Death

2011? Jesus, how did you arrive here - on your dinosaur? Click here to go to hencewise.com, and stop a weirdo holding a candle in the dark, looking all dramatic and old-fashioned.

According to numbers and science and stuff, 100% of us are going to die. That’s a lot.

Yet despite this important, common event being one that we will all share regardless of race, sex and bank balance, the fact of our mortality is the one that we collectively seem the most poorly adjusted to. It’s the topic that we try to think and talk about the least to avoid unpleasantness, and yet the one that has caused the most problems for our species since we became the only animals clever and arrogant and silly enough to start worrying about it. Indeed, Professor Numbers from the University of Guessing says that 90% of the people on the planet are still so afraid of dying that they spend their entire lives pretending and telling each other that they won’t, and choose instead to believe that they’re going to come back immediately as a butterfly or live forever in a big cake in the sky.

The reason that these childish fantasies have persisted through thousands of years of science, philosophy and logic, is, of course, that we still don’t know what happens when we die. More specifically – because we do know what happens when other people die (they become suddenly, infinitely boring, then later smell funny and melt) – we do not know how to reconcile our weird, subjective experience of reality (our consciousness, or ‘soul’ if you want) with the idea of an objective universe without us in it to experience it. Sentences like that aside, we literally can’t imagine not existing. We’re very used to it, and we’ve never experienced the opposite. It’s impossible for us to think about what it’s like to not think.

Yet we know that one day we are going to die, we know that every living second brings it closer, and we know there is absolutely no way to cheat it.

It is no wonder, then, that the lack of any right answer to a question that fully changes everything terrifies us more than the thought of being locked in a room with Mel Gibson and some gin. And it is no further wonder that the impossibility of disproving any claim about death is what protects religion’s attempts to have a cheeky guess, and why people desperately want and try so, so, so hard to believe those guesses regardless of how little they seem to make sense or explain anything.

However, just because we cannot be Right does not mean that we cannot be Less Wrong, and luckily we don’t even have to die to realise that some of humanity’s biggest, or at least latest, theories aren’t entirely convincing. Take the Judeo-Christian idea of Heaven, for example, which looks absolutely lovely in the brochures but makes about as much sense in the real world as trying to give a surprise reflexology massage to a sleeping alligator.

We can forget entirely that Hell sounds exactly like the kind of place humans would invent to scare their kids into eating their peas, that separating people in to ‘good’ and ‘bad’ is a moral system about as complex as Danny Dyer’s acting, and that concepts like pleasure are entirely impossible without equal and opposite kicks-in-the-balls to compare them to, and dissect the notion of Heaven rationally, logically, and sarcastically, to figure out if it contains any impossibilities or paradoxes.

The idea of the Christian afterlife (and no other religion is much different) is that a being that exists separate to everything in our universe in an unknowable dimension outside of space and time, that has existed forever, don’t ask, apparently not evolving, created you, specifically, and your appendix, in a different dimension inside space and time that he controls, with a master plan, and free will to choose for yourself, obviously, don’t ask, because he loves you, ignore those fossils, but judges you, because he knows everything, Jesus, and can change everything, praying, then judges the sum worth of your obedience, forgiving you, sort of, on a simplistic scale of human behaviour from the separate and unknowable dimension, angels, to choose whether you should once again rejoin, somehow, that separate dimension outside of space and time, without sin, to exist as yourself, again, but forever, not evolving, don’t ask, or go to a third dimension, separate to all other dimensions outside of space and time, but hotter, which is for naughty children and those crafty gays.

White, handsome Jesus explains his appendix to some tramps

It’s all about as lovely-sounding and unlikely as the sky raining hammers on an open-air Justin Beiber concert. Still, I hear you ask, why would you want to strip this comforting illusion from someone, you smug, awful swine?

There is a common opinion, I think, that because atheism or science or mushrooms or yoga do not provide any convincing alternatives to the Afterlife that this freedom-from-facts is supposed to make good and rational people tolerate religious beliefs, no matter how bonkers they seem when you bullet-point them on a badger, as long as they do something, anything, to help people cope with the potentially agonising dilemma of Death. And it’s very hard to argue against the idea of giving a little comfort to someone who is frightened or grieving without looking like the kind of prick who would kick down a sandcastle and abuse Christmas in a basement, for almost the exact same reasons that it is easier to continue certain other simple lies rather than confront a difficult truth. But there is, I think, an extremely urgent, important and humane reason to challenge these beliefs.

