The database details criminality over 157 years until 1936, as well as chronicling the lives of some of the justice system’s more notorious enforcers
If death is the final taboo, it might not be for much longer. There has, in recent years, been increasing effort to promote conversations about death and dying, both in the home and in more public settings. For example, death cafes, first launched in Switzerland in 2004, have spread around the world, enabling people to speak about their fears over cake and coffee.
Our reluctance to talk about death is often taken as evidence that we are afraid, and therefore suppress thoughts about it. However, there is little direct evidence to support that we are. So what is a “normal” amount of death anxiety? And how does it manifest itself?
Experimenting with death
Judging by studies using questionnaires, we seem more bothered by the prospect of losing our loved ones than we do about dying ourselves. Such studies also show that we worry more about the dying process – the pain and loneliness involved, for example – than about the end of life itself. In general, when we are asked if we are afraid to die, most of us deny it, and report only mild levels of anxiety. The minority who report high levels of death anxiety are even considered psychologically abnormal – thanatophobic – and recommended for treatment.
On the other hand, our tendency to report only low levels of death anxiety might be a result of our reluctance to admit to our fear, to others and ourselves. Based on this hypothesis, social psychologists have, for almost 30 years now, examined the social and psychological effects of being confronted with our own mortality. In well over 200 experiments, individuals have been instructed to imagine themselves dying.
What’s worse: the death of a loved one or facing our own death?
The first study of this kind was conducted on US municipal court judges, who were asked to set bond for an alleged prostitute in a hypothetical scenario. On average, judges who were confronted with their mortality beforehand set a much higher bail than those who were were not confronted – $455 versus $50. Since then, many other effects have been found among groups including the general population in many different countries.
Besides making us more punitive, thinking about death also increases our nationalistic bias, makes us more prejudiced against other racial, religious and age groups, and leads to other such parochial attitudes. Taken together, these dozens of studies show that being reminded of death strengthens our ties to the groups we belong to, to the detriment of those who are different from us.
Reminders of death also affect our political andreligious beliefs in interesting ways. On the one hand, they polarise us: political liberals become more liberal while conservatives become more conservative. Similarly, religious people tend to assert their beliefs more fervently while nonreligious people disavow more.
On the other hand, these studies have also found that thinking about death tempts us all – religious or otherwise – towards more religious belief in subtle, perhaps unconscious ways. And when the reminder of death is sufficiently powerful and when participants are not mindful of their prior political commitments, liberals as well as conservatives tend to endorse conservative ideas and candidates. Some researchersclaim that this could explain the US political shift to the right after 9/11.
What do the results mean?
But why does the prospect of death make us more punitive, conservative and religious? According to many theorists,reminders of death compel us to seek immortality. Many religions offer literal immortality, but our secular affiliations – such as our nation states and ethnic groups – can provide symbolic immortality. These groups and their traditions are a part of who we are, and they outlive us. Defending our cultural norms can boost our sense of belonging and being more punitive against individuals who violate cultural norms – such as prostitutes – is symptom of this.
Consistent with this interpretation, researchers have also found that reminders of death increase our desire for fame and for children, both of which are commonly associated with symbolic immortality. It turns out that we do want to be immortalised through our work and our DNA.
Thinking about death makes us dream of being famous.
When asked, we do not seem, perhaps not even to ourselves, to fear death. Nor would we guess that thinking about death has such widespread effects on our social attitudes. But there are limits to our introspective powers. We are notoriously bad at predicting how we will feel or behave in some future scenario, and we are similarly bad at working out why we feel the way we do, or evenwhy we have behaved a certain way. So, whether we realise it or not, it seems that to bring death to the surface of our minds is to open Pandora’s box.
So what should we make of these new efforts to demystify death and dying through conversation? It is hard to say. Increasing death’s profile in our imaginations, private and public, might make us all more punitive and prejudiced, as the research found. But then perhaps we get these negative effects precisely because we are unaccustomed to thinking and talking about death.
In exposure therapy, carefully exposing patients to the source of their anxiety – an object, an animal, or even a memory – reduces their fear. In the same way, perhaps this most recent taboo-breaking trend will inoculate us psychologically, and make us more robust in the face of death.
Memoirs rarely tremble with such life as when expressing their author’s death.
A memoir of dying is exceptionally wrenching because we know the end at the beginning, and so meet with an effortful, pulsing person who will soon be neither. Pages rarely tremble with such life as when expressing their author’s death.
End-of-life memoirs have become increasingly prevalent of late. Christopher Hitchens wrote of his demise with customary pugnacity. Oliver Sacks recorded his fading remembrances, as did Tony Judt. Jenny Diski is currently chroniclingthe indignities of her last stretch, while Clive James composes newspaper columns on his future disappearance. Our aging population, granted so many extra years by medical science, anxiously tiptoes toward the dark matter, guided by those articulate enough, unlucky enough, to know what to say.
