Based Camp - Based Camp： People Don't Know How to Die Anymore

00:00:00.000 They are using the amount of pain that person's deaths caused their children as like a judge of the quality of that relationship.

00:00:08.780 And so they want you to experience pain as a sign that relationship was a meaningful one.

00:00:17.740 Worse, when they expect this emotional reaction from you and when you have this emotional reaction, you are affecting.

00:00:24.760 I'm affecting my entire family, my wife and my kids most of all.

00:00:28.340 It's saying not just they want me sad, but they want my kids to feel this grief.

00:00:32.620 They want my...

00:00:33.700 And this is where it gets really scary, right?

00:00:36.580 Because this is where you can turn something into a traumatic event, as we've discussed in other episodes, by making it contextualized as traumatic.

00:00:46.220 Would you like to know more?

00:00:47.200 Hello, Simone. 0.69

00:00:48.560 This is going to be an interesting, if sad episode, because we lost one of this show's first and most avid watchers.

00:00:57.400 She watched every episode a few days ago, which was my mom.

00:01:01.660 She passed away suddenly and unexpectedly a few days ago.

00:01:05.040 Since she passed away, I have experienced a very interesting phenomenon.

00:01:10.240 Do you want to talk about it, Simone?

00:01:12.720 Yes.

00:01:13.200 You have experienced the phenomenon of what we might call morning culture, M-O-U-R-N-I-N-G, where, interestingly, there's a very bifurcated reaction that we get from people when we tell them.

00:01:25.900 One is, wow, that's really heavy.

00:01:28.340 Hope you're doing all right.

00:01:29.180 Let me know how I can help.

00:01:30.600 Other people are like, whoa, hold on.

00:01:33.920 Like, how are you even on the phone with me right now?

00:01:36.240 Like, how could you be telling, you need to be like, no, get off the phone right now.

00:01:40.240 This is an emergency.

00:01:41.200 I understand.

00:01:41.840 Like, don't, you know, don't handle, process your pain.

00:01:44.400 And they kind of, there's very much this expectation and feeling that you get from these conversations.

00:01:49.120 That you should be pulling out your hair, crying, rending your clothing, gnashing your teeth, right?

00:01:58.440 Like, rolling around on the floor in pain.

00:02:00.160 Yeah, I need to be doing whatever North Koreans were supposed to do when Kim Jong-il died. 0.97

00:02:05.120 Where you get, the moral police come after you if you are not mourning correctly and loudly enough.

00:02:12.100 Yes.

00:02:12.500 This brings me to a confluence of really interesting phenomenons, right?

00:02:17.360 Which is, one, what's going on here?

00:02:20.480 Like, why specifically do they want me to be demonstrating emotional pain?

00:02:27.280 What are the reasons why people feel emotional pain when somebody dies?

00:02:32.760 And if we are intentionally building our own culture, a culture by our value system,

00:02:41.080 what would a person actually do when a person dies, when a parent dies?

00:02:44.460 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:02:45.640 And how do we relate to that?

00:02:47.720 And then in addition to those things, I want to cover the concept of what lessons I learned from my mom.

00:02:54.840 Because I think that's a really valuable thing to convey to the audience.

00:02:59.460 I don't know, man.

00:03:00.020 That might be a whole, like, a whole other episode.

00:03:02.840 That might be a whole other episode, yeah.

00:03:04.260 No, this woman was a force of nature.

00:03:06.980 She is not someone who can be wrapped up in even one episode. 0.80

00:03:09.940 So no, let's save that for later.

00:03:11.180 Let us talk about the culture of especially mourning in the context of losing a loved one or family member.

00:03:19.140 Focus on why.

00:03:21.580 Like, why do people feel sad when somebody died?

00:03:25.820 And I think that there are only a few reasons.

00:03:30.200 And they can really be isolated to better understand if they're bringing you any utility

00:03:34.540 or they are in any meaningful way honoring the person who died.

00:03:39.060 So the first is you are sad for anything that they did not get to experience, right?

00:03:47.740 There's a feeling of regret over what they didn't complete because you know what they wanted

00:03:52.040 and they didn't get that.

00:03:54.100 Yes.

00:03:54.620 And so that can be things like seeing their grandchildren grow up or something like that, right?

00:04:00.260 It's similar to that.

00:04:01.920 And I think that this by far is the biggest reason that people mourn, is regret over things

00:04:08.440 that they won't get to do with the person in the future.

00:04:11.440 The reactions they won't get to have from the person, essentially missing the person.