Children believe in Santa Claus because a lot of us adults tell them he’s real. In one way, it’s an abuse of our supposed moral authority. Children ask us questions about how the world works because they’re truth-seeking, pooey little curiosity-machines, and then we tell them about flying, bullied reindeer, magic slave elves who prefer rich kids, and obese jolly men who disobey property rights and work for Coca-Cola. Of course, it’s generally regarded as an OK lie to tell, because it’s a pretty weak tangle of fibs that falls apart on the first tug of the tinsel. Children should work it out fairly young as long as you don’t drop them too much, and adults should admit to their collective deceit quickly unless they want to seem as daft as two ducks juggling.

The child cries for an afternoon, Mum apologises through the door, Dad has a brandy, Granddad falls down a manhole, and everyone carries on as normal with just some minor trust issues that therapy can always iron out later.

However, imagine for one christmassy minute that a child starts to wonder if Santa Claus is real, and asks the parents, who insist that he is, but who eventually get angry or end the conversation if it persists. Imagine if the same child kept asking other figures of moral authority – teachers, priests, politicians – and they all maintained that Santa Claus is real, got upset or angry or offended when the child kept asking, then also refused to continue talking about it. The two options for the child are obvious; he would either continue to believe in Santa Claus because it is too painful to imagine that all of the sources of moral authority in his life would lie about their lack of knowledge, or he would be ostracised from the collective belief by the Truth’s inevitable ability to expose liars, frauds, dicks, and sneaky, pretend present-givers.

This is, of course, atheism’s relationship with religion in far too much of the world.

Some people find it extremely difficult to hear because religious beliefs are almost universally protected, pandered to and pussy-footed around, but there is a reason that we’re afraid of death, and afraid to talk about it.

It is because religion cannot prevent our fear of death; it can only create, prolong and protect it.

It gives us the flimsy promise of an afterlife in exchange for our blind, unquestioning trust. It dangles the incentive of eternity in front of us, a reward for our earthly loyalty, and then tells us to close our eyes and wait. It performs a crafty but unconvincing magic trick, on children mostly, that simply defines mortality out of existence. Disregarding how much people really trust their faith, and I suspect the truth of that is masked often by the real, psychological harm inflicted on young minds by lying and abuse, religious beliefs are so profoundly damaging because they arrogantly divert us from perhaps the most important question of all.

What if we're temporary?

There is absolutely no reason to believe there is an afterlife, at all, and the people most likely to find that hard, sad or scary are the people who have always had their fingers in their ears, deluded themselves into passivity, and naively extended their existential expectations to the borders of infinite.

These people aren’t stupid. They’re not fools. Their irrational beliefs aren’t the product of an intellectual shortcoming of any kind. The reality is far sadder. They are the victims of a subtle but lasting dogma. They were told what to think by all those who claimed to care most about them in the world, people whose good intentions were so often only matched by their inadvertently disastrous results. To question certain beliefs, unfortunately, is to question the authority and moral good of the people who believe them, and there are strong emotional and social stigmas in place that make that difficult. You can see it, I think, in the way some people live their lives – especially when it looks like they’re not living them at all, but just trying to get through them as quickly as possible and without dropping too many jars in the supermarket. The worst offenders follow The Rules, whatever they’re told they are by anyone with a haircut, place their happiness inexplicably in collecting things, carbon-copy the lives of their parents, look increasingly like someone with a bag of charity shop clothes and a cruel sense of humour has mismanaged a walrus, and grow old and fat and slow in a house never more than 80 footsteps in any direction from the bit of land some awful vagina plonked them on to.

Death is a really important thing to adjust to, and not to hide from as we are so actively encouraged, because it should be the biggest driving factor of how we choose to live our lives, decide what we want, and manage our health and happiness. You are going to die, so is every one you know, that inevitably is governed by no rules or regulations about how, why, where or when, and as you get older with those around you, it will become an increasingly regular part of your life, and, of course, as looming, indifferent and ever-nearer a certainty as the next Fifty Shades of Twilight paper-tragedy.

Think about how quickly it felt that you got to where you are now, and then imagine, if you can, how quickly the second chunk ahead of you will go. There is no time to waste, really, and you will never be younger than you are now. There is no afterlife for you in any form that is like you are now -- this is it, right here, right now, and it shouldn’t take the clichéd near-death experience to trigger some productive, excited urgency deep in your bones. Life is the near-death experience.