Often, the memoir starts with a prominent author declaring the diagnosis in a major periodical (Hitchens in Vanity Fair; Sacks in the Times; Diski in TheLondon Review of Books). The diagnosis is usually terminal cancer, whose time frame may lend itself to contemplation, though not to more extensive pursuits. Typically, the author recites the markers of tragedy: foreboding symptoms overlooked, a collapse, the condemning scans, the switch to the wrong side of the window between healthy and ill. Some writers embody Hitchens’s line about “living dyingly,” straining to remain themselves, expressing dark humor and secular defiance, downshifting from existential fears to the banal process of death. Others pore over what they’ve had, been, seen. Touchingly, both Judt and Sacks cite nostalgia for gefilte fish. Food—that first pleasure—can be so important at the end, even when it cannot be swallowed.
Another mode is the lyric goodbye, typified by the poetry of James, particularly “Japanese Maple,” a rare popular hit for contemporary verse when it was published in The New Yorker. Of the maple tree, he wrote:
Come autumn and its leaves will turn to flame.
What I must do
Is live to see that. That will end the game
For me, though life continues all the same.
But a complication followed—among the only pleasant complications available to a terminal patient: James failed to die. Indeed, he continues to write, having survived that maple flaming twice over. In his new column for the Guardian, called “Reports of My Death,” he confesses to a twinge of embarrassment, as if he’d duped everyone with that guff about dropping dead. (A famous case of this desirable awkwardness involved the humorist Art Buchwald, who moved into a Washington hospice, in 2006, expecting to die, only to thrive there, dining on McDonald’s and holding court for months before ultimately moving back out.)
Other end-of-life writing is hortatory: memoirs with lesser literary aspirations but greater motivational ones, such as “The Last Lecture,” by Randy Pausch, a computer-science professor; the book, a parting address about achieving childhood dreams, was a best-seller. Another example is “Chasing Daylight: How My Forthcoming Death Transformed My Life,” by Eugene O’Kelly, an executive at the accounting firm KPMG who spent his final hundred days eschewing his hard-driving ambition in lieu of moral fulfillment. What most end-of-life memoirists share is a desire to wring the essence from what they’ve been—either to clasp on to it or, finally, to release it. These are works of defiance, sometimes escapism. Above all, they are expressions of the noble delusion: create because nobody endures, and create in order that you endure.
A compelling, crushing addition (and, sadly, a subtraction) is “When Breath Becomes Air,” by Paul Kalanithi, a neurosurgeon of immense promise who died of lung cancer, in March, at the age of thirty-seven, having labored on a memoir that stands as a manifesto for the genre, pressing readers to look at the impending darkness. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he writes. “Yet there is no other way to live.” When Kalanithi saw the CT scans of his chest, he surveyed a map of his own death. Others, including his shattered father, insisted that the young man would beat it. Kalanithi was too talented a diagnostician to concur. But a question pursued him: How long have I got left? This prompted a much shared Times Op-Ed that became the seed of his book.
In past centuries, those who were dying might have known that the end neared, but nobody had the tools to estimate when. Today, we have Kaplan-Meier survival curves, and yet doctors grow coy when pressed for a number. Keep up your hope! Kalanithi himself had dodged the subject with patients. When he becomes one himself, he aches to know. His oncologist refuses even to discuss it.
But it is time itself that conditions our behavior, even our identity. When we consider ancient populations whose life expectancy was less than forty years, we picture wretches, limited in scope, and fundamentally different from us as a result. Presumably, our descendants will view us in the same way, as being cursed with the appallingly brief span of eighty-something. For now, that is our anchoring point, an acceptable innings, with seventy too soon, sixty unfairly so, and so on. It’s a pact that the secular make with nothingness: we’ll accept just this life, but give us our share! While healthy, Kalanithi had divvied up his remaining years: twenty as a surgeon and scientist, followed by twenty as an author. Abruptly, he had to recalculate. If ten years remained, he’d devote himself to science. If two, he’d write. Which was it to be?
Raised in suburban New York, then in a small town in Arizona, Kalanithi was a bright son of southern-Indian immigrants, his father a cardiologist, his mother a trained physiologist, although she is recalled in his book more as her son’s minister for education. Her academic urging propelled him toward English literature at Stanford, which he studied along with human biology. At the graduate level, however, literary studies frustrated him, touching on the stuff of life, but with wool rather than with steel. The scalpel called. Soon, he was dissecting cadavers at Yale Medical School, where, he remembers, a surgeon drifted in to explain various scars on a corpse, his elbows leaning on the dead man’s face. Kalanithi returned to Stanford for his neurosurgical residency, and he excelled. He stood at the brink of a glittering career. But there was the weight loss, the back pain, the suspicions batted away. Chances are it’s just …
When the elderly face death, they dread losing what they’ve had. When the young face death, they dread losing what they haven’t had. Which is worse? Kalanithi’s wife worries that, if they conceive a child, it could render his farewell more excruciating. But life, he argues, is not about avoiding suffering.
