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Sheldon Solomon: How Accepting Our Death Can Bring Life to Life
31 Plays4 years ago
The Glam Reaper is back with another intriguing episode! This time, host Jennifer sits down with Sheldon Solomon for a very interesting conversation on how accepting death can lead us to living a better life.
Sheldon is the co-author of the book, The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life, and in this episode, he talks about the meaning of life and the role that death plays. Listen as he reveals how the ideas of author and cultural anthropologist, Ernest Becker, first sparked his interest in the subject of life, existence, and death and inspired him to write his book.
Want to hear some cool facts about life and death? Tune in to this conversation and don’t forget to tell us your thoughts after! Enjoy!
LITTLE NUGGETS OF GOLD:
- A quick introduction about Sheldon Solomon
- Sheldon’s enlightenment about life and death
- How culture influences the way we see life and death
- Viewing death as a part of our lives
- How people should embrace their lives
Connect with Sheldon Solomon:
Email: ssolomon@skidmore.edu
Connect with Jennifer/The Glam Reaper:
Facebook Page - Muldowney Memorials: https://www.facebook.com/MuldowneyMemorials/
Facebook Page - Rainbow Bridge Memorials: https://www.facebook.com/rainbowbridgememorialsdotcom
Instagram - @muldowneymemorials & @jennifermuldowney
Twitter - @TheGlamReaper
Email us here: glamreaperpodcast@gmail.com
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Transcript
Introduction to Sheldon Solomon and His Work
00:00:04
Speaker
Hi and welcome to the Glam Reaper podcast.
00:00:07
Speaker
On today's episode, I had a really interesting conversation with a gentleman who wrote a book about the meaning of life and how if we accept that we're gonna die one day, we might live life a little better, which is definitely right up my alley.
00:00:22
Speaker
So let's talk to our very fabulous guest and let him take it away.
00:00:30
Speaker
So, okay, well, author, professor, his name is Sheldon Solomon and he is an absolute delight.
00:00:37
Speaker
He has written a book on the role of death in life, which I find fascinating.
00:00:44
Speaker
I have actually dog-marked, ear-marked, whatever you want to call it, many pages here for anybody that can see.
00:00:50
Speaker
But I want, Sheldon, for you to give us a quick intro as to you,
00:00:56
Speaker
how you came to be and how you came to write a book on the role of death in life when a bit like me you didn't have necessarily a massive past you're not in the funeral world in the medical profession per se so tell our listeners how that came about
00:01:11
Speaker
Yeah, great question.
The Origins of Solomon's Interest in Death
00:01:13
Speaker
And like anything, probably came about not from one particular direction, let's say.
00:01:22
Speaker
I can't remember if we talked about this when we were last across the table from each other in New York, but I've been disinclined to die for as long as I can remember.
00:01:31
Speaker
Ever since I was about eight, that was the day after my grandmother died.
00:01:36
Speaker
And I just remember it because I was sitting there and I was like, oh, I'm going to miss my grandmother.
00:01:41
Speaker
And then, you know, I was like, oh, but that means my mom's going to die.
00:01:45
Speaker
And then it was like, and I used to collect stamps in the old days and
00:01:50
Speaker
I had stamps with all these old American presidents and I was looking at them.
00:01:54
Speaker
I was like, oh, there's George Washington.
00:01:56
Speaker
He's dead.
00:01:57
Speaker
There's Thomas Jefferson.
00:01:58
Speaker
He's dead.
00:01:59
Speaker
And then all of a sudden I'm like, oh man, that means, you know, someday I'm going to die.
00:02:05
Speaker
I really had one of those, you know, shuddering moments.
00:02:08
Speaker
And so I guess my point is, is that I always had kind of a personal stake in this, although I didn't really think about it for a long time.
00:02:17
Speaker
And then
00:02:18
Speaker
You know, fast forward a couple of decades, I was a young professor walking around in the library at Skidmore College where I bumped into books by Ernest Becker, a cultural anthropologist who I'd never heard of, who had recently died in 1974.
