Why is our planet going to hell in a handcart, despite all the climate hype, the warnings of warming? Why aren’t all of us, now we’re informed much more than ever before, curbing over-consumption? How do so many stay so comfortably numb?
Well, for starters, the internet, aka digital culture, has trained our tractable brains to translate the manifest world into symbols. Technology inserts itself (with lots of top-down help) between us and restorative immediacy, stealing our time and invading our psyches; gives us ‘friends’ in return for clicking an icon, arrays them as ‘likes’; reduces dialogue to texting, flirting to sexting; shapes education via algorithms. And as our needs are increasingly met via tokens traversing the ether, we humans (glorified biological organisms, a weakness we ignore at our peril) react to this scam by grasping for more: products, photos, factoids, updates, data storage, vitamins to prop up processed diets, pharmaceuticals to mute our pain, vacuous capitalist fantasy ‘entertainment’…
Because what can we do about polar thaw, mass extinction, soaring homelessness, escalating resource depletion (hence wars), extreme weather and more? Seems we sign online petitions, back pro-renewables politicians, cram insane shitloads of packaging into our recycling bins, and keep using non-renewables like there’s no tomorrow – because although we worship at the altar of YOLO, we still have a conscience, don’t we? You only live once. A comforting notion: here today, gone tomorrow. The prospect of return would present too many moral dilemmas. And who has time to thrash out those? Capitalism and atheism chime like tea and sympathy, trial and error, crashing and burning, smoke and mirrors, fossil fuels and climate change. And how can we withstand the dominant paradigm when we’re vastly outnumbered? If we rebel, we’ll be punished. Locked up/down/out. Cancelled. Publicly shunned.
At twelve, I stopped caring about pleasing my parents. Maybe because I wanted to die for the first time I can recall? That year, I also had my first orgasm. The former experience – of rage, shame, hurt and fear sparked by my mother’s betrayal – marked the darkest pain I’d ever felt, and the latter, the deepest pleasure; I’d found an unprecedentedly empowering way to please myself. Twelve: it’s often the age of traditional tribal initiation. Yet with no cultural context for psychic or hormonal change, I inadvertently underwent secret and solitary initiations.
Since then, I’ve contemplated suicide (and orgasmed) many times. Yet despite the return of suicidal feelings at intervals throughout my adult life, I’ve never considered an overdose. So – slitting my wrists? Too slow: a friend who tried it got impatient and hanged herself. A noose, then? No: too many attempts at hanging fail. Gas? No way: a means supplied by corporations goes against the grain. I’ve mostly envisioned a flying leap from a very high cliff or swimming out into a dark sea until I drown. Engaged a while back in research for a self-harm-themed novel, I read about a suicide who did both. Still alive after surfacing from a long fall into deep water, he struck out for the horizon, a witness reported. No second thoughts.
Just now, I googled ‘most common method of suicide in Australia’. And the algorithm stopped drop-down options as soon as Google caught on. ‘Help is available’ was the top result. ‘Speak with someone today’. Followed by the number for Lifeline. That’s right. It’s okay to die from a vaccine mandated by your workplace, but not cool to take your own life. The appropriate MO is to put your faith in the medico-pharma nexus; resign yourself to death by a thousand cuts, whereby not only the body dies – all remaining will, imagination and spirit are killed. Our culture insists that when we die, we cease to exist. Yet more often these days, any meaningful existence ceases well before death occurs physically.
Towards the end of her long life (in residential aged care: where more than half of all Australians aged 85 and over die), my mother would confuse me with her youngest brother – at least, she’d call me by his name. Although I kept reminding her, she kept forgetting he’d died. He’d had a heart attack according to the official story spread by his only child. In fact, my cousin confided, my 88-year-old uncle had suicided, more likely due to terminal illness than depression. And if so and he’d lingered on, he’d probably have died in hospital.
According to a Lifeline counsellor quoted in Nikki Gemmell’s 2017 memoir, After, of all Australians who suicide, ‘the highest age-specific category is males over eighty-five. These men never ring Lifeline.’ Is that because men of their generation don’t know how to talk about feelings, or at least not to some stranger? Or would they just rather die at home in peace than stuck full of tubes by uniformed staff under fluoro lights, amid beeping machines?
In a four-minute animation suitable for children, Kathryn Mannix, a former palliative care physician, describes the process of dying ‘under normal, or perhaps ideal, circumstances’. Informed by twenty years of experience, she’s a TEDx speaker too: she hopes to dispel our fears about dying by telling us what to expect. Yeah? Fear of death is normal for a biological organism; fear of death aids our odds of survival. But Western fear of death is neurotic. Why would Mannix think we need death to be predictable – so as not to disrupt the somnolence of the average life? To her credit, she advocates dying at home among loved ones instead of in a medical facility, and laments the shift last century to ceding the process to professionals. Death is not a medical event, she says.
The way Mannix tells it, though, most folk don’t die consciously; they drift off before their last breath. Which makes sense. Death is the final stage of a series of transitions (which all of us are engaged in). Yet if we die the way we’ve lived, we won’t be wholly present. Most folk spend their waking time dissociated, distracted – scared to fully live, let alone die, hence our cult of safety, of the virtual. But the shadow of this thanatophobia is killing all life on Earth.
And safetyism suffocates; it kills diversity. Why do most deaths seem so similar to Mannix? Does something about palliative care promote uniformity? Because in the high-care area of the nursing home where my mother and her peers lolled about, deteriorating, all residents were more or less medicated, sometimes needlessly due to failure to review individual cases.
Gemmell’s memoir deals with her mother’s surprise suicide – ahem, euthanasia – after a botched surgery ruined her life. Hooked on booze and opioids to treat chronic pain and dreading slow death in a nursing home, she chose to overdose. And suicide is okay in some nations and states if you can satisfy legal requirements. So a growing cohort of pain-racked elders aspire to medically assisted dying. But why should medical experts decide whether we’re entitled to end our own lives?
So much for autonomy. Because it’s not as if most folk want to die consciously. If this is all there is, better to end your misery painlessly, escape the tyranny of the tiny conscious portion of the brain. Meanwhile, scientific experts exist to demystify (however unconvincingly) woo-woo phenomena such as (increasingly common) NDEs in their crusade to manage all aspects of our time, space and psyches, mediating our interface with reality to keep us shopping and popping our meds instead of becoming more sentient.
observer of times 