If the thought of dying still scares you, it’s probably because you’ve never been given the chance to adjust to it healthily. It might be a kick in the head now, but it’s a kick in the head when you're napping on the train track. It might be painful, but it’s the radiotherapy that will cure the cancers of fear and doubt.

We should think about death, a lot maybe, and we should talk about it, and we should carry it’s presence around as a proud and constant millstone on our necks – not because it is depressing or frightening, but because it is what reminds us that we are alive now, and that we won’t be for long or forever. It should inspire us, motivate us, help us forgive, forget, and remind us not to worry about what we can’t change, or scream at us to repair our priorities from the bizarre and crazed arrangement that society now encourages.

And once you’ve killed the delusions of religion and refused the corrupt pledges of an afterlife, there is no reason to be afraid of death. None. There will be no final judgement on your character, no hierarchy in which you will be assigned a place forever, no eternity to anguish over your mortal mistakes, and, healthiest of all, no lasting reasons to despair over the deaths of others.

Amy Winehouse, as we all found out by text message, recently and accidentally boozed herself dead, with the final coroner's report concluding that she died of ‘misadventure,’ arguably the most fun of all the possible causes. The whole episode was pasted in the news as a tragedy, and it was of course, but for us, I think, not her. She was watching telly and listening to music, steadily glugging her way through several bottles of vodka, slipping numbly and unknowingly into her Last Sleep – and, perhaps for someone who seemed to fit so uneasily in this world, release. She started with nothing and ended with nothing. It is us who suffer, grieve, weep and wonder in her wake, or wait for a sombre, slapped-together collection of B-sides at Christmas, while she, simply, does not exist anymore. Her deathday was shared by hundreds of thousands of others on our planet, as is everyone’s, yet the fact that we cry most for those we know best should be the biggest clue to the personal fear at the heart of our grieving.

We have lost something, the Dead have not. Funerals are not for them.

Because when we die, we are not there.

When your time comes, it is not you who will die -- it is the Universe that will end.

There is nothing to be frightened of, because you wont be there to be frightened of it.

That's beautiful.

Death is not a call to Futility and Depression. It can be nothing, I’m sure, but one loud and desperate, pleading Call to Arms. To adventure, experiment and investigate, to dare and dance and drink, to race and run and fight and fall over, and get back up, crash around, and do it all again every day your body lets you; to trade pleasure with pain however you can, and to grow and change and fix yourself; to laugh at Fear and Doubt when they whisper their pathetic noises in your ear, to cram as much love and laughter in to your life, and as many good others as you can find, as you can, while you can -- to live as one big shiny, screaming Fuck You to whatever indifferent forces dropped us here without a map or purpose, and an even bigger one to whatever now keeps us from living how we want.

Death shouldn’t be the handbrake that leaves us rusting in some garage of our own invention, but a red and seductive pedal clamped to the end of our legs, that wont release us until the cliff edge is behind us, the canyon’s fall in front, and all we can think as that Last Wind rushes through our hair is what a great, mad ride it was when we really, really wanted it to be.

2011? Jesus, how did you arrive here - on your dinosaur? Click here to go to hencewise.com, and stop a weirdo holding a candle in the dark, looking all dramatic and old-fashioned.

You

2011? Jesus, how did you arrive here - on your dinosaur? Click here to go to hencewise.com, and stop a weirdo holding a candle in the dark, looking all dramatic and old-fashioned.

Hello!

Right now, you’re strapped to a bit of dust called Earth by an unexplained force called gravity in an incomprehensibly large absence of matter called space, orbiting at extraordinary speeds around a massive ball of plasma called the Sun in a period of relative cosmological calm, and at a convenient distance and temperature that support a weird little magic mindfuck called life.

Yet this cheeky little phenomenon, while often lovely and interesting, has been confusing our tiny little brains ever since it invented them for us. There are concepts so baffling to us that when we try to imagine them, our minds almost literally recoil in defence like there’s an inbuilt shut-off valve to protect us from the full horror or wonder of understanding them.

Like everything. You know, all this, hydrogen, magnets, cushions, where exactly did it all come from? How does anything, let alone everything, come from nothing? If before something there wasn’t something, then, you know... what?

And infinity. How can space and time not have boundaries? How can anything go on forever? If infinite does not have a start or an end, and it doesn't, apparently, then, you know... what?