Understanding Becker's Ideas on Death Anxiety
00:02:35
Speaker
right after or right before rather he published the book the denial of death and i started reading his books and was just blown away by the simplicity of his ideas and also the way that i found them psychologically discombobulating because he just said look that what makes people different than any other form of life
00:03:01
Speaker
is that we're smart enough to know that the basic biological imperative that we share with all other living creatures, which is to stay alive at all costs, is doomed to fail.
00:03:13
Speaker
So every living thing is biologically predisposed to survive.
00:03:18
Speaker
But one accidental byproduct of our vast intelligence is we realize from a rather early age that we are going to die someday.
00:03:28
Speaker
not only that but it could be today and what ernest becker said is that if that's all we thought about you know that we're gonna die we can walk outside and get hit by a comet or smote by a virus that you just wouldn't be able to stand up in the morning and
00:03:47
Speaker
He said we'd be debilitated with waves of existential terror.
00:03:53
Speaker
But that raises the question of how come we are able to stand up in the morning.
00:03:58
Speaker
And his answer in a single word was culture.
00:04:01
Speaker
He just said, look,
00:04:03
Speaker
We have these humanly constructed beliefs about reality that we share with each other in our group and that helps us manage death anxiety by giving each of us a sense that life has meaning and that we have value
00:04:19
Speaker
Maybe to the point we're eligible for immortality, you know, either through the heavens and afterlives and the souls of all the world's great religions.
00:04:29
Speaker
Or even if you don't believe in that kind of immortality, the ancient Greeks had another flavor that these days they call symbolic immortality, where you're like, OK, I'm not going to be here forever.
00:04:41
Speaker
But I know that aspects of me that will persist over time nonetheless.
00:04:47
Speaker
Maybe I'll have kids.
00:04:48
Speaker
Maybe I'll make a lot of money and put my name on buildings and things.
00:04:54
Speaker
Maybe I'll create a great work of art or science, or maybe you'll do a fine podcast and a lot of folks will listen to it long after we're no longer around.
00:05:05
Speaker
And what Becker proposed very simply is that
00:05:10
Speaker
Whether we like it or not, we spend most of our waking moments.
00:05:15
Speaker
And whether we're conscious of it or not, we spend most of our lives trying to maintain confidence in our culturally constructed beliefs, and as well as faith that we're living up to the standards of value that are associated with our role in the context of that culture.
Reception and Value of Becker's Theories
00:05:36
Speaker
The English translation in Becker's language
00:05:39
Speaker
We need to have self-esteem, the belief that we as individuals are valuable members of our community.
00:05:48
Speaker
And so those were the ideas that 40 years ago I was like, wow, this strikes me as really relevant to my own experiences.
00:06:00
Speaker
It was also the case that Becker's ideas helped me understand a whole lot of things that I was always thinking about.
00:06:08
Speaker
And I thought that was awesome.
00:06:10
Speaker
But to make a short story long, none of our psychologist colleagues at the time thought very much of these ideas.
00:06:19
Speaker
So we would go around to conferences and we'd be like, wow, this guy,
00:06:22
Speaker
has a lot of interesting things to say.
00:06:25
Speaker
It can help explain a lot.
00:06:28
Speaker
And psychologists just said, no, I don't think so.
00:06:31
Speaker
You know, they said either some would say, well, I don't think about death much.
00:06:36
Speaker
So your ideas are obviously not right.
00:06:39
Speaker
Others said, this is interesting, but there's no proof.
00:06:44
Speaker
And as long as there's not, it's speculative.
00:06:48
Speaker
And that's fine for some disciplines, but not for supposedly psychological science.
00:06:55
Speaker
So that's how we kind of got involved.
00:06:57
Speaker
We found the ideas captivating.
00:07:00
Speaker
Our colleagues didn't buy it.
00:07:03
Speaker
And we're like, all right, this is what we're trained to do.
00:07:05
Speaker
So we'll give it a go.
00:07:07
Speaker
This is you, Sheldon, with Jeff and Tom.
00:07:11
Speaker
That's right.
00:07:11
Speaker
My buddies Jeff Greenberg and Tom Puszynski, we were graduate students together back in the last millennium at the University of Kansas.