Meds stabilize his disease for a spell. He soldiers through the completion of his residency. On a subsequent scan, a large new tumor appears. “I was neither angry nor scared. It simply was. It was a fact about the world, like the distance from the sun to the earth.” He conducts his last case as a doctor, his final walk from surgery, witnessing the dissolution of an identity so arduously attained. Kalanithi attended the birth of his newborn daughter, and grew deeply attached to her. “I hope I’ll live long enough that she has some memory of me.” Cady was eight months old when Kalanithi died. “Words,” he writes, “have a longevity I do not.”
The literary world has been circling the subject of death for at least a decade, notably via acclaimed accounts of bereavement such as Joan Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking” and “Blue Nights”; Kay Redfield Jamison’s “Nothing Was the Same”; and Joyce Carol Oates’s “A Widow’s Story.” Academic thinkers are joining in, too; among the volumes appearing this past year are “The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life,” by the psychology professors Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski; “The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains,” by Thomas W. Laqueur, a historian; and “The Black Mirror: Looking at Life Through Death,” by Raymond Tallis, a former professor of geriatrics.
All this attention comes not from a greater understanding of mortality but from a greater ignorance of it. The promises of religion are replaced by the promise of science, yet medicine fails to vanquish its ultimate foe, instead rendering death more obscure, a matter for procrastination. The preëminent thanatophobe of our day, the novelist Julian Barnes, wrote a two-hundred-and-fifty-page memoir on his fear of nonexistence, “Nothing to Be Frightened Of.” The title isn’t intended to be soothing: by “nothing” he means “nothingness.” He writes, “If death ceased to be talked about when it first really began to be feared, and then more so when we started to live longer, it has also gone off the agenda because it has ceased to be there, with us, in the house.”
In richer parts of the world, death is likely to arrive in a nursing home, or in a hospital—precisely where we most dread spending our dwindling hours. The exit from life, as Atul Gawande observes in his treatise “Being Mortal,” has become overly medicalized in recent decades, causing us to forget centuries of wisdom. We have ended up with a system that treats the body while neglecting its occupant. But the discontent is mounting, Gawande says: “We’ve begun rejecting the institutionalized version of aging and death, but we’ve not yet established our new norm. We’re caught in a transitional phase.”
How much should each of us be pondering death? Some people flee the topic. (Few of them, I suspect, have read this far.) Others brood over it. As a matter of preparation, the death-minded aren’t necessarily better off, since they are so unlikely to predict their manner of departure. (How many flight-phobics will fall to earth clutching their chests?) Nor does one know the person to whom one’s own death will occur, given how the violence of disease changes a patient.
But death contemplation is more than prep work. It’s a world view, with nothingness conferring meaning on what precedes, just as a novel gains meaning from its conclusion and would lose sense were it to patter on interminably. Writers—perhaps from a vocational need for endings—seem especially attuned to the looming conclusion of themselves. Or maybe it’s the other way around: those gripped by thoughts of death are prone to artistic pursuits, in the hope that something of themselves will remain.
When medieval painters incorporated memento mori into their compositions—the skull dabbed into a portrait of courtly gents, say—they were proclaiming, “Beware earthly delights, for hell is everlasting!” In our times, the skull has become a fashion accessory or an attempt at irony in dreary artworks. The contemporary emblem of death is the bucket list, inverting the memento mori into “Partake of earthly delights, for life won’t be everlasting!”
The problem is not a lack of spirituality, though. The problem is how to partake of earthly delights. Should one engage in pleasures at the end? Should one strive for lasting accomplishment? The answer depends on what haunted Kalanithi: How long have I got? The answer is so hard to find, harder still to admit. Paradoxically, time is precisely where our society errs in handling death, having licensed our doctors to extend existence, irrespective of the character of the additional weeks. Unfortunately, dying is something we are figuring out only through doing. And now perhaps through the telling, too.
Jane Faller is embraced by her longtime friend Deb Anthes after she changed Faller’s arm bandage on Oct. 1 in Republic, Wash. Injured in a fall, Faller’s arm required daily care from Deb, who would visit her as Jane’s husband, Bob Faller, lay in hospice care.
Bob Faller died after a day of fighting and struggling. Naked and fierce, gripped by death’s delirium, he rolled on the floor tearing paper into tiny shreds. He tried to flush his pants down the toilet.
Jane, his wife of 58 years, was alone in their rural Republic house, terrified. Helpless.
