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DEATH, THE ULTIMATE SOLUTION
Very recently, I came across several things that redirected my thoughts to an old, familiar subject: the finality of death. More precisely, on youth’s fixation with death as a mysterious, completely beyond-understanding, totally foreign yet alluringly attractive aspect of their destiny.
The first thing that prompted this focus was an article advising older people on how to prepare themselves for death (regarding planning in advance for that inevitable end-point event everyone ultimately faces). The second was an accidental visit to what I shall call a heavy-metal, gothic-punk website. And the third was a rather routine visit to the commercial website of a major motorcycle accessories supplier. Seemingly unrelated catalytic singularities, they started my old mental cogitations rolling along a tangential track (I’m noted for that).
Written articles such as the first one, while helpful and perhaps quite useful, are to me depressing and even boring, but what really grabbed my attention was (in the instance of the second item above) youth’s obvious fascination with a concept totally beyond their most remote glimmerings of understanding.
In our highly insular, detached-from-reality manner of routinely ‘confused’ daily existence, we Americans suffer from the sort of contrived marketing high-fantasy that is the by-product of corporate business…