00:07:19
Speaker
And so in a really brief way, if somebody was not to read your book, what would sum up what's in it and why they should read it?
00:07:30
Speaker
Great question.
00:07:31
Speaker
So what we say that we're trying to do in our book is to describe Ernest Becker's ideas at the same time that we provide the evidence that we've collected over the years in support of them.
00:07:47
Speaker
And so the reason that we think it's important that people expose themselves to these ideas, it has nothing to do with us.
00:07:55
Speaker
Of course, we wrote a book and everyone would like it if your work was well received.
00:08:02
Speaker
But more important is the broad dissemination of these ideas for two reasons.
00:08:08
Speaker
One is that
00:08:09
Speaker
We think that there's too many things that you can't understand without these ideas.
00:08:17
Speaker
So for example, Becker says, look, this helps us understand why we can't get along with people who are different.
00:08:24
Speaker
Because if somebody has different beliefs,
00:08:27
Speaker
and i accept them well that destroys my confidence in my own beliefs and because my beliefs protect me from death anxiety when i run into somebody who's different i'm gonna disparage and dehumanize them i'm gonna try to get them to get rid of their beliefs and adopt mine instead and if that doesn't work i'm just gonna kill them
00:08:50
Speaker
And so Becker's like, that's one of the main reasons why we've been beating the crap out of each other since day
The Effects of Mortality Awareness on Behavior
00:08:57
Speaker
one.
00:08:57
Speaker
You know, history is a nightmare from which I'm trying to awake.
00:09:01
Speaker
So basically, Becker's like, look at all the evil that is perpetrated in the world, he claims, just trying to rid the world of evil.
00:09:12
Speaker
And in our studies, what we find is when we remind people that they're going to die, they hate and harm other people who are different.
00:09:20
Speaker
And so when we remind people they're going to die, it changes their political beliefs.
00:09:26
Speaker
It makes them more likely to vote for charismatic leaders who say, I'm the only one who can keep you safe.
00:09:34
Speaker
It makes people uncomfortable with their bodies and with nature.
00:09:39
Speaker
It turns people
00:09:41
Speaker
into indiscriminate and insatiable buyers of stuff.
00:09:47
Speaker
It makes us go out.
00:09:48
Speaker
Yeah, and just on that, because I think that's quite fascinating, especially considering at the moment and what's going on in the United States.
00:09:56
Speaker
You've actually done quite a lot of research on this.
00:09:59
Speaker
So if this isn't just sort of somebody who read a couple of books and decided I'm going to put my thoughts down about this subject.
00:10:07
Speaker
You've done all of the research, you've sat down and how many people and, you know, put death in front of them and what has their reactions been?
00:10:16
Speaker
I mean, you've already given us that people will change politically dependent on and people make purchases.
00:10:22
Speaker
What are some of the more interesting things that you've discovered from your research?
00:10:27
Speaker
Well, I do think that one of the more interesting things is just how it modifies political preferences.
00:10:32
Speaker
So, for example, in the election that we just had a few weeks ago, we found in a study conducted a week or two before the election that in Staten Island, a sample of Americans who were intended to vote
00:10:46
Speaker
In a control condition, as a group, they like Joe Biden more than Donald Trump.
00:10:52
Speaker
But the ones that were reminded of their mortality first, they like Donald Trump more than Joe Biden.
00:10:59
Speaker
So this idea that a really subtle alteration, thinking about yourself dying, and by the way, you don't even need to know that you're thinking about dying.
00:11:09
Speaker
We can blast the word death on a computer so fast that you don't even know it's in your head.
00:11:15
Speaker
And I find that amazing.
00:11:18
Speaker
I find it amazing that after you're reminded that you're going to die, that if you drink alcohol, you drink more alcohol.
00:11:25
Speaker
If you smoke cigarettes, not only do you smoke more cigarettes, you inhale harder.
00:11:31
Speaker
So if you're reminded of death or your mortality, which is, I mean, I had the exact same experience as you at younger.
00:11:40
Speaker
It was sort of thrown right in my face and I was like, whoa, I could die tomorrow.
00:11:45
Speaker
So it's something that you and I had in common.