Then there’s life itself. Is it just here or absolutely everywhere? How did it start and what happens when it ends? If we are ‘alive’ but we are just made up of loads of stuff that is not ‘alive,’ then, you know... WHAT?

You get my point.

Take you, for example, the sitting, reading trophy of four billion years of evolution. You’re interesting. At one point you were the youngest person on Earth, remember? You’re amongst the most complex creatures to have ever lived on this planet, maybe anywhere in the cosmos, and you exist now at the end of an unbroken chain of successful reproduction, adaptation and genetic transfer that stretches all the way back through time to the very first interactions of boring, inanimate molecules that sparked the beginnings of life. Or to put it a cooler way, none of your ancestors were barren or sterile or failed at getting laid, even before they had genitals, and even before they had to have sex with themselves to get things done. If you don’t have any children, you’ll finally be ending a continuous pattern of humping that’s been going on since your ancestors were about five-thousandths of a millimetre in length. If you think that puts pressure on you to try and get some sperm or other into a warm place with good career prospects, then consider the alternative: if you don’t reproduce, you’re at the end of that chain; the zenith; the apex; the pinnacle of a single billions-of-years old evolutionary strand. Every single event and atomic encounter since the beginning of time led exactly to you. Here. Now.

This very instant, my special little sausage, you are floating somehow, somewhere in a part of the liquid phenomenon of Time we call the Present, both the oldest you have ever been, and the youngest you will ever be again.

Despite this, however, everything you see and experience happened in the past, even though you, now, again, comma, have never been in it. The sunlight that warms your mayonnaise at a picnic is seven minutes old, a bullet could already be in your pelvis by the time you’ve heard a gunshot, and this sentence will take entire nanoseconds to reach the middle of your brainbox, even longer if you’re reading it underwater or reflected off the highly polished skin of a dolphin. The ‘present,’ ultimately, is a figment of your imagination, a deceptive trick of the senses, a concept that we claim to live but are more realistically ever chasing after like a fat kid, bumbling and wheezing half way up a staircase, trying to figure out what just happened, what's going on, and, oh for bum's sake, now fucking what?

Meanwhile, the whole time we’re ignorantly faffing around in socks and jobs, we’ve also got no idea if we’re even in control of ourselves, our thoughts or our actions -- not that it matters who wrote the movie, as long as you're enjoying it-- and we're hurtling without brakes towards a cliff edge of uncertainty.

It’s not like you could be expected to figure out these brain-bungling conundrums, though, being as ill-equipped for philosophical computing as you are. After all, you’re just a sort of colourful, thinking soup in a human-shaped bag; a pulpy, watery mass made of blobby, smelly things and meat that is constantly renewing, refreshing and replacing itself. The thing you eat today will be part of the brain tomorrow that recognises what that thing is, so no wonder it’s asking a lot to figure out if it has Free Will or not. That quite unintelligent looking potato in your flabby lap, for instance, could tomorrow be doing complicated maths, or solving an intricate moral dilemma involving a duck, or even remembering your first kiss. And when it does remember that first kiss, incidentally, it will trick you again into believing that you were there.

Except you weren’t.

Not a single atom in your body now was there then. Every bit of you has since been replaced many times over. Whatever you are, therefore, is not what you’re made of, but is somehow, and not-simply, contained in the gooey, temporary arrangement of what you’ve eaten. To put it more delicately, you have a hole that runs  through your body, practically uninterrupted from your mouth to your arse, and its job is to disrupt the flow of matter from one place to another in the Universe and momentarily assemble it in to a recipe called You. You’re a glorified food tube; a squishy-squashy tunnel that supports your head; an egg-type structure that contains your brain; a grey, shaved hedgehog thing that worries and gets addicted to cigarettes. You, or your idea of whatever you are, is just electrical signals bouncing around somewhere inside a spongy slab of meat with a structure that is constantly changing, adapting, and making new connections between its neurones... it will be literally, physically different after you read this sentence. And this one as well, strangely enough, even though this one doesn’t have a sensible potato spaceship.

In fact, your body, the only thing you can ever really claim to own (though it’s more like a loan from some elusive magic bank that can snatch it back at the slightest tickle of a pickle), came from something you or your mother once consumed. More than that, everything you are came from the Earth and will one day go back to it.

