Life , Death and COVID-19

“To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.”

I love so many things about Harry Potter, this quote one of them. For a lot of people, it might seem just stupid fiction, but for me, it states a fact of our existence.

Life and death both are facts, I don’t know when we started to cherish one and frowns upon the other. Life and death are two faces of the same coin. It doesn’t matter how we feel about them, they both still facts of this existence. I understand that human nature tries to run away from whatever it doesn’t understand. I completely comprehend that we are scared the most of the mysterious. However, existence will not change to accommodate our feelings and perspectives.                                                                                                            

I want to ask the reader, why death is scary? Why are we obsessed with forever? Why we keep trying to omit that everything comes to an end? Why are we so greedy and want everything forever? For the length of life and existence itself been proved over and over again that everything is temporary and the illusion of permanent doesn’t exist except in our mind. Civilizations, creatures, ideas, problems, and solutions have come and go, and nothing of what once was here cease to exist anymore. As there is arrival, there is a departure, whether we like it or not.

I am not suicidal, nor I glorify death. Simply I accepted death as I accepted life. As I try to make the best of my day, I try to not leaving regrets to take to my grave.  And that has allowed me to live in harmony and peace. Does that mean I have everything I ever wished for? NO. Does that mean I am helpless? NO. I am just in peace and never looked at death as an end of existence. I am intrigued by death, when it comes, I am curious to what is beyond this life, beyond what I know. There might be something awesome, there might be something awful, there might be nothing. But I have faith that I will be fine with whatever comes next as I am fine with this life. We really don’t know how we existed and what is our purpose in this universe, and we are still capable and surviving and managed to adapt to this life. Why do we imagine that we won’t be able to adapt to death and what is after death?

We are collectively glorifying life and tried so hard to avoid death; we overburdened our planet. We overcrowded the earth, and once the existence trying to correct itself, we are fighting back in the name of humanity. People do die every day everywhere. People have died from disease, famines, droughts, floods, storms and many other ways all along history, and once existence has spoken, no one can avoid it. We are trying to delay the inevitable, we are trying to cut the loses, I understand it – very human of us – but the way we address this will change our future drastically. I am not talking about the devastating economic losses we will face soon. I am not talking about casualties and losses (human and material). I am talking about our existence as we know it. We try to trick existence while we don’t understand shit about life. We are trying to “fix” problems and treat diseases. But have we ever stopped and thought of at what cost we are doing that?

 The more we are pushing people to avoid getting sick, the more we are compromising our future as species. Everything we have learned about biology and our evolution, we are just throwing it to the trash and building dependency on governments in the claim that we are technologically advanced enough to face anything. I am not a backward hippie, not anti-vax mom; I am a person who has so much faith in science & technology and has the most respect for that. However, I am a thinker, and I never take what I have been told for granted. I do think of my life and others and have a natural tendency for analysis. As a proud pragmatic person, I see that our continuous dependency on technology and government will eventually hurt us in the long term. We are trying to make people live longer, not through natural selection but through human intervention. Our obsession with avoiding death has not only burdened our planet but as well created an unnatural state of living. We do get sick, our body fights sickness, and we build immunity, and the body gets used to certain conditions. Nowadays, we are trying not to fall ill, even for the slightest sickness we can recover from. We are trying to avoid it at all costs, which is very human. The question is, leaving some diseases out there without a permanent solution can do what in the future? Avoiding it in the short term might seem reasonable if we have a long term strategy to terminate it. But leaving diseases to evolve will harm our future and will cause more causalities over an extended period of time. Many diseases avoided but not terminated is still lurking and might evolve to cause us further harm in the future.

The same at this time, what we are doing with COVID-19 is, we are trying to avoid the virus at the cost of our future. We are trying to protect the health system at the expense of the human future and our evolution. We are trying to look away from the reality check we have been given. No health system, no government, no nation is ever ready for an epidemic to burst. We were just living with the illusion that we reached a technological advancement, which enabled us to fight everything, everything but life as it is. The question here, we will avoid the peak of COVID-19, and it might pass like SARS, MARS, and H1N1 and many others but not thinking of the future and how to terminate a disease is just plain stupid. We have a history of a virus that has hit humanity in many forms, many times posing a real threat to our existence. The solutions we have, either we devote all resources to terminate the disease and contain it in all possible ways using our technological advancement. Or let nature and biology take its way, and we find the best way to build herd immunity. People call it cruelty to risk the lives of the elderly and high risk, I call it saving our future. When we stop glorifying life and hate death, we will see what is happening as a natural process of life. Yes, we all hate it, and we don’t want it near our loved ones or us, but guess what? We really don’t have a choice; either we let life be, and we protect our future and the future of our children, or we ourselves will soon cease to exist due to our own doings. It might happen in the next 10 years it might be 100 years. The bottom line, if we don’t sober up and stop intervening in the course of existence and nature, we will fuck ourselves up. If we want to fight and use our technological advancement to defeat nature, then lets at least do it right.

Can governments only cut on military expenditures and armament ($1822 billion in 2019 alone) and spend the money to advance science and technology? Or governments will do whatever it takes to make people believe they are doing the best while they are hiding their failure and incompetency? The current crisis can answer that clearly for anyone willing to think for themselves.