When a new day dawned, she called a hospice nurse, who told Jane to increase her husband’s morphine dose to every two hours. Bob eventually settled, slept, and slowly let his body shut down.
Longtime friend Steve Anthes was with Jane as Bob, 79, took his final breath. It was Oct. 19, nearly 18 months after Bob was diagnosed with throat cancer, 18 months of dying slowly in the forests far away from hospitals, tubes and machines. It was the ending he chose.
Now a new struggle begins for Jane. Can this 77-year-old woman live alone in the winter in remote Ferry County with little money and medical bills arriving daily?
A nondescript box containing the ashes of Bob Faller sits atop a hutch he built by hand in his earlier years. “There’s pieces of furniture he built all over the country,” Jane said.
Relief brings feelings of guilt
“It’s quiet now,” Jane said shortly after her husband’s death. Her voice was strong but soft over the phone, the relief evident.
Yet within an hour, her house filled with people and the chaos of dying’s aftermath. The coroner, friends bearing containers of food, phone calls, decisions.
By 9 p.m., Jane sat in near-darkness on her couch, alone. Murphy the dog slept on the floor near her feet. Bob’s hospital bed was around the corner, empty.
“I feel guilty at feeling so relieved,” she said. “I’m really going to sleep tonight.”
Three months later, Bob’s ashes are in a gray plastic box on a beautiful wooden shelf that he crafted with his own hands years ago. Jane carefully removed the lid, exposing a plastic bag of ash. She put her nose near the bag and took a big sniff. She shrugged. At first she talked to him a lot, lit candles. Not so much now.
Jane’s unsure what she will do with the ashes, other than eventually spread them somewhere in nature. It doesn’t matter right now as snow falls outside the window and each day presents more pressing problems and challenges.
Two weeks ago the weather warmed and snow slid from the roof, burying the deck so she couldn’t open the door. She called for help.
A few weeks before that, the ancient hot water heater leaked at least 25 gallons onto the floor and into the crawl space under the house. She called the local hardware store for the name of a plumber, who inspected the damage and asked for a $400 check to buy a new heater and supplies. The man was gone several hours, long into the evening; Jane panicked. At one point she held her cramping stomach, wrought with stress. But he eventually returned and by 9:30 p.m. had the tank installed and working. She paid another $125 in labor costs and then had to buy a new faucet for the sink. Her hand shook as she wrote the check.
After visiting her daughter in Issaquah, Washington, for Thanksgiving, she returned home and turned on the kitchen light. It crashed from the ceiling.
Jane Faller dons a coat in her mudroom containing canned goods on Wednesday. Everywhere she looks, she sees reminders of her late husband. Jane and Bob canned the goods last summer and they remain stored on a shelf he built for them next to a collection of his favorite hats.
Cumulative stress taking its toll
Jane knew living alone would be challenging, but she wasn’t prepared for the reality of it.
A year of stresses have snowballed: Bob’s illness and mental highs and lows. The nasty fall while walking her dog that turned into a three-hour ambulance ride and a weeklong stay in a Spokane hospital. The missed time with her dying husband because of her hospitalization. The nearby forests that erupted in wildfires this summer, the same week Bob started hospice care, forcing them to prepare to evacuate.
Now there’s snow and ice and long, dreary days. After spending months with her arm immobilized in a brace and then in physical therapy, Jane’s arm and hand still hurt. The scars are purple and angry. Her fingers ache.
Jane is timid about walking, although she used to hike miles a day in all weather. She hasn’t resumed her yoga practice. Her legs and feet are achy.
“She’s keeping a good face on it,” said Cherie Gorton of Rural Resources, who checks on Jane at least weekly and recently sat with Jane as she opened piles of medical bills. “I think it’s to the point where she probably needs to get out more. Accept invitations. But I know that is really hard to do.”
Gorton called Jane’s daughter in Issaquah, Cat Kelley, to see if she could help her mother make sense of the mounting medical bills from the hospital stay and ambulance ride. Jane has Medicare, but that only covers a percentage of the bills. She has a few too many dollars in her savings account to qualify for Medicaid. Jane and Bob took out a reverse mortgage that covers their mortgage payment, and she receives Social Security. Her son in North Carolina recently created a GoFundMe account to ask people for donations.
The financial woes weigh heavy on Jane. She doesn’t like owing people. Her kids want her to wait for all the bills to arrive so she knows how much she owes. Then they will figure out a plan.
“It makes me really upset,” Jane said, after a recent trip to the mailbox, which most always contains a bill. “It’s horrible.”
On Oct. 20, the day following Bob’s death, daughter Cat Kelley holds Jane’s healing arm as the two go for a walk on the Fallers’ Republic, Wash., property.
Once estranged, the kids have visited their mom
Jane and Bob chose an adventurous, nomadic life at the cost of not having more than a few thousand dollars in savings. They never thought about getting old, getting sick or having medical expenses.
