Staring At The Sun (Irvin Yalom)
OVERVIEW
If you’re an atheist with death anxiety, may I present to you: Dr. Irvin Yalom – an atheist and existential psychiatrist from Stanford University, and therefore an incredible resource for the secular community when it comes to facing existential dread. Yalom says the most pressing existential concerns are death, isolation, meaning, and freedom, but even the latter three tie intimately back to death anxiety. And so, “Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death” is a book about death anxiety and how to subdue it.
Many of us commingle anxiety about death with the fear of evil, abandonment, or annihilation. Others are staggered by the enormity of eternity, of being dead forever and ever and ever and ever; others are unable to grasp the state of nonbeing and ponder the question of where they will be when they are dead; others focus on the horror of their entire personal world vanishing; others wrestle with death’s inevitability.
I enjoyed the sequence of chapters, how to recognize death anxiety (overt vs. covert), how to awaken to the reality of mortality, and finally to the tools Yalom uses to ameliorate fear (philosophical ideas/thought experiments, an emphasis on interpersonal connections, a call to live authentically, etc.). There were a few ideas that felt underdeveloped, like that freedom and mortality are closely tied. “Difficult decisions often have roots that reach into the bedrock of existential concerns and personal responsibility.” I wish he had lingered more on how the loss of youth and making big life decisions are a type of irreversibility that can cause death anxiety. But that tiny wish aside, this book was heartfelt, utilitarian, and almost spookily relevant to the blog.
Let’s dive into what this book did exceptionally well, which is give us concrete actions for dealing with mortal terror. Note: the first three “to dos” are from Yalom’s chapter on the power of ideas, thought experiments or exercises that can help frame our anxiety. With that in mind, Yalom reminds us: “good ideas, even ideas of power, are rarely sufficient in a single shot: repeated doses are necessary.”
WHAT NOW? (actions for mortal atheists)
Brush up on Epicurean philosophy
The three most important Epicurean arguments that help Yalom in his practice are:
· The mortality of the soul: there is no immortal soul and therefore nothing to fear in an afterlife
· The ultimate nothingness of death: we will never perceive death and so have no need to fear it
· The argument of symmetry: we have no fear of our prenatal non-existence, which is identical to our posthumous non-existence; thus, our attitudes to birth and death should be symmetrical (if you’re not fearful of the prenatal abyss, you shouldn’t be afraid of the posthumous one)
You can find expansions of these arguments in many philosophical texts, and they all amount to the same thing: fearing death is irrational.
Practice being dead by falling asleep
In addition to the Epicurean arguments, Yalom draws parallels to sleep and death. In Greek mythology, Thanatos (death) and Hypnos (sleep) were twin brothers. Yalom says “each of us has a taste of death when slipping into sleep every night or when losing consciousness under anesthesia.” This is another useful comparison in helping to alleviate irrational death anxiety; being asleep and being under anesthetic are not horrifying experiences, they are simply states devoid of “us” (dreaming aside) and tolerated quite well. We should feel similarly about death.
Project yourself into the future through “rippling”
Death brings us face to face with transiency. Nothing stable, nothing enduring. To palliate the angst of transiency, Yalom recommends the concept of rippling: “leaving behind something from your life experience; some trait, some piece of wisdom, guidance, virtue, comfort that passes on to others, known or unknown.” This is Stephen Cave’s concept of legacy, broadly applied. “Rippling tempers the pain of transiency by reminding us that something of each of us persists even though it may be unknown or imperceptible to us.” Rippling is more stable than legacy, more robust and impervious to destruction by its design. I would even argue that you could expand it further to all the ways in which your actions, big or small, have set off far-reaching cascades of events. This highlights one of the “comforting thoughts about death” presented by Greta Christina too.
Make connections
“Rich connections temper the pain of transiency.” Yalom has written elsewhere that in his working with the terminally ill, forming deep interpersonal connections had the single greatest impact in ameliorating death anxiety. Relationships also magnify one’s ability to “ripple,” and it echoes what I heard in talking to Annetta Mallon about end-of-life connections. Yalom says that “loneliness greatly increases the anguish of dying,” and so while relationships cannot assuage existential loneliness, they do palliate everyday loneliness and increase feelings of connectedness and purpose.
