This episode is also on Bilibili too.
Hi everyone, I’m Zhichao Wei. Last Saturday, Matthew Perry, who played Chandler in the American sitcom Friends, suffered cardiac arrest, drowned in the bathtub at home, and sadly passed away at just 54. Life is unpredictable. I’m sure many of you felt deeply moved by Matthew Perry’s death. Friends wasn’t just the show that introduced many Chinese viewers to American TV; you could say it was also one of the symbols of China becoming more open after joining the WTO, as more and more young Chinese people began to understand the outside world and embrace it. Friends and Chandler hold a place in many people’s hearts that no other American sitcom can really match.
After hearing the news of Matthew Perry’s death, I couldn’t help thinking about all sorts of things related to death these past few days. So I’d like to use this episode to explore with you: Why should everyone think seriously about death? Why, although most people avoid talking about death, should we sometimes face it head-on? What can facing death bring us?
‘Facing death head-on’ was the subject of the very first lesson in the mental health education course I used to teach at university. I would start that class by telling my students: ‘This may be the scariest class in your entire four years of college, because I’m going to show you what may be the most horrifying picture you’ve ever seen.’
The picture I showed my students is the one you’re seeing on screen now: 30 rows and 30 columns, 900 squares in total. Just a grid of squares.
What’s so terrifying about it? If each square represents one month, then 900 squares represent 900 months. That’s 75 years—more or less one human lifetime.
Is life very long? Not at all! It’s only 900 months!
Measured in days, a human life is roughly 27,000 days. A day is short, but 27,000 is a big number, so when we use days to measure life, we often fail to feel how brief it is.
The same goes for measuring life in years. Seventy-something is a small number, but a year is pretty long, so life still feels fairly long when counted in years.
But measuring life in months is completely different. 900 isn’t a big number, and a month is so short! One month slips by in a flash. I only just claimed the October free games on PS Plus a few days ago, and I’m already about to claim November’s. And a stretch of time that passes in the blink of an eye occurs only a few hundred times in an entire lifetime? Come on!
You can actually put yourself into this chart right now and experience the terror of 900 squares firsthand. Make a 30-by-30 grid in Excel, then calculate, based on your current age, how many squares of your life have already passed and color them red. For example, by the end of October 2023, I had lived 42 years and three months. My grid looked like the one on screen.
Look! My progress bar is already more than halfway through!!! If this were the health bar in a fighting game, I wouldn’t be far from getting KO’d!
Still, looking at this chart statically isn’t the most frightening part. It becomes truly terrifying when you use it dynamically. Try printing out this chart with the squares you’ve already colored red, sticking it on the wall, and coloring one more square every month starting this month. Keep it up for six months, watching the progress bar move toward ‘game over’ at a speed you can actually feel, and I guarantee you’ll feel as if five thunderbolts have struck your head. The shock of realizing that your own death isn’t actually far away will absolutely beat the scariest horror movie you’ve ever seen.
You may think you won’t leave this world in your fifties like Chandler did, but how much longer can you really live than he did? It would just mean a few more rows of squares on this sheet of paper.
Life really is very short. Much shorter than you think.
Mr. Mu Xin once said: ‘All the lives I have seen merely passed by; none could be said to have been completed.’
How many people think, ‘The road of life is long. I’ll keep walking; there’s no need to hurry. I have plenty of time’? And yet, in the blink of an eye, they reach the end and discover that life ‘merely passed by,’ leaving far too many regrets over what was never completed.
That’s why I think we sometimes really need to scare ourselves with death. We can print out this 900-square chart and color in a square on the first of every month. There may be many things you’ve hesitated to do, but after this gives you a jolt, you just go for it. That’s what it means to ‘live toward death’: using death to help yourself figure out what it means to be alive. It’s an attitude toward life that many philosophers have strongly advocated.
Still, as a psychology professional, I think these 900 squares alone are far from enough, because the effect of ‘living toward death’ can be described as Schrödinger-like—it’s highly unpredictable. Death can scare someone awake, but it can also scare them into paralysis. Some people say, ‘Life is short, so I have to pull myself together. I can’t procrastinate anymore; I need to do something I truly want to do.’ But others will surely think, ‘We’re all going to die eventually, so what meaning does anything I’m doing now have?’
That is the biggest hidden danger of ‘living toward death.’ Death is the ultimate fear: it makes all the other fears in life seem trivial and makes us brave. But death is also the ultimate void, and it can make every experience in life seem just as empty. Facing death is risky. It may cause us to lose our sense of meaning and sink into a kind of numbness resembling depression, losing our enthusiasm for everything.