Yet Jane doesn’t regret their independent lifestyle and her husband’s dreamy, back-to-the-land mentality.
Kelley, Jane’s daughter, said her mom recently told her that’s she’s trying to remember only the good things about her life with Bob.
“That will be stuck in my mind forever,” Kelley said. “I like it.”
The Fallers’ romance with nature, however, hasn’t been embraced by their four living children.
“That’s how she wants to live,” Kelley said recently. “She has something in her that thrives on that.”
All the children have rebelled against their parents’ hippie lifestyle. In subtle ways, they have all alluded to the fact that having Bob as their father wasn’t easy. He was gruff, demanding.
Today all the Faller children are financially conservative, have stable, traditional jobs and live in large houses in the suburbs. They drive nice cars and buy material things.
Kelley, an attorney who no longer practices, proudly has three bathrooms in a big house. It has a generator so she is never without electricity. She said she will never again live like a squatter, as she believes the family did when they homesteaded in Canada and lived in a shack without running water or a toilet and where her mom cooked over an open fire.
The result was something of an estrangement between the children and Bob, and by association, Jane.
Since Bob’s death, three of the children have reconnected, however, jointly visiting their mom in November to help her prepare for winter and sort through Bob’s possessions. Kelley said it’s relieved a lot of family tension.
Before Bob died, one of his grandsons, Bobby, came for a rare visit, to say goodbye and make peace. Afterward, Bob would talk about the visit until his voice gave out. He reiterated the importance of family, even when people don’t agree and view the world differently. Afterward, Bob felt energized, somehow released from his burdens. Perhaps it was that connection he needed, proof that the Faller tenacity lives on.
With that same tenacity, Jane is reaching deep into her adventurous soul and said she intends to stay put on her beloved land. She looks through seed catalogs by the wood stove. Friends are plenty, checking on her, plowing the driveway, helping in any way she needs. This is home.
“I’m staying as long as I can,” she said with her girlish giggle. “We’ll see what happens.”
Jane Faller eats dinner by herself as snow settles outside her home in Republic, Wash., on Tuesday. Her children worry about her making it through the winter, but her friends Steve and Deb Anthes regularly check in on her, and a neighbor plows her driveway. Still, the solitude can be unrelenting. “It’s an empty home,” she said.
Sometimes when something unbelievable happens, it’s so outrageous (usually in a good way) that it seems like you’re in a dream.
Life is what you make of it. So if you dare to dream, envision what you want it to be – it becomes your reality. It goes right along with the saying “You can be anything you want to be…”
In dreams anything is possible, impossible becomes possible. In life there are limitations with unseen forces that work along with our motives to confuse us more on the path to fulfillment. Life is but a dream – nothing is so easy as to dream it and make it happen right that moment without obstacles standing in way.
Life is a bitch. Then you die. So while staring at my navel the other day, I decided that that bitch happens in four stages. Here they are.
Stage One: Mimicry
We are born helpless. We can’t walk, can’t talk, can’t feed ourselves, can’t even do our own damn taxes.
As children, the way we’re wired to learn is by watching and mimicking others. First we learn to do physical skills like walk and talk. Then we develop social skills by watching and mimicking our peers around us. Then, finally, in late childhood, we learn to adapt to our culture by observing the rules and norms around us and trying to behave in such a way that is generally considered acceptable by society.
The goal of Stage One is to teach us how to function within society so that we can be autonomous, self-sufficient adults. The idea is that the adults in the community around us help us to reach this point through supporting our ability to make decisions and take action ourselves.
But some adults and community members around us suck.1 They punish us for our independence. They don’t support our decisions. And therefore we don’t develop autonomy. We get stuck in Stage One, endlessly mimicking those around us, endlessly attempting to please all so that we might not be judged.2
In a “normal” healthy individual, Stage One will last until late adolescence and early adulthood.3 For some people, it may last further into adulthood. A select few wake up one day at age 45 realizing they’ve never actually lived for themselves and wonder where the hell the years went.
This is Stage One. The mimicry. The constant search for approval and validation. The absence of independent thought and personal values.
We must be aware of the standards and expectations of those around us. But we must also become strong enough to act in spite of those standards and expectations when we feel it is necessary. We must develop the ability to act by ourselves and for ourselves.
Stage Two: Self-Discovery
In Stage One, we learn to fit in with the people and culture around us. Stage Two is about learning what makes us different from the people and culture around us. Stage Two requires us to begin making decisions for ourselves, to test ourselves, and to understand ourselves and what makes us unique.
Stage Two involves a lot of trial-and-error and experimentation. We experiment with living in new places, hanging out with new people, imbibing new substances, and playing with new people’s orifices.