More than that, everything you are is currently at the furthest point it has ever journeyed from the very beginnings of the Universe and its origins in the nuclear furnaces of emerging stars. The atoms that make up your left eyelashes come from different stars than the ones in your right, and their brother and sister particles are scattered all across the cosmos up to god knows what outside the blinking bonanza of your face. You’re made of the same basic building blocks of matter  --matter which is almost entirely space, incidentally-- as everyone and everything that there is. While I’m sure you can do something bafflingly impressive like shit yourself to music, you are just hydrogen that was left alone with nothing to do for long enough that it got smug and started thinking about itself. Before you knew it, that same hydrogen was you, reading slightly jarring one-line paragraphs on the Internet.

We are all one. 

While that might sound like the kind of pretentious, wanky nonsense you’d avoid all day from any fucker in a tie-dye wigwam that grows their own lentils, it is literally and unarguably true. We’re all related in every single conceivable way possible, and the level of separation between us exists only in our minds. Stretching out from your family, you are related to every other human, every other animal, every other life-form on this planet, and subsequently the very Universe itself as everything ‘living’ is made up of stuff that is called ‘nonliving.’ Boring, simple life happened, somehow, in the new hot soup of Earth, then life beget life, beget life, beget life, like a continuous Olympic torch of biology, burning inevitably through the ages towards you because it was never quite put out by the comets or diseases or volcanoes or wars that tried.

Biologically, chemically, and physically you are, like every other lump of life that is mucking about here, part of the same single eternal organism. Just as the innumerable bacteria in your stomach and microbes on your skin are part of the wider ecosystem of your body, so your body is part of the wider ecosystem around it. While you could certainly get the impression that you’re some kind of unique, special individual, especially when someone compliments you on that wacky cutlery you bought from Ikea, more realistically you are a tiny, dispensable constituent of something entirely bigger: a walking, wobbling nutrient and gas conversion bit in a massive, alive and complex engine called Earth.

Indeed, with enough scale, the entire sprawling presence of humanity on the surface of our planet wouldn’t look unlike mould on a floating, blue Orange – or Bluorange, if you will – in space. As our species multiplies at exponential speeds in every available direction, spreads into every liveable nook and planetary cranny, and rapidly converts everything green and available into more smoke, dust and grey matter than you’d find in Margaret Thatcher’s evil cunt, it’s probably far safer to assume we’re more likely a fleeting, arrogant space virus than some amazing fallen race cast in the image of a divine creator.

If you don't like the idea that the average hilariously self-important human is no more individual than a single spore of something growing on an unattended armpit, or if you’re not quite ready to be the boring guest in the garden explaining how “we are all, like, interconnected, man,” then you might still enjoy the more digestible, placebo fact that the average human is a 28-year old Chinese man. If this doesn't get a polite, interested nod from the dullard opposite you who actually thought it was fine to bring hummus to a barbeque, then you could try the more cryptic, esoteric observation that the average human, perhaps, is a dead one. A hundred billion of our human ancestors, it is speculated, have been and gone, along with 99.99% of all the species to have ever existed on Earth that slept quietly into extinction. (Which, on a side note, is why it’s so irritating when someone tries to save a fucking panda.)

And you too, of course, will die.

While your birth may have been an almost unfathomably unlikely statistical improbability, your impending death is an absolute certainty. Indeed, one day this year is the looming pre-anniversary of your death. The same day every year, of course, until your timeline is intersected by a particularly sharp object or a heart attack. You probably won’t enjoy it, either, but hey, it will be quick and you won’t remember it. You literally won’t know you've stopped living, incidentally, so unless you’re the kind of person who soils their bedclothes every night before you go to sleep, it is nothing to be afraid of. Really. It's not you that will 'die,' after all, it's the world that will end. 'Reality,' the dream-like story that your brain assembles for you from a million strange electrical signals and sensory ingredients, will fade to end credits and be over.

The Story of You will be finished.

Then what, though, you might ask?

Well, while we don’t have the right answers to probably the wrong questions we've been asking for millennia, we do know exactly what happens when you die. Just like all the matter and energy that comprises you was something else before, so it will be something else again. Matter and energy can’t be destroyed, only transferred, so you’ll just begin the next phase of your fluctuant cloud-like existence. Maybe you’ll be buried or burnt, or wedged into a gap to support a table. Maybe your body will gradually break down into its constituent parts and go straight back to work as a mushroom, or an ant, or a bit of stick. Maybe you’ll be eaten by something large and toothy in the morning, sunbathe as shit in the afternoon, then help some nice grass begin its happy little poo-born life in the evening.