Cultivate death awareness
We’ve heard this reiterated many times (of course you’d expect exactly that when your sample size consists of authors who have chosen to think and write about death and dying), but Yalom has seen the fruits of this awareness in his own patients. Here’s where Yalom encourages you to “stare at the sun.” To take an unblinkered view at your place in existence. This can inspire feelings of gratitude and luckiness in the face of such immensity. It’s what *Heidegger called the shift from everyday mode to ontological mode… from being consumed with how things are, to being marveled that things are. Focus on and appreciate being itself.
“Keep in mind the advantage of remaining aware of death, of hugging its shadow to you. Such awareness can integrate the darkness with your spark of life and enhance your life while you still have it. The way to value life, the way to feel compassion for others, the way to love anything with greatest depth is to be aware that these experiences are destined to be lost.”
Live your life
*Heidegger’s call to live your life in ontological mode inspires you not just to be “more aware of existence and mortality and life’s other immutable characteristics, but also more anxious and more primed to make significant changes. You are prompted to grapple with your fundamental human responsibility to construct an authentic life of engagement, connectivity, meaning, and self-fulfillment.” Yalom puts a real emphasis on living authentically. His direct experience as an existential psychiatrist is that the more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety. As to how we go about living more authentically, Yalom offers Nietzsche’s parable of Zarathustra (click here for the thought experiment).
Death awareness and living fully go hand in hand. Mortality salience is a catalyst for major life changes. Only with a sense of finiteness can we be inspired to stop wasting time, to wake up, to live well and with fewer regrets. Worldviews (religious, cultural, or otherwise) that deny the finality of death can be barriers to living with this sense of gratitude and urgency.
Accept that there will always be residual anxiety
“Despite the staunchest, most venerable defenses, we can never completely subdue death anxiety: it is always there, lurking in some hidden ravine of the mind. […] Death is destiny. Your wish to survive and your dread of annihilation will always be there. It’s instinctive – built into your protoplasm.” Yalom believes that fear of death is biologically hardwired into us, and it will “zap us with terror from time to time.” Rather than strive to be completely free of fear, this gives us permission to be afraid sometimes, that short bouts of existential dread are as natural as breathing or sleeping.
IN SUM:
Is this book entirely secular? A big, delicious “Yes.”
If you had to describe the book in one sentence? An atheist, who has spent his life studying therapeutic techniques for existential dread, gives you lots of advice on how to overcome mortal terror
Who should read this book? Everyone with existential concerns
FAVOURITE QUOTES
Every day annihilation looms.
I try leaving traces
That maybe matter;
Engaging in the present.
The best I can do. [one of Yalom’s patients]
“Adults who are racked with death anxiety are not odd birds who have contracted some exotic disease, but men and women whose family and culture have failed to knit the proper protective clothing for them to withstand the icy chill of mortality.”
“At some point in life […] each of us is due to awaken to our mortality. […] What do you feel when you have such experiences? What do you do with them? Do you plunge into frenetic activity to burn off the anxiety to avoid the subject? Try to remove the wrinkles with cosmetic surgery or dye your hair? Decide to stay thirty-nine for a few more years? Distract yourself quickly with work and everyday life routine? Forget all such experiences? Ignore your dreams? […] I urge you not to distract yourself. Instead, savor awakening. Take advantage of it.”
“To me, transience is like background music: always playing, rarely noticed until some striking event brings it into full awareness.”
Dawkins’ metaphor of the laser-thin beam of light illuminating only the present moment on the ruler of time “dispels grimness and evokes in me the thought of how staggeringly lucky I am to be here, alive, and luxuriating in the pleasure of sheer being! And how tragically foolish it would be to diminish my brief time in the life-light by adopting life-negating schemes which proclaim that real life is to be found elsewhere in the utterly indifferent immense darkness ahead of me.”
*Heidegger: he is mentioned in many of the texts I’m reading, especially those about existentialism and its periphery philosophies. Heidegger was a philosopher, an atheist, and believed that pondering death was a worthwhile use of time. He also became a Nazi. If an author has included thoughts about him, or quotes, I’m sometimes including them in the blog, but I agree with many authors/philosophers that it’s more than worth considering if Heidegger’s fascism should retroactively invalidate his entire enterprise and if he should be excluded from the conversation altogether (even when his earlier works are relevant to it).