Where were you before you were born ?

Ranjan Yumnam *

The author opines that we focus on the recent, the immediate, and the foreseeable future because it is too painful and perplexing to understand the purpose and meaning of our lives in the cosmic scheme of things

Why do we cringe when we see lifeless bodies ? Why do horror movies fascinate us even when we know there will be gory scenes ahead that will startle and give us nightmares ? Our hair stands when we imagine eerie sounds and hallucinations of ghost sightings. Why are we not terrified of the dead chickens but eat them with relish? Or a dead fish, for that matter? We don’t fear the ghosts of ants and elephants.

If they exist, I am sure we will find them funny. What is it about human morbidity that frigh- tens us? The answer may lie in our vicarious fear of our own inevitable death someday, somehow. This universal feeling of dread at the thought of meeting our mortal end is an enduring one. Religions and philosophies console us by dangling the prospects of life after death, reincarnations based on karma and ideas of heaven and hell.

We strive to live virtuously, hoping to enjoy eternal bliss in heaven away from suffering, injustices, and yes, another death end. In some religions, the afterlife perks include easy companionship with virgins to keep the hearth and loins warm. Here on Earth, we behave to earn our place in the real estate of heaven and constantly adjust our moral compass day in and day out.

It is as if once mothers give birth, the children are driven by an unrelenting will to live forward, paradoxically by dying a little every day, bit by bit, like the portions of cakes cut by the knife on successive birthdays. Have you ever imagined viewing birthdays as marking the milestones of a deader you?

DRAMA OF 4000 WEEKS

If the current expected human lifespan is anything to go by, a person will likely expire after living for 4000 weeks. During this period, one has to go through the motions of life, some innocuous and others deemed serious. Sleeping, brushing our teeth in the morning, taking a bath before venturing out to the office, forgetting the keys to the car, etc. take away a significant slice of our lives.

Then, we have the important business of participating in social life, marriage, raising a family, casting our votes, writing an opinion piece like this regardless of whether people will read it or not, paying taxes, and so on. We create meanings out of these rituals and form a private identity in this life. Most of the time, we live for and react to others and the things happening around us.

The agendas could be climate change, wars, famine, inflation, diseases, and technological miracles like AI. This presentism as it is, and how we act under its thrall, further reinforces our notions of living in the greatest period of human civilisation.

But this is an illusion, which psychologists call the availability or recency bias that inflates the importance of our own lifetime circumstances, disregarding the milestones that occurred in history when we didn’t yet exist.

The very act of existing contains within it the seeds of destruction. The moment we saw the light of the day, we were already marching towards our respective Death Days. All the human dramas, joys, and traumas happen during this journey. Politics, business, relationships, wars and our day jobs are all transacted within this limited time frame between one’s birth and the body’s disposal in a cemetery or crematorium.

WE ARE 20 SECS OLD

I won’t ruin your weekend with this morbid talk, but proceed to the agenda of this article : What do you make of the 14 billion years of the universe’s existence before you were born a few years or decades ago ? Who cares, you might say.

But let’s pretend anyway to care about the many lives we didn’t get the chance to live in the past. In the geological clock of 24 hours, the human species have lasted for a mere 20 seconds to compete against other species to reach the top of the food chain. All the recorded history had occurred in the last second of this 24-hour chronology.

This confirms how recent and fleeting our existence is relative to the time scale of Earth’s history. The ancestors of human beings were weak and as vulnerable as any mammal as they lacked any technological advantage. As the brain grew in size and language emerged, humans gradually dominated nature and prevailed over other less clever organisms.

When agriculture revolutionized food production 12000 years ago, human settlements became possible, finally sealing the fate of humankind. The resulting leisure from seden- tary habitation and food security unleashed other pursuits like art, music, and science, and human pro-gress quickened by leaps and bounds.

Though one paragraph above has compressed human history, the devil lies in the details. Conflicts, competition, diseases and natural disasters marked the survival and evolution of human beings for most of their existence on this planet. Wars and turmoil were rather the norm than an exception. Periods of peace were the equivalents of punctuation in a long essay.

Every imaginable human intrigue, political machination, epic of love and betrayal, cruelty, injustices, heroism, spirituality, and bestiality has occurred in the past. This brings us to the original question: why are we too invested in the present, underestimating the gigantic magnitude of human experience in the millennia bygone?

DIFFERENT PLOTS, SAME STORY

We persist in giving myopic attention to recent and present events, inflating self-importance. While ignoring the richness of human evolution and varied experiences during its course, we exaggerate our superiority to the level of neuroticism. We are unduly worried that our choices will make or undo the hard-won human progress. It’s so naïve.

However, there is nothing special with us or happening here that hasn’t happened in the past, except for some tinkering of materials, most of which were extracted from the bowels of Earth. The plots change, but the underlying meta-narrative remains constant.

If an omniscient being had to examine our minuscule life, we would be no more different and ordinary than the countless people who perished battling the same struggles over identity, be-longingness, power, status, wealth, survival, and reproduction. We rarely wonder or investigate our invisibility and void in the past. Yet we succumb to the unknown future that has not yet arrived at our doorsteps.

Not only do we belittle the checkered past, we turn a blind eye to the infinite future. Regardless of our illusion of control, the world will continue for billions of years after we breathe our last.

It is therefore tempting to fixate on the recent, the immediate, and the foreseeable future because it is too painful and perplexing to understand the purpose and meaning of our lives in the cosmic scheme of things. The hordes of people who lived before us were none the wiser, and we are doomed to be as clueless as ever. This uncertainty is both a boon and a curse.

A boon, because we may not like the actual purpose determined for us by a higher power. For all we know, we could be food farmed by aliens or characters enacted in a Matrix-like computer program. So ignorance could be bliss.

This ignorance is also our curse because it frustrates us and makes us scramble in the dark to seek life’s meanings. Some give into mindless slogging, snake oil idols, and superstitions and some get mental illness.

Therefore, prudence lies in lumbering on, to look death in the face and create our islands of meaning. That prudence also includes not trying too hard to make sense of all that we find disturbing, irrational, and insane. And to embrace uncertainty amidst all the chaos that divides societies, nations, ideologies and approaches to a bewildering range of issues.

If there are any valuable suggestions on how to live, one idea is to stop watching the news, disable phone notifications and sleep eight hours a day. The rest, as they say, is all routine. Same as ever. If this strategy doesn’t work and you remain anxious about the future, recall the aeons that passed before you came into existence.

The past is like a blank space until your consciousness ends one day, at which time it will go blank again.