You will die, and everything you are, and have ever been, will just become something else.

It's the ciiiiiiiiircle of Lion King, etc.

However, while it might sound a little more bleak to you because you are not a talking fictional cartoon lion (probably) it could also be argued that you’re already dead, basically. You weren't alive for billions and billions of years before you were born and you won’t be alive for billions and billions of years after you die so life, really, is just a temporary phase - perhaps even an illusion - in between. You’re a passing, interesting arrangement of matter in a massive, shifting equation of energy; a confused, momentary mist of material and purpose in an infinite environment without one. Your human life is less than a blink in the cosmic time span, but you didn't experience the beginning of it, and you wont experience the end of it, so subjectively it will be infinite.

You don't need an afterlife. To your brain, the meatball architect of whatever you experience, you have always been here, and you always will be.

Regardless, assuming we don’t invent immortality milkshakes this week, in about one hundred and twenty years not a single person alive today will remain. The Earth will have an entirely new set of humans, which at the very least means none of them will be Donald Fucking Trump, and it'll be like a big global party where you don’t know any one, nobody knows you, you're not invited, no one's invited, you're dead, and there's no booze.

Our generation’s names, only, will be peppered thinly in memoirs and memories; most of us forgotten, some of us footnotes, and a spare few celebrated by history if we're on the side that writes it. Most of us will not be remembered a generation after we die... all of us will not be remembered eventually. The legacy of world-changing Genghis Khan of Mongolia and company policy-changing Sally the Human Resources Manager of NatWest's Swindon Branch will taper towards the same equilibrium as every other life form to exist now or ever, here or anywhere.

On top of that, nearly seven billion people walk the Earth today with the Internet and a buffet of past gods, religions and philosophies to nibble at, and we've still not got a whiff of a clue what-how-why-when-or-who did the shit, even though our noses are moving nearer and nearer to the fart every day. Everyone that says they do know what happens when you die should be avoided like a shoe full of pubes and old milk, obviously, and we should also be careful believing ourselves too often. Most of the things we think we know about anything, after all, were learned through billions of other people like us, processed and filtered through the collective mind of humanity and history, whittled down to an expressible language-limited essence, twisted to self-interest and delivered to us in a manageable chunk; something we plucked quickly from a conveyor-belt as it glided past us towards incorrectness or irrelevance.

In short, we know almost nothing about anything, and we’re probably the smartest stuff going on for at least 24 trillion miles in every direction. Furthermore, we’ll probably never understand the fundamental paradoxes of life, death, space, time, or reality... especially on our current, misguided oil-guns-and-money species trajectory. Our existence unarguably is meaningless, but only because what we conventionally understand about “meaning” is meaningless.

However, from this apparent crisis in significance and purpose and moral abandon, emerges a fun and therapeutic opportunity: You can do anything you want. You can create your own meaning. You don’t have to follow other people’s rules, or directions, or social structures. You don’t have to do what you’re told, or feel guilty about the opposite. You can make up your own rules, your own meaning, your own purpose. Best of all, you can’t go wrong unless you go wrong by yourself. Nothing matters unless it matters to you.

On a warm and starry night you can look up at the sky with no roof between your silly human head and the astonishing scope of infinite beyond it, part of both the nothing and everything you perceive, and choose to do with the tiny, little life that you've been gifted whatever you think is right.

You should probably choose wisely.

2011? Jesus, how did you arrive here - on your dinosaur? Click here to go to hencewise.com, and stop a weirdo holding a candle in the dark, looking all dramatic and old-fashioned.

Worry for Nothing and You're Thick for Free

2011? Jesus, how did you arrive here - on your dinosaur? Click here to go to hencewise.com, and stop a weirdo holding a candle in the dark, looking all dramatic and old-fashioned.

I have personally found that one of the most positive and liberating attitudes you can cultivate in life is a healthy attitude towards Time. We don't much know about it, but what we all seem to agree on is that, to us at least, it is galloping unrelentingly in a single direction, away from what's happened and towards what's about to. It's unforgiving; not giving you the chance to say the much funnier thing you thought of after the argument. It's indifferent; never arranging the future according to what you would or wouldn’t like to happen to that prick doing a wheelie on his moped. And it's unstoppable; definitely on the way to wherever it’s going, and not about to change for any of your silliness.

And what's the point in worrying about anything that you can't change?

