To Be…or Never to have Been

2000 words, 8 minute read

Hamlet only scratched the surface. He imagined that he had influence over life and death. Too late, sweet prince; that ship had sailed. Hamlet was already born, and there’s no erasing that…is there?

Still, he asks good questions: should we nobly “suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune?” Is that a fair price to pay for long life? Or should we “take arms against a sea of troubles,” thereby placing our lives at heightened risk? 

Troubles only cease when we ‘sleep’, so our campaign against them can only end in death. “’Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep…”

“To sleep, perchance to dream – aye, there’s the rub.” Hamlet weighs the possibility that consciousness might survive the death of the material body. 

A decision to eschew the lure of long life opens up a range of behavioral options ranging from crusades against injustice, to risky personal behavior, to outright self-harm. Each of these lifestyle choices carries an enhanced risk of premature death but none of them has the power to annul our birth.

A friend recently told me, “I don’t know if there is any continuation of consciousness after death, but if there is, I am sure that what happens in our current life influences whatever comes next.”

On the one hand, my friend was proposing an outlandish theory for which there could be scant empirical evidence. On the other hand, he was expressing what turns out to be an almost baseline human belief. 

In our Western religious tradition, we call it Heaven and Hell. In the Eastern tradition, karma, reincarnation and Nirvana. Other traditions (Confucian, Abrahamic) imagine that we live on through our descendants and, perhaps, that the consequences of our vices and virtues are somehow visited on those latter generations.

 For the more material-minded among us (from Mill to Marx), we offer Utopia…your choice of a post-industrial techno-paradise or a return to the state of nature following a Dictatorship of the Proletariat. And for the rest of us, there’s Estate Planning.

Like most, Hamlet is concerned (1) that personal consciousness might extend beyond death, (2) that the nature and quality of such post mortem (PM) experience is unknown, and (3) that the content/conduct of our current lives might influence that quality.

Like many, Hamlet elects to ‘play it safe’; he will not tempt fate. He will accept life as it comes (or doesn’t) but he’ll do nothing to accelerate his demise (contrast Ophelia).

Practically speaking, Hamlet has only two choices, and he decides that the devil he knows is better than the devil he doesn’t. But philosophically, there is a third option: What if Hamlet could choose never to have been at all? No risk of nightmares now! 

Job got there 2500 years earlier, in the opening lines of his eponymous epic: “Let the day disappear, the day I was born, and the night that announced, ‘A man has been conceived’. As for that day, let it be darkness…Let darkness, ‘dead-darkness’ expunge it.” (3: 1-5) 

Job understands, intuitively of course, that once an ovum is fertilized by a sperm…or very shortly thereafter, the die so to speak is cast. There is no going back…unless I can resolve the Grandfather Paradox and kill the old coot before he can reproduce. 

A silly thought? Not at all! In fact, there is a school of thought that suggests that all our lives will ultimately be expunged…at the heat death of the cosmos. What we call ‘being’ is really just the existential track of a virtual particle in a virtual universe. But that is not what Job (or Hamlet) had in mind. 

I like to bet on Pro Football. At the beginning of each NFL season, I pick a few ‘underrated’ teams that I think might have a chance to go all the way. If the teams I pick are bad enough (think Jets), I can get outrageous odds.

Typically, I’ll bet a whopping $25 on each such team. If any of my teams win, I stand to gain at least $1,000 and in some cases much more: just how bad are these teams? (Think Jets.) 

But if I happen to land on a ‘hot property’, as I did this year, the wins pile up as the season progresses. Superbowl buzz makes my $25 bet look like a work of pure genius, reminiscent some would say of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerti. 

Suddenly, I am the hot property: “You stand to win $3,000 if your team goes the distance, but if they lose anywhere along the way, you get zero. I’ll give you $1,000, right now, no questions asked, for your betting slip.”

Job has something even better in mind. He is proposing a type of poker where a player can fold at any time…and receive back 100% of what he’s bet so far on his hand. Extending the analogy, we can live our lives and then, at the end of it, decide whether to make it ‘real’ or not.

But suppose Job has his way. Suppose God updates his design to allow creatures to retroactively erase their lives, their being, at any time. Gone is the accumulated suffering of the decades, gone is the prospect of an excruciating death, gone is the risk of nightmares.

Of course, gone too are the pleasures and joys of life and their attendant memories, reveries, etc. We are conditioned to tell pollsters that the joys outweigh the sorrows. But do they really?

Suppose you were born with a special button and told that you were free to push that button at any time but that pushing the button would not only result in immediate death but in retroactive death. It would be as if none of your life experiences had ever happened.

Do you think you would have pushed that button by now? Would you ever push it? If so, when? Under what circumstances?