00:11:47
Speaker
I remember when we met, but so the fact that if I'm reminded of death or my own mortality, it means I'm going to drink harder, smoke harder and vote for Donald Trump.
00:11:58
Speaker
Is that?
00:11:59
Speaker
A brief summary.
00:12:01
Speaker
Oh, God.
00:12:02
Speaker
It is at least possible.
00:12:04
Speaker
And by the way, just to pile on a little bit, if you have a diagnosed psychological disorder, anything from a phobia to social anxiety to OCD to a touch of PTSD, death reminders magnify
00:12:25
Speaker
every existing psychological disorder.
00:12:29
Speaker
So you're quite right.
00:12:30
Speaker
It sounds kind of gruesome, but death reminders, you know, they turn us into hateful, warmongering, you know, proto-fascists plundering the planet in our insatiable quest for dollars and dross.
00:12:45
Speaker
And so one reason to think about this, and by the way,
00:12:49
Speaker
When I say that this is what happens, I'm not excluding myself from any of these phenomenon.
00:12:56
Speaker
And that would be one reason, Jennifer, I would submit that it's important that all of us think about this to understand the extent to which
00:13:06
Speaker
a lot of our behaviors that we may not be particularly proud of are the unfortunate manifestation of essentially repressed death anxiety, not to resort to psychobabble.
00:13:21
Speaker
And then the hope, though, and here's the upside.
00:13:25
Speaker
And the argument is that, again, these are not our ideas.
00:13:29
Speaker
This goes back to antiquity.
00:13:32
Speaker
The point being that to live a full and rich life, and you know this as well or better than I, requires a mature confrontation and engagement and ultimately acknowledgement and acceptance of the reality of the human condition as it pertains to each of us.
00:13:51
Speaker
And that is that we're going to die.
00:13:55
Speaker
And I like how Albert Camus put it, you know, when he said, come to terms with death thereafter,
00:14:01
Speaker
anything is possible.
Confronting Death and Enhancing Life
00:14:03
Speaker
And that's our other agenda in the book is that it's not just to say, oh, look at all of these horrible things that we do when we're reminded that we're going to die, because ultimately it's not about death.
00:14:17
Speaker
It's about life and returning to the question of how it is that engaging with our finitude is ultimately life enhancing.
00:14:31
Speaker
Yeah, and actually you nearly answered a question that I was going to ask you, which is that, like when I just described there that thinking about death is going to make me drink harder, smoke harder and vote for Donald Trump.
00:14:43
Speaker
That picture, depending on who you are, that's a pretty dire picture.
00:14:48
Speaker
So, you know, should we think about death?
00:14:50
Speaker
I personally am an advocate for thinking about it and I feel like we live more fully.
00:14:54
Speaker
So you kind of actually answered the question ahead of me in that,
00:15:00
Speaker
You believe that while those actions are something we innately do, you do believe that if we think about death as a part of life, the problem is when we don't think about it and it's suddenly put in subliminally, that's where the anxiety comes in.
00:15:19
Speaker
Yes, brilliant, Jennifer.
00:15:20
Speaker
And I think that's an important point that bears repetition.
00:15:25
Speaker
The phenomena that we find in our studies that are unpleasant, you know, we become gluttonous and hateful and so on.
00:15:36
Speaker
Those are in response to really subtle or even unconscious reminders of death.
00:15:42
Speaker
And I like how you put it.
00:15:43
Speaker
We're almost hardwired.
00:15:45
Speaker
When death enters our mind, the first thing that we try to do is to get it out of our minds.
00:15:52
Speaker
And it's when we do that, that it ends up coming back anyway.
00:15:58
Speaker
And that's when we get more hateful and I need more cigarettes and beer and so on.
00:16:04
Speaker
That's different than metaphorically stepping out of that kind of almost automatic, it is an automatic set of defensive processes so that you could metaphorically, you know, render yourself the object of your own subjective inquiry long enough, you know, to clear a space, you know, in your mental horizon.
00:16:30
Speaker
to be able to really think about it explicitly.