So ‘living toward death’ has to be taken together with something else: ‘living toward meaning.’ When we feel how brief life is, we have to tie ourselves to some meaning we genuinely accept.
But what exactly is the meaning of life?
Actually, life really has no meaning. Death doesn’t create the ‘illusion’ that life is meaningless; it shows us the ‘truth’ that life is meaningless. Because our final destination really is the void.
Ms. Li Yinhe has also said: ‘I often think about the unsolvable question of the meaning of life. After thinking it over and over, the answer turns out to be this: from a macro perspective, life cannot possibly have meaning, but from a micro perspective, we can assign meaning to it ourselves.’
Life has no meaning at its core. Fortunately, humans are extremely good at deceiving ourselves. We can ‘assign meaning’—in other words, certain things can give us a sense of meaning, a ‘feeling’ that something matters (or perhaps an ‘illusion’).
Winning a game can give you a sense of meaning. Successfully losing weight can give you a sense of meaning. Getting a promotion and a raise can give you a sense of meaning too…
In the long run, though, perhaps only two things can continuously bring people a powerful sense of meaning strong enough to stand up to death. One is ‘working for the benefit of all beings’; the other is ‘forming bonds with the people you love.’
I’m currently reading Elon Musk. After I finish, I’ll make a video analyzing Musk’s personality based on the book. So far, what has moved me most is a fixation in Musk’s mind—a fixation many people think means he’s worrying needlessly. He has spent his whole life trying to put humanity’s egg into different baskets. He’s always worried that it’s incredibly dangerous for our species to stay on just one planet, Earth. What if some enormous disaster comes along and wipes us all out? Why not hurry up and send a group of humans to Mars? Then we’d have a backup. Isn’t that completely crazy? But from his impoverished youth all the way to today, Musk has kept charging headfirst toward this goal that looks a little embarrassingly adolescent.
It’s hard for someone who lives like Musk to lose their sense of meaning. At least in his own eyes, he is ‘working for the benefit of all beings,’ striving for the future of all humanity. The sense of meaning brought by such a goal can sustain someone for an entire lifetime.
If you bring more happiness to more people in the world (or at least what you believe is happiness for them), you’ll have a greater sense of meaning. So you don’t necessarily have to worry about all humanity like Musk does, but you can take inspiration from this fixation on ‘working for the benefit of all beings.’
The other thing that can continually bring a sense of meaning and counter death’s void is ‘forming bonds with the people you love.’ That means building strong emotional bonds with the people you love around you—your family and your partner. It may sound unbearably clichéd, but love is the ultimate weapon against the void.
In Everything Everywhere All at Once, the female protagonist’s daughter travels through all the possible choices of life across countless parallel universes. After seeing and experiencing everything, nothing matters anymore. At the end of the universe is a bagel that destroys everything: total emptiness, the feeling that all reality is void. She has fallen into that sense of meaningless emptiness.
But after going through all of that too, the female protagonist, played by Michelle Yeoh, arrives at a different realization: Even if I know that everything will ultimately become nothing, right here and right now I still choose to use this emotional bond between you and me to connect our souls, floating alone in an empty universe, and use our tiny, insignificant bond to give this desolate universe just a little bit of meaning.
Life is an illusion, but the only thing that may be real within it is the bond you and the person you love feel here and now.
If you don’t have the chance to ‘work for the benefit of all beings,’ then seize every opportunity to ‘form bonds with the people you love.’
Finally, I want to say that work, making money, binge-watching shows, cuddling dogs…these ordinary parts of life are obviously the main theme of most people’s lives. But every now and then, we should still cosplay as philosophers: sometimes doodling on the 900 squares, sometimes putting aside our chores, looking up at the stars, and contemplating the mysteries of the universe and human life.
All right, that’s where we’ll leave the subject of living toward death. I’m Zhichao Wei, and I’ll keep sharing my three greatest interests on this channel—psychology, books, and movies.
If you enjoy my show, please follow, like, save, and comment. It really matters to me. I’ve put the research reports and references mentioned in this episode in the description below the video. Thanks for your support, and I’ll see you next time.
P.S.:
Looking back now, by the time Matthew Perry, the actor who played Chandler, died, his career peak had long since passed. Perhaps it had become difficult for him to find a sense of meaning in ‘working for the benefit of all beings.’ He spent half his life immersed in drugs and alcohol, his mind worn down by them over the years, and he probably failed to take good care of his ‘bonds’ with the people around him. Perhaps he went from the void of being alive to the eternal void. It’s still terribly sad to think about.
Leave a Reply