Philosophy
Psychology
Existentialism
Personal Development
Attachment
Mortality
Fear of Failure
Essays
Permanence
The relief is that we're all going to die, and in fact we're all deteriorating in a multitude of ways. The deliberation of death should instruct you in the perils of attachment, in remaining light-hearted, hardly taking life too seriously.
This is not a nihilistic outlook, far from it. There is a beautiful wonder to the shortness of life that makes it significant. It is precisely when we take everything too seriously that we stumble; fearful of failure, dismissive of death, paralysed by terror.
All these would resolve themselves if one gave up his desires to preserve permanence, and was willing to lose them if they were threatened. But, we live in a world of unsound fixation with everything that is stroked by death, and will be taken from us.
And of course, our possessions were never truly ours to begin with, they were briefly in our possession, but they're not ours. If they were, they wouldn't be taken away. But, it is precisely our fixation with what isn't ours that causes the most misery.
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