In my Stage Two, I ran off and visited fifty-something countries. My brother’s Stage Two was diving headfirst into the political system in Washington DC. Everyone’s Stage Two is slightly different because every one of us is slightly different.
Stage Two is a process of self-discovery. We try things. Some of them go well. Some of them don’t. The goal is to stick with the ones that go well and move on.
Stage Two is a process of self-discovery. We try things. Some of them go well. Some of them don’t. The goal is to stick with the ones that go well and move on.
Stage Two lasts until we begin to run up against our own limitations. This doesn’t sit well with many people. But despite what Oprah and Deepak Chopra may tell you, discovering your own limitations is a good and healthy thing.
You’re just going to be bad at some things, no matter how hard you try. And you need to know what they are. I am not genetically inclined to ever excel at anything athletic whatsoever. It sucked for me to learn that, but I did. I’m also about as capable of feeding myself as an infant drooling applesauce all over the floor. That was important to find out as well. We all must learn what we suck at. And the earlier in our life that we learn it, the better.
So we’re just bad at some things. Then there are other things that are great for a while, but begin to have diminishing returns after a few years. Traveling the world is one example. Sexing a ton of people is another. Drinking on a Tuesday night is a third. There are many more. Trust me.
Your limitations are important because you must eventually come to the realization that your time on this planet is limited and you should therefore spend it on things that matter most. That means realizing that just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should do it. That means realizing that just because you like certain people doesn’t mean you should be with them. That means realizing that there are opportunity costs to everything and that you can’t have it all.
There are some people who never allow themselves to feel limitations — either because they refuse to admit their failures, or because they delude themselves into believing that their limitations don’t exist. These people get stuck in Stage Two.
These are the “serial entrepreneurs” who are 38 and living with mom and still haven’t made any money after 15 years of trying. These are the “aspiring actors” who are still waiting tables and haven’t done an audition in two years. These are the people who can’t settle into a long-term relationship because they always have a gnawing feeling that there’s someone better around the corner. These are the people who brush all of their failings aside as “releasing” negativity into the universe or “purging” their baggage from their lives.
At some point we all must admit the inevitable: life is short, not all of our dreams can come true, so we should carefully pick and choose what we have the best shot at and commit to it.
But people stuck in Stage Two spend most of their time convincing themselves of the opposite. That they are limitless. That they can overcome all. That their life is that of non-stop growth and ascendance in the world, while everyone else can clearly see that they are merely running in place.
In healthy individuals, Stage Two begins in mid- to late-adolescence and lasts into a person’s mid-20s to mid-30s.4 People who stay in Stage Two beyond that are popularly referred to as those with “Peter Pan Syndrome” — the eternal adolescents, always discovering themselves, but finding nothing.
Stage Three: Commitment
Once you’ve pushed your own boundaries and either found your limitations (i.e., athletics, the culinary arts) or found the diminishing returns of certain activities (i.e., partying, video games, masturbation) then you are left with what’s both a) actually important to you, and b) what you’re not terrible at. Now it’s time to make your dent in the world.
Stage Three is the great consolidation of one’s life. Out go the friends who are draining you and holding you back. Out go the activities and hobbies that are a mindless waste of time. Out go the old dreams that are clearly not coming true anytime soon.
Then you double down on what you’re best at and what is best to you. You double down on the most important relationships in your life. You double down on a single mission in life, whether that’s to work on the world’s energy crisis or to be a bitching digital artist or to become an expert in brains or have a bunch of snotty, drooling children. Whatever it is, Stage Three is when you get it done.
Stage Three is all about maximizing your own potential in this life. It’s all about building your legacy. What will you leave behind when you’re gone? What will people remember you by? Whether that’s a breakthrough study or an amazing new product or an adoring family, Stage Three is about leaving the world a little bit different than the way you found it.
Stage Three ends when a combination of two things happen: 1) you feel as though there’s not much else you are able to accomplish, and 2) you get old and tired and find that you would rather sip martinis and do crossword puzzles all day.
In “normal” individuals, Stage Three generally lasts from around 30-ish-years-old until one reaches retirement age.
People who get lodged in Stage Three often do so because they don’t know how to let go of their ambition and constant desire for more. This inability to let go of the power and influence they crave counteracts the natural calming effects of time and they will often remain driven and hungry well into their 70s and 80s.5
Stage Four: Legacy
People arrive into Stage Four having spent somewhere around half a century investing themselves in what they believed was meaningful and important. They did great things, worked hard, earned everything they have, maybe started a family or a charity or a political or cultural revolution or two, and now they’re done. They’ve reached the age where their energy and circumstances no longer allow them to pursue their purpose any further.
The goal of Stage Four then becomes not to create a legacy as much as simply making sure that legacy lasts beyond one’s death.
