On avoiding death

While these days back home I haven't been able to see friends and family for obvious reasons, at least I was able to see my grandma. She won't come out of her apartment almost for nothing, my mom takes care of most of the household chores, buying groceries and so on. And when she steps inside my grandma's apartment, she does so wearing a mask and a face shield; mind you, I proceeded in the same way.

In a sense, I guess in this situation we're all intentionally escaping death, either our own, someone else's, or both. And I guess we all go to different lengths to avoid it, we all give up something, some of us more and some of us less. What has surprised me the most during this pandemic is the selfishness of so many people in this regard, not understanding that them not giving up their normality can cost someone else's well-being or ultimately their life.

Overall, anyway, we all just seem to naturally want to perpetuate [our]  life at all costs. Even those aforementioned selfish bastards are laughing until they're not. As some people say, life's purpose seems to be simply to perpetuate itself and nothing else. That's perhaps the thing I find the most odd about suicide: it completely goes against the purpose of life whilst being the only true thing we have a power to choose (as opposed to everything in life, including to live). In a similar vein, I find as somewhat curious the joy that most people find in newborns or small kids, and how in a sense these result more valuable than older lives: a suicide of a middle aged person is intrinsically less tragic than that of a teenager.

These are just spare and somewhat disjoint thoughts on life and death that came to mind this morning and I felt like writing. As Albert Camus, I believe the one truly serious philosophical problem is suicide, and overall I tend to agree for the most part with Emil Cioran's thought that it's not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.

Death And Life, 1908 by Gustav Klimt