Robert Greene discusses how modern society represses thoughts of death, unlike past eras where it was visible and constant. He argues that embracing mortality through Stoic practices like memento mori creates urgency and deepens empathy. Greene illustrates this with his own near-fatal stroke, which left him partially paralyzed but heightened his sensory experience and emotional connections.
Chapters
I'd love to hear your thoughts on confronting mortality as a subject. I've heard you talk a lot about it, and it's a very popular subject, I think, within my sphere of influence right now. And I've been talking a lot about death with people, so I'd love to have you expand on that a little bit.
Wow, why is it so popular? Because of the coronavirus?
Well, for me, I got into Stoicism, and one of the principles or aphorisms that, that really hit home for me was memento mori, and I actually got it tattooed And I have a poster on my wall that says, my life in weeks, and every— each week you fill in a little circle. And the idea is not morbid, it's beautiful. It's to prioritize your time, to be reminded of your own mortality often. That's why I love Ryan's work so much.
It's the last chapter in The Laws of Human Nature, Confront Your Mortality, and I go very deeply into the subject, sort of touching upon some of your own ideas. Basically, the idea that It's your greatest fear in life, obviously. And we live in a world that very much represses the thought of death. So if you go back, once again, to do this thought experiment a couple hundred years ago, you would— you could not fail to see people die in front of you, literally, physically, several times during your life. You might see it on the streets in a town or a city. You'll see it— people died in their houses. Right? If you lived, you know, if you— most people had to kill their own food. They had to kill a chicken. You saw animals being slaughtered in front of your eyes for their food. Death had a presence. It was constantly there. And so it was— people were thinking about it all the time, and they had religion to kind of help them soothe the idea of their own mortality. But death was very present. And we live in this world where it's the complete opposite. We have to repress the thought of it. We can't see it anywhere. It's put into hospitals where it's sanitized, where it happens behind closed doors. You know, nobody ever talks about it. Nobody tells you— this is probably the most important life skill that you could have, to know how to deal with that fear. Nobody teaches it. Your parents don't talk about it. Your girlfriend or boyfriend, they don't talk about it. Nobody. It's a dirty little secret. Right, but it's the only reality we have. We're all going to die. Okay. So if you're in denial of it, if you're repressing it, which most people are, and then don't tell me that, oh well, in movies people are dying all the time. That's kind of a cartoon version of death. There's no kind of emotion attached to it. When you see 18 people being gunned down with a machine gun, there's no kind of empathy or feeling. That is even making the thought of death even more repressed. When you repress it, it comes out in secret ways. It makes you anxious in your daily life because you're not dealing with the one most important thing. You don't realize it, but it's infecting you on your day-to-day decisions, how you interact with people. So you need to get over it. You need to confront it. And the idea is simple. You could die tomorrow, right? It happens. You have no control over this. You could be young. You can be 24. People die young all the time. So be aware of that and understand that what that means is your time is limited. You don't have these vast decades of life in front of you, and— but you have dreams and aspirations and things you want to accomplish. Well, this gives you a sense of urgency. It makes you also appreciate everything around you that you see. It makes life more vivid and intense by understanding that any day now it could be ripped away from you. And of course, I personally had this brought home to me like a slap in the face. 2 months after I finished The Laws of Human Nature, I suffered a stroke, a rather severe stroke, in which I was— I'm very lucky to be here, very lucky to be alive. I'm very lucky not to have suffered brain damage. I can write another book. You know, it was just a matter of a couple of minutes and it was over. I was in a coma. And then I woke from that and my whole left side of my body is gone, was gone, paralyzed basically. It's coming back slowly. But anyway, I had to confront that right in my face, like just after I wrote the book. And what I wrote about in the book is true. So now if I'm sitting there going out in the world in any way and I look around me, I go, you know, because like A couple of days ago, I had the second-year anniversary of my stroke, and I think this could have been the second anniversary of my death very easily. People would be talking about, wow, Robert died 2 years ago today. Wow. You know, so I'm looking at the world, I'm seeing, you know, I'm suffering because I can't— like, I still can't walk very well. But look at everything that I see. Look at everything that I have. It makes everything more intense. The colors are more intense. The sounds are more intense. The feeling of being connected to other people is more intense because now I'm aware not just of my own mortality, but that the people I'm with— my girlfriend, she could be gone tomorrow. My mother, who's 93, she could be gone tomorrow. I have to appreciate them on a higher level. I have to understand that everybody has this in them. And knowing that you, Nicholas, are also facing it is a way for me to connect to you. It's a way to deepen my empathy and understand you on a very deep, basic, primal human level. I could go on and on and on. It's sort of the subject of my next book, the essential powers that confronting your mortality will give you. I call it the sublime, which I introduce in The Laws of Human Nature. But it also opens up this idea of how amazing the world is that we live around us, that we take so much for granted. Because we just think that we're going to live forever. So it's an incredibly important concept to me. And it's also very personal in the sense that I came this close to dying myself.
Well, thank you for taking the time to go through that. I selfishly, I need more context from people like yourself so that I can articulate that very important lesson of intentionally confronting fear and why everybody should be confronting fear because of what it's done for me. But sometimes I can't articulate it as well as somebody like you can. So I'm definitely excited to read that book. And I've read like On the Shortness of Life by Seneca and Meditations by Marcus. Books like that have been very important in helping me to understand those concepts.