Events that have already happened, of course, fall unquestionably into that category. Until you invent that time machine you're obviously working on, saying things like 'I wish I'd never kicked that dog's eyes off' are always going to be mean exactly nothing. Blaming yourself for what you should have done makes about as much sense as electric soap; you didn't, and now you can't. Sure, you might not like the consequences of your action but that fact is immediately irrelevant. The new reality is that there's a canine missing its retinas, and your 'regrets,' as boring as they are, possess no magical abilities to reattach them. Instead, it's far more productive to think about what you can do presently to improve the situation, rather than what you should have done then to avoid it. Stop worrying. Stop moaning. In fact, stop all your unproductive word-fart nonsense, and redirect that wasted energy into self-improvement – ‘how can I prevent the end of my leg from intersecting puppies' faces in the future?’ you could ask yourself-- or get on your hands and knees, start searching for them corneas, and hope someone's got some sticky tape.

The more you practice this attitude, and it is often as small a thing as the pause it takes for your intellect to overtake your emotional response, the sooner it becomes your default way of dealing with the world, and the less anxiety you'll feel towards anything and everything that's out of your control. As an example, I had one of those boring car crashes a couple of weeks ago -- just smashed my vehicle in to the back of someone else's one for a laugh -- and while my initial jerk reaction was to swear at the boring airbag that didn't even hit my face, only a second or two later I was completely calm again. Really. The new situation - and the fixed state of reality from that point on - was that I now owned a large piece of metal about as useful as Stevie Wonder's telescope, my next insurance policy quote would be about as cheerful as cot death, and I was now a full-time pedestrian again like all the rest of the world’s massive walky wankers.

While it's a fairly simple concept to understand in relation to the past, though, it can be almost equally applicable to the future. 

Expectations, indeed, can be almost as self-destructive as regrets. 

Imagine you're going to an interview for that recently decided career diversion into Veterinary Optometry. Just as you can never know what might have happened if you had made different choices in the past, neither can you predict how the possibilities and potential of your future will arrange themselves as they squeeze through your present and into the growing prison of your past. Yeah. Sure, you can choose how to dress, how you present yourself, and how you prepare, but beyond that, once again, you’re at the mercy of the Universe. You can't control who interviews you, what they want, or manage what they'll think of you and your past discretions with the fragile, frontend of a German Shepherd. You can't control the kind of room you're entering, the atmosphere waiting inside, or whether you’ll be allergic to the chair. You can't control the questions you'll be asked, or what already exists in your head with which you can answer them. You can't know or change who else will apply for the job, what the interviewer thinks of them, how they'll compare to you, or how many animals they’ve punted in the chops. Worrying about the future is as unhealthy as the past because, almost equally, you cannot control it. 

You can only react to it.

With no expectations, you cannot be surprised. With no expectations, you cannot be disappointed.

In terms of unnecessary things to worry about, the Future might as well join the bulging, heaving pile of nonsense things we fret about unnecessarily.

Death. The Past. Your height. Other people’s stupidity. Aging. Your parents. George Lucas cashing in on Star Wars. Pandas not humping. Continental drift. Your skin colour. Your gender. Your genes. Yoko Ono. When all of these inevitable facts are raked in to the same dark and dusty corners of the mind where Catholics store scientific facts and their repressed childhood memories, the real priorities that deserve our attention begin to emerge and become clear. Once you let go of the things that are beyond your control, you can hold much tighter on to the things that are left within it. If you prevent wasting energy where it’s useless, it’s more available for where it can make a difference.

Now please open your Handy Gandhi pocket notebooks, skip past the photo where he looks like Gollum's just re-emerged from the caves with a degree and a bed sheet, and jot down the following in the Shit He Probably Said First section:

You can't change what people think of you, but you can change how you treat them.

You can't change your body, but you can appreciate it.

You can't change your past, but you can accept it.

You can't change that you'll die, but you can change how you live.

You can't change the world, but you can change yourself to fit better in it. 

2011? Jesus, how did you arrive here - on your dinosaur? Click here to go to hencewise.com, and stop a weirdo holding a candle in the dark, looking all dramatic and old-fashioned.

The Luck Perception

Everyone's brain is different. Not different enough to massively distort the shape of our heads of course, but certainly enough to allow for the broad spectrum of unique qualities that we can easily use to hate each other without any need for creativity. Our likes and dislikes, knowledge and ignorance, dreams and phobias, keep us separate and unique. Where we are all united, however, is the existence of a small hollow space in the center of the brain that we are instinctively compelled to fill with unnecessary shit to worry about.

