Dear James,
I’m only 19 years old, and I’m afraid of dying alone. Any advice?
Dear Reader,
First of all, you are not “only” 19 years old. Nineteen is a perfectly respectable age at which to be experiencing the terror of the human condition. Especially these days. My own encounter with dizzying finitude didn’t happen until I was 25—but this was pre-internet, pre–authoritarian disruption. Your generation, I think, has aged at warp speed: By the time you’re 16, you’re all anxiety ninjas and grand masters of depression.
From your question, I can’t tell if it’s the eventual snuffing-out of your subjectivity that so appalls you or the idea of having no one there when it happens. Probably some combination of the two, right? We go through this life sealed up in our skull, squinting out through our jaundiced little eyeholes, and we’re lucky if we feel the consoling touch of another—if we get shaken all night long, as AC/DC has it—before our switch gets randomly flicked to the “Off” position. Dying alone: That’s what it comes down to.
Or does it? Because the older I get, and the weirder I get, the more convinced I become that, far from being a bunch of brains spinning in cosmic isolation (which was very much my sense of things when I was a younger man), we are wildly and unstoppably connected—to one another, to the world, to everything. We’re not in exile; we live here. Our bodies are crucibles of sensation; our minds go out to greet reality. And other people, whether we like it or not, are all over us, just as we are all over them. Even you and I, right now, are in a particular kind of rarefied relationship. You may feel alone—you may even want to be alone—but you’re not.
You are, however, in charge. Your life, and its decisions, are your own. You’re the boss. This is the flip side of isolation: autonomy. So claim it. Get out there. Revel in experience. Do things you’ll be proud of. Make the leap, and people will show up for you, I promise. Are we floating in a universal sea of Love? I think we sort of are, especially when it doesn’t feel like it. As a friend in London once said, when he saw me despairing: “Be strong, mate. Be happy.”
Amazed at my own advice,
James
