On this, the most morbid day in all of Christendom, we are reminded that we are dust and to dust we will return. “Our days are like grass … ” and the seemingly endless succession of days will one day end, our bodies returning to the dust from which we were first created. We are finite, subject to death and decay against our will. But what value is there recalling death’s inevitability?
Ash Wednesday is not merely an inconvenient reminder of the need to prepare oneself for eternity. Its testimony to the natural limits of life is meant to orient ourselves within the bounded time that has been given us by God. We are not limitless gods, but finite creatures. We cannot do everything; nor should we try. And yet we live our life chasing the infinite possibilities we imagine for ourselves. As Oliver Burkeman writes in his book Four Thousand Weeks, the reality that our days are numbered serves as an antidote to our very modern penchant for endless bucket lists:
[T]here’s a deeper sense in which merely to be alive on the planet today is to be haunted by the feeling of having “too much to do,” whether or not you lead a busy life in any conventional sense. Think of it as “existential overwhelm”: the modern world provides an inexhaustible supply of things that seem worth doing, and so there arises an inevitable and unbridgeable gap between what you’d ideally like to do and what you actually can do. As the German sociologist Hartmut Rosa explains, premodern people weren’t much troubled by such thoughts, partly because they believed in an afterlife: there was no particular pressure to “get the most out of” their limited time, because as far as they were concerned, it wasn’t limited, and in any case, earthly life was but a relatively insignificant prelude to the most important part. They also tended to see the world as unchanging through history or, in some cultures, as cycling repeatedly through the same predictable stages. It felt like a known quantity: you were content to play your role in the human drama — a role that countless thousands had played before you, and thousands more would play after your death — without any sense that you were missing out on the exciting new possibilities of your particular moment in history. (In an unchanging or cyclical view of history, there never are any exciting new possibilities.) But secular modernity changes all that. When people stop believing in an afterlife, everything depends on making the most of this life.
And when people start believing in progress — in the idea that history is headed toward an ever more perfect future — they feel far more acutely the pain of their own little lifespan, which condemns them to missing out on almost all of that future. And so they try to quell their anxieties by cramming their lives with experience. In his translator’s introduction to Rosa’s book Social Acceleration, Jonathan Trejo-Mathys writes:
The more we can accelerate our ability to go to different places, see new things, try new foods, embrace various forms of spirituality, learn new activities, share sensual pleasures with others whether it be in dancing or sex, experience different forms of art, and so on, the less incongruence there is between the possibilities of experience we can realize in our own lifetimes and the total array of possibilities available to human beings now and in the future — that is, the closer we come to having a truly “fulfilled” life, in the literal sense of one that is as filled full of experiences as it can possibly be.
So the retiree ticking exotic destinations off a bucket list and the hedonist stuffing her weekends full of fun are arguably just as overwhelmed as the exhausted social worker or corporate lawyer. It’s true that the things by which they’re being overwhelmed are nominally more enjoyable; it’s certainly nicer to have a long list of Greek islands left to visit than a long list of homeless families left to find housing for, or a huge stack of contracts left to proofread. But it remains the case that their fulfillment still seems to depend on their managing to do more than they can do. This helps explain why stuffing your life with pleasurable activities so often proves less satisfying than you’d expect. It’s an attempt to devour the experiences the world has to offer, to feel like you’ve truly lived — but the world has an effectively infinite number of experiences to offer, so getting a handful of them under your belt brings you no closer to a sense of having feasted on life’s possibilities. Instead, you find yourself pitched straight back into the efficiency trap. The more wonderful experiences you succeed in having, the more additional wonderful experiences you start to feel you could have, or ought to have, on top of all those you’ve already had, with the result that the feeling of existential overwhelm gets worse. (p. 44-47)
Burkeman continues,
Any finite life — even the best one you could possibly imagine — is therefore a matter of ceaselessly waving goodbye to possibility.
The only real question about all this finitude is whether we’re willing to confront it or not. …
We must live out our lives, to whatever extent we can, in clear-eyed acknowledgment of our limitations … that life is not a dress rehearsal, that every choice requires myriad sacrifices, and that time is always already running out — indeed, that it may run out today, tomorrow, or next month. […]
Rather than taking ownership of our lives, we seek out distractions, or lose ourselves in busyness and the daily grind, so as to try to forget our real predicament. … we embark on the futile attempt to “get everything done,” which is really another way of trying to evade the responsibility of deciding what to do with your finite time — because if you actually could get everything done, you’d never have to choose among mutually exclusive possibilities. Life is usually more comfortable when you spend it avoiding the truth in this fashion. But it’s a stultifying, deadly sort of comfort. It’s only by facing our finitude that we can step into a truly authentic relationship with life. (p. 60-62)