Life is great, or at least more interesting than the alternatives, but as the recent bout of cold weather has been exemplary in illustrating, we can’t find enough little things to keep us awake at night and moaning in the day.

On one hand, it's a good thing. It's certainly better for society to have a population worrying about train times and finding spiders in grapes rather than, for example, the horrifying possibilities posed by asteroids, super volcanoes, viruses, mega tsunamis and nuclear weapons which loom ever menacingly over humanity like a lonely ginger child above an anthill.

But it can also be a bad thing. The excellent way we are collectively and constantly deciding as a species that we're not really prepared to do very much in the face of global warming, for instance. There are people everywhere taking baths in their lorries and completely content because they believe we must have back-up planets. Unfortunately, for most people, the words ‘destroying the Earth,' for all the terrifying connotations of apocalypse that tiny phrase contains, is too large a concept to merit attention. Perhaps environmentalists should specify and contextualise the doom a bit more by explaining that the end of the world would also be the end of sausage rolls and Top Gear and that iPhone app that helps you navigate your way around London by leading you in to traffic like a pleb.

Personally, I find it hard to worry about many of our often trivial Western concerns, like arthritis and petrol prices and the internet cutting off; the general point being if you've survived whatever you're moaning about, you've won life's lottery. A bit of food and a roof chucked in too, and complaining about how difficult your existence is would be an offensive kick in the face to Zanabu, the terminally ill, blind, disabled boy from Poorland who's lifelong misfortune comes on top of being given a borderline-racist name and being completely made-up.

I’m an incredibly lucky person. And not only because I live a decadent, middle-class existence where I can easily access over two types of cheese, but because I believe I am lucky. Luck is relative, subjective, and, most importantly, defined by perception. If you believe you're lucky, you are, and if you believe you're not, you're not.

It’s literally your own fault so stop being such a horrid whinging bore about your 'problems.'

Let me explain.

To simplify this, we’ll apply my idea to two arbitrary characters, Person A and Person B. Actually, we’ll give them two arbitrary names, Frank and Razzer, to help follow the situation. Furthermore, again for clarity's sake, let's say that Frank is a dentist with no teeth and Razzer is a condom machine attendant who won the lottery several years ago but didn’t want the win ‘to change him.’ They sound pretty similar, right?

WRONG.

Frank is an optimist and Razzer is a pessimist.

Picture this. Frank finishes work, gives a cheery wave to his dental nurses and begins his walk home. Meanwhile, on the opposite side of the same city, Razzer restocks his last pub toilet and does the same, although he slips in piss on the way out, which is just a feature of his life that he deals with. Frank and Razzer have never met, of course, although they have nearly passed each other several times on their daily commutes without realising. Today though, the Universe has conspired to have them cross the exact same road at the exact same time, and have them both consequently ploughed down by the exact same tram.

They both survive, however, because the Universe isn't all bad.

Inevitably, Frank goes home and gums to his wife Ethel about how lucky he is to be alive. She pauses knitting, stands to hug him and offers to cook his favourite meal, mash potato and soup, to celebrate. The two collapse laughing as that’s the only thing he can ever eat. “Oh, Ethel, you bloody ironic japester,” he says, “get in that kitchen!” They’re happy.

Meanwhile over in pessimism land, Razzer goes home to his mansion after the same incident, grumbling and moaning, and tells his wife Pazzy how unlucky he is to have been in an accident. "All this wealth is a nightmare, I'm still getting hit by large, railed metal transport," he grumbles. She’s not listening though because she’s making horrible love to the Butler and using Razzer’s highly-prized collector’s condoms to do it. Irrelevant: they’re unhappy.

The point is, Frank is lucky because he defines himself so. You smash a tram into him, he goes home smiling because he's alive. You take his teeth, he thanks you for his gums. By the reverse side of the same token, Razzer is ‘unlucky.’ Despite his obvious fortune, both financial and dental, he returns home to his crumbling life, unsure of why money hasn’t bought him happiness, and complains that he got hit by a tram and lost a mere leg.

Rather than thank a fictitious deity or look on the bright side of the situation, he takes out the shotgun, pumps one bullet in to Mrs. Pazzy Razzer, then aims the last one at his own brain. He stares at the naked, terrified, blood-splattered butler. "Clean this up." BANG.

Exactly. So cheer the fuck up.