quantum states to become objective truth.

I am Schrödinger’s cat.

I’m both dead and alive. I’m a failure who threw away too many opportunities or I’m the talented genius who achieves the greatness that others expected.

I can’t be both. It’s one or the other. Somebody has to open the box. The observer has to create the circumstances by which the quantum superposition collapses into one state or the other.

But I desperately want to live.

I want to be what I was made to be. I want to love and be loved. I want to create things which touch other lives and which change lives. I want to find ways to show others the beauty and possibility of what this world could be. I want to be satisfied that I found my best possible way of bringing love and light and joy to the people around me.

I don’t want to die. I also don’t want this miserable half-life and half-death. I desperately want to fully live, but I haven’t figured out how to find my way home to love and joy and peace.

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I’m seeing a lot of simplistic and dishonest explanations right now for the current rioting in France. Those on the populist far right claim it’s all about Muslim immigrants to France disrupting the culture. Their message is that this sort of thing is going to happen in the U.S. unless “we defend the border.” On the far left, socialists and their fellow travelers claim the riots are all about wealthy people in France not paying enough taxes, resulting in cuts to government services. The truth is far more complicated, but it’s rooted in the decline of population growth in Europe. There simply aren’t enough young workers paying into the tax system anymore, so cuts in social services were inevitable. There is genuine cultural tension as more and more people immigrate from other countries, but government cuts to education and other services are even more important to what’s happening. The situation is complicated, so don’t let dishonest people with U.S. political agendas tell you that it happens to support whatever they were already promoting for partisan reasons.

Here’s another reason to appreciate the cats in your life: New research involving 93 countries found that places with more cats per person also tended to have happier people. The researchers say the finding fits with previous evidence that living with pets can reduce loneliness and stress while providing companionship, emotional attachment and social support. The study doesn’t prove that cats cause greater happiness, but it certainly adds to the evidence that sharing your home — and your life — with a cat might be good for you.

The company that owns Facebook and Instagram is heavily promoting its new AI-based software assistant called Muse, but people who are using it as it was designed are incredibly foolish. An early adopter of the software discovered that a few days ago when he advertised an item for sale on Facebook Marketplace — and he inadvertently gave Muse full authority to act on his behalf. The software agreed to a lowball offer made by another Facebook user and then gave that man the home address of the man for whom he was an agent. The software told the buyer that the seller was home and waiting for him. When the buyer showed up and waited angrily, the would-be buyer left an angry review for the man. And this angry man had the seller’s home address. It was only well after that that the software reported what it had done and admitted it had made a mistake. I won’t be putting that much power into the hands of any software. I think anyone who agrees to such terms is a fool. And the software’s user agreement says you’re responsible for purchases the software makes in your name. Nope.

Meet my new girlfriend. Her name is Meg. And she’s my little sweetheart. A couple of months ago, a neighbor across the street told me about a new stray in the neighborhood that she and I were both soon feeding. The cat had been very skittish about contact and she had a lot of scabs and parasites in her fur, but a trip to the vet last week revealed that she was otherwise in good health. The vet estimates her to be 1 to 2 years old. I named her for Meg Murry, the 13-year-old protagonist of Madeleine L’Engle’s wonderful book, “A Wrinkle in Time.” (Please read the book. Don’t watch the horrible movie.) Since we lost Lucy almost a year ago, it seems appropriate that we finally have a new little girl to join the household. She’s already captured my heart, but Alex, Oliver and Sam aren’t there quite yet.

There’s nothing socially acceptable that’s as dangerous as drinking alcohol. Most people grow up being told to “drink responsibly” — and all of us see people abusing this drug in one way or another — but the truth is that drinking alcohol is always a terrible risk. The alcohol in these drinks is toxic and the human liver has to work hard to filter the toxins out. What most people don’t realize is that alcohol is classified as a known carcinogen by the World Health Organization — because of the well-established connection between imbibing and various cancers. Many people have taken refuge behind the idea that light or moderate drinking might be safe, but a new study shows that drinking even one drink a day increases the risks of 10 types of cancer. When I was a teen-ager, I looked around and saw the negative effects that this behavior had on a lot of people and decided not to start drinking, so I’ve never even tried this poison. The evidence keeps piling up that I was lucky to have come to that conclusion early.

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