00:16:34
Speaker
Yeah, and I think, for me anyway, I think, I mean, he did a lot of good things when he was alive, but I think Steve Jobs summed it up incredibly well when he said that death was maybe the single best invention of life because it's life's change agent and it clears...
00:16:54
Speaker
the way for the new.
00:16:57
Speaker
And that's a very harsh reality in one sense, but it's very true in another sense.
00:17:06
Speaker
It's harsh in none of us want to lose our loved ones.
00:17:10
Speaker
None of us want to lose a child too soon.
00:17:12
Speaker
None of us want to lose our mothers, our brothers, our sisters too soon.
00:17:16
Speaker
But life is cyclical and it doesn't matter what you believe in, whether there is an afterlife or there's not,
00:17:23
Speaker
our current state of affairs is never going to be repeated.
00:17:27
Speaker
It's never going to be the same again.
00:17:29
Speaker
It doesn't really matter what you believe in.
00:17:31
Speaker
And so I think what's fascinating about what he said and what you're saying is that we have a lot of anxiety about it and probably
00:17:41
Speaker
I think do think religion does help us probably that's why religion was invented in a certain way was to give us that soft cushioning of it's okay there's something after this to take away that death anxiety and talk a little bit about because you do talk about it in the book religion and I don't say cults but tribal like people coming together in communities and how how does that help with your death anxiety how does that like all these death cafes that are out right now
00:18:09
Speaker
people coming together to talk about debt.
00:18:12
Speaker
And that could be two very different things.
00:18:13
Speaker
But yeah, if you can give us enlighten a bit about that.
00:18:15
Speaker
Yeah, you know, they are two different things, although clearly overlapping, honestly, in important ways.
00:18:21
Speaker
So I like that juxtaposition of questions, although because I'm in my early senility days, if I forget where we're heading, you'll remind me.
00:18:29
Speaker
So one of the things that we do in the book is to try and provide an overview.
00:18:34
Speaker
And we're not experts on the evolution of religion.
00:18:37
Speaker
except that right now what a lot of people argue, and I think that they're on the right track, is that a religion may have arisen long before people were explicitly conscious or aware of death or had any notion of gods.
00:18:56
Speaker
The word religion comes from a Latin word that means to bind.
Religion, Community, and Death Anxiety
00:19:01
Speaker
And a dead French guy, Emile Durkheim, he said that really a religion arose to foster social coordination and cohesion between individuals, that it really is something that at our best just brings us together.
00:19:19
Speaker
And of course, when we get to the death cafes, I think that comes back to the original.
00:19:24
Speaker
I find this exhilarating because the implication here, and I mean, no disrespect,
00:19:31
Speaker
to those who take issue with a natural explanation for religion.
00:19:36
Speaker
But the fact of the matter is, is that what really underlies religion, when you get right down to it, is commonality.
00:19:45
Speaker
It means to bind.
00:19:47
Speaker
Over time, the argument goes, we began to, as a species, become increasingly self-aware to the point where concerns about death arose.
00:20:01
Speaker
At which point, religious worldviews that provided hopes of immortality were obviously going to be selected for, which is just my way of saying I'm agreeing with you, Jennifer, when we talk about one.
00:20:18
Speaker
important psychological function of religion is to provide comfort in wake of the knowledge of our death.
00:20:27
Speaker
But there's more to it than that.
00:20:31
Speaker
And I can't remember a Swiss scholar, he died recently, Walter Burkert, he wrote a book about religion.
00:20:37
Speaker
And he's like, look,
00:20:38
Speaker
We have religion because we fear death, but we also have it because we love life.
00:20:44
Speaker
And I like to, I think that's awesome.
00:20:46
Speaker
But then by the end of the book, when we're talking about the death cafes, that's in our chapter.
00:20:53
Speaker
I think we call it living with death, where we point out that in our society, and of course, I know from our last meeting that you know this much more than I, that, you know, we live in an essentially death denying culture.
00:21:08
Speaker
But we don't, most people have never seen a dead person.
00:21:12
Speaker
Old people, you know, they go live in other places.
00:21:17
Speaker
And we spend more on cosmetics than we do on education, just to keep from looking old and so on.