00:04:18.120 People are mourning their own lifestyle changing to a great extent, right?

00:04:22.100 Yes.

00:04:22.880 And the things that they're like, I think that this form of mourning is entirely selfish

00:04:27.240 and really not beneficial at all.

00:04:30.320 The first form of mourning, and we'll get to other forms, I don't know, I can understand

00:04:34.860 why you would take some time to reflect on the regret of the things the person isn't going

00:04:40.240 to get to experience, but it really has no utility.

00:04:43.460 By that, what I mean is the person's already dead.

00:04:46.500 Yeah.

00:04:46.660 You're not going to be able to fix it by fretting over it.

00:04:49.380 Yeah.

00:04:49.560 And so what you're doing is you're allowing that person to, for something totally non-efficacious

00:04:55.280 to negatively affect your mood and worse, and this is something I always say about sadness,

00:05:02.320 sadness hurts the people when I show sadness, when I publicly show grief, especially if it's

00:05:08.400 an unaddressable grief, right, that disproportionately hurts the people who care about me most, because

00:05:16.700 they will begin to feel that grief.

00:05:18.960 It will begin to affect their mood as well.

00:05:21.100 Yeah, it's a communicable disease.

00:05:22.620 So it's like knowing that you have a bad cold and then running up and French kissing someone.

00:05:28.140 And there was that great study that you were looking at how families, how emotions travel

00:05:32.300 throughout the families or how stress travels throughout the families.

00:05:34.980 Saliva cortisol levels.

00:05:36.340 So I recently found a study that I found really interesting that measured throughout the course

00:05:41.440 of a conflict.

00:05:42.440 So they, the researchers orchestrated, I guess, like a conflict inducing activity for a family.

00:05:49.260 And then they, throughout this activity, the duration of it at several points, they measured

00:05:53.380 everyone's saliva level, cortisol level.

00:05:55.660 So I guess they made them spit like in the middle of this.

00:05:58.400 And they found that families do have high correlations in cortisol levels.

00:06:04.360 In fact, step-parents had lower levels of correlation in cortisol levels with the rest

00:06:08.220 of the family, like with the kids, than biological parents.

00:06:11.640 And they found also that mother's cortisol levels predicted father's cortisol levels, predicted

00:06:17.560 children's cortisol levels, predicted mother's cortisol levels, which also suggested like mothers

00:06:22.320 are the onus is on mothers to stop the cycle when people are getting stressed out because

00:06:27.340 they are the, the driver of the feedback loop, essentially, which is really interesting.

00:06:32.920 And I think that that happens on a broader sense with many emotions.

00:06:36.120 I'm sure happiness works in similar ways.

00:06:38.800 Sadness probably works in similar ways.

00:06:40.580 Anger probably works in similar ways.

00:06:42.420 Yeah.

00:06:42.680 So what they're really saying, because I think that people, they talk about grieving and they

00:06:46.500 talk about, you should do it for this reason and this reason.

00:06:48.460 And they're not really thinking about the cost of it.

00:06:50.400 If I am doing this big public grief display, and it seems really genuine because when somebody's

00:06:56.160 grieving over the death of a loved one, there's not really that much you can say to them because

00:06:59.800 you can't make it go away, right?

00:07:01.740 It's not like a fixable problem.

00:07:03.240 Yeah.

00:07:03.380 I think this is why people send flowers.

00:07:04.860 I don't know.

00:07:05.340 I want you to know that I'm here for you and send you something beautiful in a moment

00:07:07.980 of darkness, but I, I can't make it go away.

00:07:10.220 Sorry.

00:07:11.540 But, and often the person who died wouldn't want you to be sad.

00:07:14.560 Like they wouldn't want to inflict that on you.

00:07:15.700 But worse, when they expect this emotional reaction from you, and when you have this

00:07:19.860 emotional reaction, you are affecting, I'm affecting my entire family, my wife and my

00:07:25.520 kids.

00:07:26.000 Most of all, it's saying not just, they want me sad, but they want my kids to feel this

00:07:30.300 grief.

00:07:30.780 They want my.

00:07:32.000 And this is where, this is where it gets really scary, right?

00:07:34.760 Because this is where you can turn something into a traumatic event, as we've discussed in

00:07:39.720 other episodes by making it contextualized as traumatic.

00:07:43.720 So we were actually really lucky to not be at home when we heard the news about your mother.

00:07:50.220 And I'm really glad for that because our kids didn't see us go through the initial shock.

