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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Here’s the latest of my ridiculous parody shorts. It crossed my mind Tuesday to wonder what a slick and fast-talking car dealer might do right now to try to turn the high price of gasoline to his advantage. So I conceived of a fat and lovable character who tried to sell cars that don’t use any fuel — and then I started wondering if it would be funnier if all the characters were felines. Designing the King Cashpaw character took about four hours, but the rest took only another four hours, so this was a relatively quick piece that virtually wrote itself. I know it’s almost impossible for these parody videos to find a larger audience, but at least they amuse me — and there are 19 of them on my YouTube page now. The first few were very limited, but they’re getting more complex.

The Republican Party is dead. It still exists in name, of course, but it’s nothing but a shell. All that’s left are idiots and stooges and con men of the MAGA party. When Donald Trump is gone — which won’t be long — those populist idiots and pragmatic fools will have no one to follow. Democrats will thrive. They will take more power than ever and they will push the federal government further to the radical far left than ever. When that happens, don’t just blame Trump if you’re a conservative. Blame every person who has claimed to be a conservative and has given up on principles, character and everything else that Republicans once claimed to stand for. As someone who worked as a GOP political consultant for many years, this is disgusting and disturbing to me. Those who have enabled Trump to have almost unchecked power are going to be shocked when they see what they will unleash in the long run. It’s been plain all along what this narcissistic con man is. It’s your fault that you chose to pretend not to see what he really is.

We are ruled by the dumbest and most incompetent people among us — and we have a system which allows stupid and irresponsible people to force the costs of their idiocy onto smarter and wiser people. Can we get away with that? Yes, for quite some time. But we eventually reach a point at which the dumbest of the dumb — who are habitual liars and mentally ill fools — lead us to the disasters and destruction that some of us have seen coming for years. We are approaching that point. And yet most of the idiots around us still wave their rhetorical banners of support for the evil people who are leading us to ruin — and all of them point their fingers at someone else, never noticing that their own enthusiastic support of evil is to blame. When things finally fall apart, blame yourself for your blindness to the evil, not whoever happens to be in power when it happens.

I’ve been making some changes to the site lately and there are more changes coming in the days ahead, so don’t be surprised if you some small differences. This is not a wholesale redesign, but rather the addition of some features. Since they’re smarter than I am, I’ve put Oliver and Alex in charge of the technical work, which you can see in this action photo from the control room of our media complex. I recently added a series of landing pages for readers who randomly discover the site from an Internet search. I’ve also changed the YouTube link at the top of the page to go to the new YouTube channel for video essays that reflect things I’ve already published here. (Here’s a little bit about both of the YouTube channels I’m working on.) In addition, I’m trying to move away from using Instagram, so I’m experimenting with photo plug-ins that will eventually allow me to host the pictures — cats, dogs, sunsets, whatever — that I often take. So don’t be surprised to see more changes. Thanks for your patience. Let’s hope Alex and Oliver know what they’re doing.

I have no use for the theocratic and repressive government of Iran. The people who run the country are cruel at best and evil at worst. The Iranian people deserve freedom. But I have no personal quarrel with anybody in Iran. While I’m not thrilled about a future Iranian government having nuclear weapons, I’m just as concerned about nukes in the hands of politicians in Israel, Pakistan, India, China and Russia. I’m not even thrilled with the U.S., Britain and France having them, either, because I don’t trust any politicians to be responsible with such terrible weapons. All I can say with certainty is that American taxpayers have no business attacking Iran, especially since we’re being forced to pay for this attack in order to benefit the politicians of Israel — and nobody else. If Middle Eastern countries want to fight among themselves, that’s none of my business. It’s not the business of the U.S. government, either. I have no quarrel with anybody in Iran — and having the government which claims to represent me launch an unprovoked attack against a sovereign country will only make all Americans less safe in the near future. This attack is poorly conceived and morally unjustified. Remember that when the Iranians launch attacks that we will then condemn as “terrorism.” What the U.S. is doing right now looks like terrorism to me. And let’s not forget that the attack is the latest in a long line of unconstitutional wars by various U.S. presidents — who have no legal power to declare war on their own, according to the U.S. Constitution.

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