00:21:25
Speaker
And the idea of the Death Cafe, and I met John Underwood, who's one of the guys that started it in England.
00:21:33
Speaker
And the point that he made when he started the Death Cafe was, again, I want to have a public space where people are going to feel comfortable talking about the ultimate existential concern that ironically rarely exists.
00:21:53
Speaker
gets into public discourse.
00:21:55
Speaker
So you believe, Sheldon, that we should, we are in a death denial society.
00:22:01
Speaker
And I absolutely agree with you.
00:22:04
Speaker
I mean, plastic surgery and the creams and everything we can to keep us young, keep us alive.
00:22:12
Speaker
There's even, I read a fascinating fact one time where it said that
00:22:18
Speaker
a doctor wouldn't sign a wouldn't necessarily have a DNR because they are would sorry would would have do not resuscitate because they didn't actually believe in all of the tactics we use to keep people alive and I thought that was really interesting because it just goes to show even with the likes of embalming you know I work in the funeral community the likes of embalming keeps us young keeps us pure keeps us looking the way we were before our bodies gave up on us
00:22:48
Speaker
And so all of that I find to be really, really fascinating.
00:22:52
Speaker
And there's a really good book.
00:22:54
Speaker
I don't think I'd actually read it by the time you and I met, Sheldon.
00:22:57
Speaker
It's Catherine Mannix, With the End in Mind.
00:23:00
Speaker
And I've mentioned it on this podcast a couple of times with a couple of different interviewees.
00:23:05
Speaker
And the reason why I loved it so much was it actually, while I might work in the funeral business, the thought of dying obviously does still terrify me.
00:23:16
Speaker
And so I like reading this book, she talks about the actual process of dying.
00:23:25
Speaker
And it actually when I closed it over and put it away, it actually I felt a lot more calmer.
00:23:32
Speaker
I felt more soothed.
00:23:34
Speaker
I had less anxiety about dying.
00:23:37
Speaker
I knew death wasn't necessarily going to affect me.
00:23:39
Speaker
But the process of dying and potentially dying alone and all of the factors that go with it.
00:23:45
Speaker
Yeah, I thought it was a really, really great book.
00:23:48
Speaker
But just to finish off, Sheldon, what would you potentially suggest to people as to go forward and have less death anxiety or to sort of embrace life?
00:23:59
Speaker
Should they read your book?
00:24:01
Speaker
Should they think more about their immortality?
00:24:05
Speaker
What would you have any tips for that?
Embracing Life and Authenticity
00:24:08
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, at the risk of sounding silly, my tip is to propose that there's no one suggestion that would necessarily be suitable for all.
00:24:21
Speaker
You know, we wrote a book and it's awesome when every week a few people around earth say, oh, I read your book and, you know, I feel like I've profited from that.
00:24:33
Speaker
You know, I probably don't hear from the 5,000 people that started the book, but drifted off into a coma after pain.
00:24:41
Speaker
Because I would submit, and again, forgive me if we spoke about this when we last met, but it wouldn't matter because we weren't recording it.
00:24:50
Speaker
I feel like what you all, the young folks who have one foot in the real world and then one foot in this world,
00:25:02
Speaker
that you are potentially more poised to be in a position to put these kinds of ideas in circulation.
00:25:11
Speaker
You know, I guess my main piece of advice for the moment, and which may or may not be useful, but, you know, here we are in the middle of a pandemic, which if it's not obvious, a rather once in a lifetime event of potentially earth shattering
00:25:29
Speaker
existential implications.
00:25:31
Speaker
And on the one hand, for a large chunk of humanity, this has been nothing short of tragic to the point of despair.
00:25:42
Speaker
There's millions of people who are infected.
00:25:46
Speaker
millions who have died worldwide.
00:25:49
Speaker
Moreover, there's a large swatch of humanity that is going to be economically insecure for a long while.
00:25:58
Speaker
But there's also a big chunk of humanity
00:26:01
Speaker
And I'm going to put us in it because here we are sure looking like we slept inside last night and had lunch.