To be clear, this is not suicide with its social stigma and its possibly adverse spiritual consequences. This is simply an ‘inalienable right’, conferred on every human being at conception (or shortly thereafter), either by God or by Thomas Jefferson – the right to retroactively opt out of existence at any time! 

After all, you did not ask to be born, you did not even consent to it. It only makes sense then that, upon attaining adulthood, you should have the right of self-determination, even retroactively. Nor is this ‘death’, this is simply ‘not-being’. 

To live, even for a short time, is to place oneself at almost unimaginable risk. Couple that with the periodic suffering visited on even the most charmed life and, honestly, it is hard to imagine anyone ever choosing life…for herself, or for anyone else.

And yet, we’re constantly told that folks choose life every day: “I had good innings, what a gift, I wouldn’t trade it for the world,” etc. But is that really how we feel or is it just what we’re expected to feel…or say?

After all, how bad would you feel about yourself if you came to the end of your natural life only to decide on reflection that your life had not been worth living? Imagine telling your loved ones on your death bed that you wish you’d never been born?

Fortunately, the human psyche protects us from such pain. We buck up. We put on a face for the faces that we meet (Eliot)…we put on a face for ourselves. What if the last thing we say to ourselves and the World is a lie?

But I digress. The point is, nobody wants a button. At least, no one is willing to own up to wanting a button. Are there defensible, rational reasons for this?

A co-worker was fond of saying, “Better days are coming!” They didn’t; he died. But his slightly sarcastic meme put a spotlight on something important, Hope: “There just has to be a pony underneath this pile of excrement; all I have to do is keep digging.” 

Hope is virtually omnipotent. It truly does seem to conquer all. But can we really be so naïve as that? And what is it we’re hoping for anyway? A winning Powerball ticket? Another Superbowl for New England? A cure for cancer?

(One of the 10 best movies ever made is Truffaut’s 400 Blows. Spoiler alert: in the end the tween aged hero fulfills his ‘lifelong’ dream, then asks, with his eyes alone, the fundamental existential question, “Now what?”) 

All these things (above) are good in themselves but are any of them enough to justify the high cost of the buy-in (i.e. life with all its inevitable suffering and unavoidable risks) when the only sure thing is New England?

But there is another factor: the other! Every day we’ve been alive, we’ve interacted with others and those interactions have shaped, trivially or massively, their life experiences, and in turn who they are for others, and so on. 

Now I am under no illusion that my presence in this world has net-benefited folks. Even I’m not that narcissistic! Perhaps I’ve benefited some but harmed others. Perhaps I set out to benefit Sally but harmed her in the end or perhaps I truly did help Sally but inadvertently hurt Joe. Actions and their alleged consequences are radically alienated from our intentions and regrets.

Here’s where Hope becomes Faith. Do I trust the Universe enough to believe that if I intend to benefit others and act in accordance with that intention, my influence will somehow be ‘net positive’? I have no reason to suppose that to be true but to believe otherwise is nihilism which ultimately leads to skepticism and solipsism. 

If I don’t push my button, that’s why. Not because I think I’m ‘God’s gift’ but rather because I’m not God. Perhaps I do have the right to decide, unilaterally and retroactively, whether I will or will not have been in the World, but I do not thereby claim the right to inflict the consequences of my decision on others.

Call it the Grandson Paradox. If I choose never to have lived, I condemn my biological offspring never to be born. Do I have the right to make that decision for them? And it’s not just about biology. Every living organism that I encounter, face-to-face or vicariously, will be impacted, accidentally or existentially, by my decision. 

Bottom line, if I have a button and do not elect to push it, I do so, not in consideration of myself but in consideration of ‘others’, including you, dear reader, and of course, including God. I may assert a right to self-determination but I do not therefore claim the right to make determinations for you.

And speaking of grandfathers, this thought experiment demonstrates a thesis first advanced by Anaximander, the grandfather of Western philosophy, in the 6th century BCE: All being is mutual; I am only because you are and vice versa. 

And speaking of grandsons, this thought experiment blows up the dimensions of Schoedinger’s cat carrier until it templates the edge of the Universe. Now nothing is ‘real’ until it interacts with an observer (or experimental apparatus) external to itself. There is no ‘I’ in ‘It’. (sic)

My life is not real until my existence has been felt by another. I may be readily willing to sacrifice my own life experience, but I am much less ready to sacrifice yours. “And so we continue on, going up to Jerusalem, filled with awe and dread, Jesus leading the way…” (Mark 10:32)

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The Play Scene in Hamlet (1842) by Irish artist Daniel Maclise is a large oil painting that vividly depicts the moment in Shakespeare’s Hamlet when the prince stages a “play within a play” to reveal King Claudius’s guilt for murdering his father. The work was shown at the Royal Academy in 1842 and is now in the Tate Britain collection, celebrated for its dramatic narrative and detailed portrayal of the characters watching the performance unfold.