00:07:55.900 They didn't see me cry.

00:07:57.980 They didn't see us like really act weird.

00:08:01.380 And by the time we got home.

00:08:02.960 It's not that we don't show any emotions around stuff like this, but we work really hard to,

00:08:08.220 we see having those emotions, experiencing those emotions as a negative thing that we

00:08:13.960 are working to overcome and to recontextualize.

00:08:16.880 Yeah.

00:08:17.180 It's a failure of self-control on our part.

00:08:19.720 And then I want to talk about the final reason why people get really sad.

00:08:22.780 This is outside of cultural reason.

00:08:24.100 I'm just talking about like the natural reasons you feel sad when you lose someone.

00:08:27.240 Yeah.

00:08:27.440 Is things unsaid, as I would call this reason.

00:08:30.480 Unfinished business.

00:08:31.800 Yeah.

00:08:32.000 So this is often a self-narrative reason.

00:08:34.680 As we talked about in other episodes, people have an internal self-narrative.

00:08:38.660 And within most of those self-narratives is I am a good person or I am a good son,

00:08:44.060 or at least I'm not heartless or something like that.

00:08:46.280 Or it could be like, I have a good relationship with my mother or my siblings or something like

00:08:50.680 that.

00:08:51.100 If one of your last interactions or if on reflection, you were not those things to that person,

00:08:57.100 you have now permanently lost the ability to correct that.

00:09:01.260 Right.

00:09:01.540 When I see people who I've noticed have had the hardest time overcoming specific losses,

00:09:08.160 it's because they treated that person really poorly in some way or in some way that they,

00:09:13.960 there's this one guy we know who just all the time talking about his ex-wife.

00:09:17.340 And then we talked to other people about their relationship and it turns out he's just constantly

00:09:20.880 cheating on her.

00:09:21.980 He otherwise treated her pretty badly.

00:09:23.500 His late ex-wife.

00:09:24.900 Let's be clear.

00:09:26.380 Oh yeah.

00:09:26.640 His late ex-wife.

00:09:27.640 Yeah.

00:09:27.820 Ex because she was dead.

00:09:29.300 And I think that really to an extent drove that.

00:09:33.840 And I think had I not treated like we really worked to give my mom access to her grandkids

00:09:41.380 to treat her well, even when she could sometimes be a difficult person as all parents can to

00:09:46.000 some extent.

00:09:46.460 And I think that lowers a lot of potential grief I could feel over not being in alignment with

00:09:51.800 my own self narrative.

00:09:52.760 This explains the daughter from California syndrome, which is a phrase in the medical profession to

00:10:09.680 describe a situation in which a hithero disengaged relative challenges the care a dying elderly patient

00:10:16.520 is being given or insists that the medical team pursue aggressive measures to prolong the

00:10:21.520 patient's life.

00:10:23.400 Here what you see is the people who are least able to deal with the death of a loved one

00:10:29.560 are not the ones who were closest to that person in like a meaningful sense.

00:10:35.160 They are the people who knew they should have been closer to that person, but weren't, and

00:10:41.500 now need that person to stay alive so that they can make up for their own failure.

00:10:47.260 You will feel a lot less pain when somebody dies if you knew you were there for them in

00:10:52.820 the way that you should have been when they were alive.

00:10:55.660 So I actually do think that this form of emotional pain is useful because it has a positive effect

00:11:02.600 on a person.

00:11:03.620 They weren't living up to the self narrative of the type of person they want to be in their

00:11:07.820 interpersonal relationships with other people.

00:11:10.300 And through the emotional pain that they experienced there, that can act as a lesson to make sure that

00:11:17.720 they are not treating other people in a way where they would have this form of regret if those

00:11:22.120 people die.

00:11:22.660 Okay. So it's basically, Oh, but my trip, my character arc wasn't complete.

00:11:26.460 And therefore it's this like huge prompt of, Hey, you need to start rewriting the script right now

00:11:30.300 because you're not like, this isn't working either be a better actor or bring in new people

00:11:35.740 or something like that, but it's helpful. So we see emotions as helpful when there's signals

00:11:39.640 that you need to change course. And once you take the action, actionable feeling. So if I'm like, I did not

00:11:46.380 close things up with my mom, that I might have this action of, Oh, I need to go and be nicer to my dad.