This could be something as simple as supporting and advising their (now grown) children and living vicariously through them. It could mean passing on their projects and work to a protégé or apprentice. It could also mean becoming more politically active to maintain their values in a society that they no longer recognize.
Stage Four is important psychologically because it makes the ever-growing reality of one’s own mortality more bearable. As humans, we have a deep need to feel as though our lives mean something. This meaning we constantly search for is literally our only psychological defense against the incomprehensibility of this life and the inevitability of our own death.6 To lose that meaning, or to watch it slip away, or to slowly feel as though the world has left you behind, is to stare oblivion in the face and let it consume you willingly.
What’s the Point?
Developing through each subsequent stage of life grants us greater control over our happiness and well-being.7
In Stage One, a person is wholly dependent on other people’s actions and approval to be happy. This is a horrible strategy because other people are unpredictable and unreliable.
In Stage Two, one becomes reliant on oneself, but they’re still reliant on external success to be happy — making money, accolades, victory, conquests, etc. These are more controllable than other people, but they are still mostly unpredictable in the long-run.
Stage Three relies on a handful of relationships and endeavors that proved themselves resilient and worthwhile through Stage Two. These are more reliable. And finally, Stage Four requires we only hold on to what we’ve already accomplished as long as possible.
At each subsequent stage, happiness becomes based more on internal, controllable values and less on the externalities of the ever-changing outside world.
Inter-Stage Conflict
Later stages don’t replace previous stages. They transcend them. Stage Two people still care about social approval. They just care about something more than social approval. Stage 3
people still care about testing their limits. They just care more about the commitments they’ve made.
Each stage represents a reshuffling of one’s life priorities. It’s for this reason that when one transitions from one stage to another, one will often experience a fallout in one’s friendships and relationships. If you were Stage Two and all of your friends were Stage Two, and suddenly you settle down, commit and get to work on Stage Three, yet your friends are still Stage Two, there will be a fundamental disconnect between your values and theirs that will be difficult to overcome.
Generally speaking, people project their own stage onto everyone else around them. People at Stage One will judge others by their ability to achieve social approval. People at Stage Two will judge others by their ability to push their own boundaries and try new things. People at Stage Three will judge others based on their commitments and what they’re able to achieve. People at Stage Four judge others based on what they stand for and what they’ve chosen to live for.
The Value of Trauma
Self-development is often portrayed as a rosy, flowery progression from dumbass to enlightenment that involves a lot of joy, prancing in fields of daisies, and high-fiving two thousand people at a seminar you paid way too much to be at.
But the truth is that transitions between the life stages are usually triggered by trauma or an extreme negative event in one’s life. A near-death experience. A divorce. A failed friendship or a death of a loved one.
Trauma causes us to step back and re-evaluate our deepest motivations and decisions. It allows us to reflect on whether our strategies to pursue happiness are actually working well or not.
What Gets Us Stuck
The same thing gets us stuck at every stage: a sense of personal inadequacy.
People get stuck at Stage One because they always feel as though they are somehow flawed and different from others, so they put all of their effort into conforming into what those around them would like to see. No matter how much they do, they feel as though it is never enough.
Stage Two people get stuck because they feel as though they should always be doing more, doing something better, doing something new and exciting, improving at something. But no matter how much they do, they feel as though it is never enough.
Stage Three people get stuck because they feel as though they have not generated enough meaningful influence in the world, that they make a greater impact in the specific areas that they have committed themselves to. But no matter how much they do, they feel as though it is never enough.8
One could even argue that Stage Four people feel stuck because they feel insecure that their legacy will not last or make any significant impact on the future generations. They cling to it and hold onto it and promote it with every last gasping breath. But they never feel as though it is enough.
The solution at each stage is then backwards. To move beyond Stage One, you must accept that you will never be enough for everybody all the time, and therefore you must make decisions for yourself.
To move beyond Stage Two, you must accept that you will never be capable of accomplishing everything you can dream and desire, and therefore you must zero in on what matters most and commit to it.
To move beyond Stage Three, you must realize that time and energy are limited, and therefore you must refocus your attention to helping others take over the meaningful projects you began.
To move beyond Stage Four, you must realize that change is inevitable, and that the influence of one person, no matter how great, no matter how powerful, no matter how meaningful, will eventually dissipate too.
And life will go on.
