In Star Trek: Picard and The Good Place, a key message is that life’s very finite nature gives it meaning. The idea is that if life does not end, it has no meaning. No joy.
As Star Trek: Picard put it: “A butterfly that lives forever is really not a butterfly at all.”
Isn’t it? Is annihilation an integral property to what makes a butterfly a butterfly, a human a human, or a loving relationship a a loving relationship? These shows seem to say that it is: Your love only has meaning because it too shall pass.
I find this embrace of death – and not just death, but annihilation – to be very strange. And worrying.
Impending nonexistence does not provide meaning.
It’s a logical leap designed to make one feel better about annihilation after death. The logic does not follow. But the comfort sure does, if one can swallow the lie.
Yet who really finds this comforting? The idea that one’s loving relationships have meaning simply because they will end in utter nothingness?
Further, the other half of the argument is ridiculous. Eternal life does not diminish meaning. It is not, to make a pun, a death sentence.
We can argue about whether eternal life is achievable (via technology or God), but one’s loving relationships do not lose meaning in the absence of annihilation. One’s life does not lose meaning in the absence of annihilation.
Indeed, if those relationships and the memories of acts of love can endure, they only grow richer in meaning. Because there is no point at which life ceases to be.
It is ingrained in us to fear death. To hate it. We can make our peace with it, but many of us live our lives in denial of it. Even rejection of it. The realization of mortality is something that comes to us, and when it does, it’s unpleasant.
This is how it should be. Death is the enemy.