00:26:10
Speaker
For those of us that are lucky enough to be upright and relatively physically secure, I'm going to go, I don't even know which dead philosopher said this, but these kinds of moments can be
00:26:26
Speaker
existentially discombobulating, but they can also be monumentally transformative and uplifting.
00:26:34
Speaker
Because for some people, this has been, even if involuntary, you know, kind of a metaphorical timeout that allows us to step back and for some to really think
00:26:47
Speaker
think, am I doing what I'm doing?
00:26:50
Speaker
Because that is a genuine reflection of what Heidegger called my own self or authentic living, you know, or am I culturally constructed meat puppet, just like a giant hamster on an exercise wheel, you know, forging ahead as if I knew who I am and what I wanted.
00:27:11
Speaker
And when in fact, all you're heading for in 20 or 30 years is, you know, drug rehab after a couple of divorces and so on.
00:27:19
Speaker
So maybe this is so I guess my not even sure if it's relevant to your question, but at this particular moment in time, as maybe absurd as it sounds, this could be a good opportunity for lots of us to take stock.
00:27:36
Speaker
And to be humble, grateful, joyous, and to literally, as, you know, again, as trite as this sounds, I'm trite, but I'm right.
00:27:49
Speaker
It's like, it is great to be alive.
00:27:52
Speaker
And maybe we need a pandemic on occasion to remind us of that.
00:27:58
Speaker
And then to just end where we started, I think we shared the view that, you know, to be fully alive requires that we not deny the reality of the human condition.
00:28:12
Speaker
We accept ourselves as we are as human beings.
00:28:17
Speaker
Absolutely, and I think that's a wonderful part to end on, really and truly, because COVID has landed everybody on their ass, and it didn't matter if you were wealthy, you didn't have two beans to rub together, it didn't matter where in the world you were,
00:28:33
Speaker
it brought everybody to a very, very similar level and it threw mortality in all of our faces.
00:28:42
Speaker
Now, whether you chose to pick up on that is another thing, but I think that's an absolutely imperative note to end on.
Conclusion and Reflections
00:28:49
Speaker
I really do.
00:28:50
Speaker
And it did.
00:28:51
Speaker
I think naturally the whole world
00:28:55
Speaker
had to take stock of their mortality and I think made changes for the better, mostly because of it.
00:29:02
Speaker
Mostly.
00:29:03
Speaker
Some people didn't, absolutely some people didn't and there's not much you can do about that.
00:29:08
Speaker
But I do think anybody that's listening to this today, I think the best thing you can do is what I say to most people most of the time is honestly,
00:29:19
Speaker
The simplest thing you can do is pick up the phone, pick up a mouse and a keyboard, type I love you, text your loved one, give that person a hug, tell that person you have a crush on, you have a crush on them.
00:29:32
Speaker
Like honestly, who doesn't love to be told that somebody cares about them?
00:29:38
Speaker
And it doesn't really matter if you've
00:29:40
Speaker
You know, the garbage man on the street, it doesn't matter.
00:29:44
Speaker
I mean, I say hello to my postman every morning and there is nothing wrong with just a smile and sharing a bit of kindness.
00:29:50
Speaker
And I think that's what all the world needs right now.
00:29:52
Speaker
And I think COVID really shows that.
00:29:54
Speaker
The fact that it, you know, with the masks, it took away our smiles.
00:29:58
Speaker
I just think it's a massively huge thing right now.
00:30:00
Speaker
Yeah.
00:30:01
Speaker
And I think that's amazing.
00:30:03
Speaker
Well, thank you so much.
00:30:04
Speaker
This was really good.
00:30:06
Speaker
I loved it.
00:30:07
Speaker
Thanks.
00:30:07
Speaker
My pleasure.
00:30:10
Speaker
What did you think of that episode, guys?
00:30:12
Speaker
I think he is a super interesting character.
00:30:15
Speaker
I know I probably say that about all my guests, but yeah, it was quite scientific, but definitely nerded out on all the death facts, but I found it quite interesting, and hopefully you guys did too.
00:30:27
Speaker
So send us your comments, feedback, and questions as always to glamruperpodcast at gmail.com, and we'll talk to you next time.