For thousands of years, humans have perceived death as a force in itself. Death is something that can come and take, and so on. On the other hand, life is often overlooked as a force. No one perceives life as an entity with agency, but we all seem to perceive death that way. I would like to make the proposition that, similar to light and shadow, death is just a lack of life.

The standard view of life is binary, and I agree with this. I believe that indeed it is one or the other, at least when speaking of the physical body. But I disagree with the contents of the binary. Broken down simply, darkness or shadow is nothing but a lack of light. Life and death are the same; death is nothing and is only an absence of life.

The popular view fails to account for one’s pre-life state, as pre-life can’t be described as death. Most belief systems see pre-life as some sort of nonexistence, but none see it as death. So, in this case, retaining life and death as part of the possibilities, there must be a third, which isn’t possible. The solution is to add a lack of life as an option, and to return the system to a binary, death is folded into it. We define the post-life state as a positive, death, but the negative, lack of life, is equivalent and just as valid. In this way, we have our new system. 

I think that this philosophy of life can have the potential for significant self-improvement. With the idea that death is a force, not just a lack of life, you don’t seem to have much agency. It is the supernatural entity of death coming after you, and there’s nothing you can do about it. By removing death as a force and simplifying it to a lack of life, we return agency over our lives back to ourselves. Agency over one’s life subsequently leads to improvement, as you feel a greater responsibility and duty towards something when you own it or have agency over it.

_{Image by Rudy and Peter Skitterians from Pixabay}