Footnotes
Often this occurs because the adults/community themselves are still stuck in Stage One.↵
Some people who get stuck in Stage One get stuck because they come to believe that they will never be able to fit in. These people usually succumb to some form of distraction, depression or addiction.↵
I put normal in quotes because, really, what the fuck is normal?↵
Stages can overlap to a certain extent. Transitioning between them is never black/white. It happens gradually. And often with some emotional stress and major lifestyle changes.↵
This applies to the rare individuals who are talented and capable enough to still remain highly influential and relevant into their 70s and 80s as well. Stage Three doesn’t end until the desire for some peace and quiet outweighs one’s ability to affect change in the world. Some people die without ever leaving Stage Three.↵
Research shows that generally people become happier and more satisfied as their lives go on.↵
One way to think about it is that people who are stuck at Stage Two always feel as though they need more breadth of experience, whereas Stage Three people get stuck because they always feel as though they need more depth.↵
Adam Conover’s truTV show Adam Ruins Everything is airs the perfect episode this week: “Adam Ruins Death.” Among the death-related subjects Conover breaks down in the episode is how the American funeral industry takes advantage of grief for huge profits, and if Conover has his way, a whole lot of people will be making — or revising — their own funeral plans.
Unfortunately we all die, and today had to come. If anything it’s a relief. Between my old age and failing kidneys, every day was becoming increasingly uncomfortable — These last few weeks, especially. None the less, I did my best to enjoy each and every day.
Since today could not be avoided, we decided to make an event out of it. Who doesn’t want to spend their last moments having a good time with loved ones?
My Breakfast
You can’t start any day without a healthy breakfast — let alone second breakfast, or elevensies, but I digress. Today was no exception, but we had to take it over the top.
I really enjoyed my breakfast
My human, Michael, made me a wonderful decadent breakfast with my favorite things: Fancy Feast Gravy Lovers (Beef) with Archetype powered rabbit mixed in. It may not sound great to you, but YUM!
I *REALLY* enjoyed my breakfast
Sunbathing
I think I overate. So good. So full. Need to relax.
Look! The sun!
Oh, yeah.Eating is so much work
Oh wait, I am in the middle of telling a story…
Brushing and reminiscing
Once I recovered from my breakfast-sun coma, I spent some time with my humans, Mike and Tracy. They brushed me, petted me, and we talked about my life.
Right… there…
We talked about how I was born in New York City in 1994.
A t-shirt my first human, Sui, designed based on me, in 2002.
We talked about my first human, Sui and how much I miss her. I used to climb up the ladder of her loft bed, in the East Villiage. I’d follow her too close and occasionally she’d end up stepping on me. She made an awesome t-shirt based on me.
We talked about how my human, Michael, won my heart with his constant affection. I claimed him as mine in 1999 — When he would go to work, he would pet me goodbye. The day I decided he was mine, I grabbed his hand when he went to leave, and pulled him back. Literally! I didn’t want to let him go, and stayed with him the next 16 years.
Me, Newt, and Mulder in 2007
We talked about my bully of a brother, Mulder (1994–2009), who I still loved, and miss. He was always the outgoing one, and twice my size. He wasn’t so bad most of the time, but occasionally he was so mean to me.
We talked about moving to Colorado and all the years there.
We talked about the years with the dog, Ripley (2005-?) — I never liked him. He was never mean to me, he was just a dog. Tried to smell my butt all the time. Ick!
We talked about my adopted sister, Newt (2006–2009). She was annoying, but truly I didn’t mind her as much as I let on. Such a young ball of energy, and sadly lived up to the bit about curiosity and cats.
We also talked about moving to Seattle, and how I decided to stop being so shy. One day I was curious, so started going out and introducing myself to people. It was amazing!
We talked about my final human, Tracy. She was reluctant, at first. Eventually I won her over and claimed her as mine. She was always so affectionate to me. She was always there to help Michael take care of my health needs this last year.
So much affection todayI decided Michael needed help learning fashion photography. Here I am directing him and the model.
So much affection today
After so much talking and affection, I needed a break
Resting and Health
When cats get as old as I do, it often comes with health complications. I’m certainly no exception. because of it, I need to rest. More and more every day.
My kitty stairs and bed. I’m so weak I can’t hop 12-inches any more, let alone climb it.So cumfy, back in the sun again!
After a year, I’m barely able to walk any more. My body aches and I’m so tired. After a final vet visit, we discovered my kidneys are in the final stages of failure. At this point my health is declining by the day. Don’t even remind me of the grand-mal seizures, they suck!
Rather than have me slowly suffer over the next few weeks (at most), we decided to have a relatively happy ending.
Final Moments
Not long after getting into my bed did I finally fall asleep. I was so tired from the day’s activities that I didn’t even awake when the vet arrived. That’s a good thing, it would have made me anxious.
While laying there I felt a prick on my side. By time I realized what was happening, the drugs were already sedating me.
After that, Michael picked me up one last time, and held me as a drifted away.
Final Thoughts
One of the things Michael always loved about me is that no matter how tough life was for us, I was always affectionate and loving. I always adapted, and tried to make the best of a situation, faster than any other cat he’s known.
If you don’t try to enjoy every good moment, why bother living? We should enjoy every moment we get.
Oh yeah, and and last night I left a gift for my humans to remember me by. Don’t ruin the surprise!