00:11:51.440 I need to go and be nicer to my wife. I need to go and be nicer to my kids because if I lost any of

00:11:55.980 them, then I wouldn't be the type of person that I aspire to be. So that emotion is useful. The

00:12:03.460 emotion of, I won't get to have these experiences with this person in the future. That's pretty much

00:12:08.080 an entirely selfish emotion. There's no real utility to it. The emotion of, they won't get to

00:12:13.540 experience these things in the future. There are ways, and we can talk about how you might be able to

00:12:17.440 twist that emotion to an advantage, but there's also no real utility to it. And then there's the

00:12:21.920 final emotional set, right? Which is where we talk about it societally, which is some societies and

00:12:28.100 cultures use the amount of mourning that you're showing as a way to judge how emotionally attached

00:12:35.240 to that person you were. And because people will get more emotional normally if they come from a

00:12:42.940 culture that indulges in emotion when somebody who they were closer to dies than when somebody who

00:12:47.600 they were further away from dies. Right. And so that can be used as a proxy for how much the other

00:12:54.580 people in a person's life actually cared about them. Right. Yeah. Like you didn't really love them

00:12:59.160 because you're not really crying right now. Right. And through not showing an emotion in a way,

00:13:04.260 you are sending a social signal that people didn't actually have people who were that close to them.

00:13:09.940 Now, I think this is super interesting. So we saw, for example, some time ago, there was

00:13:14.060 the famous billionaires die in a submarine accident issue. And one of the stepsons of one of the people

00:13:19.680 who died on this Titanic seeking submarine had a stepson who at first, you know, was, I think,

00:13:26.340 publicly saying, well, please send your prayers to my father. I hope he makes it through because it

00:13:30.520 wasn't known for some time if everyone had died. And then a few days later, he spotted at a concert

00:13:35.420 and he caught a lot of flack for that, including from celebrities. So high profile flack. And I think

00:13:42.820 the belief was how dare this person have fun? Their stepfather just died. And I think that's really

00:13:50.160 interesting because if I died, I would be thrilled if my kids were smiling in two days. I'd be

00:13:56.200 thrilled if they were getting on with their lives. And when I think about what would really honor

00:14:00.280 people, at least like what I would want people to do if I died is look at my objective function,

00:14:06.300 look at the missions that I cared about and see how they could contribute to those in some way.

00:14:11.620 If you really cared about me, you would be doing what I would want to be done in the world.

00:14:17.620 Yeah. So they're using the pain that this person caused other people. That's just so twisted when

00:14:26.560 you think about it. Super twisted.

00:14:28.320 They are using the amount of pain that person's deaths caused their children as like a judge of

00:14:34.600 the quality of that relationship. And so they want you to experience pain as a sign that relationship

00:14:44.240 was like a meaningful one. And this pain, let's talk about it. Even though we don't think like

00:14:49.200 negative emotional pain has like a huge negative value, it does tremendously affect your ability to

00:14:56.340 be efficacious in the world. When you are mourning, you are not efficacious. When you are really indulging

00:15:01.980 in these emotional states, you are not moving towards the things that matter. And this is where I think

00:15:08.660 we get to our cultural reaction, which is something that Simone was saying there, right? Which is when

00:15:15.060 we think about how we relate to death, like whether or not I would mourn my own death, like whether or

00:15:19.380 not my deaths would be a bad or a good thing. The question is, did I, out of the things that I feel

00:15:24.600 like I have an objective function, like what I think is good in the world, what I'm trying to complete,

00:15:27.860 I have a number of tasks that I have set to complete with my life. And the sadness of my death

00:15:33.940 is measured by the number of unfinished tasks that I had left against the number of tasks that I

00:15:40.480 completed. And to that extent, like that's how I would measure like how quote unquote sad I would

00:15:48.020 be, like the amount of regret I being dead, not feeling regret would feel, right? Oh, it's bad that

00:15:53.600 I'm dying now versus it's good that I'm dying now. Yeah. Yeah. And so I, one thing I was saying with

00:16:00.500 Simone is I think that culturally, like we're building our own culture for our family. I think

00:16:04.660 the first step, because different cultures have different grieving processes is to judge whether

00:16:11.100 the person who died had a good or a bad life. And again, this is a very Calvinist sort of culturally

00:16:17.920 informed thing, which is the idea that you have the elect and you have the not elect. I think many

00:16:21.880 cultures, they judge everyone's life is good or having matter. And I just don't think that's true. I

00:16:26.320 think sometimes people have lives that didn't turn out to matter. That didn't turn out to have a

00:16:31.080 positive effect on the world. And it's important. I think that through judging their deaths in this

00:16:36.580 way, first, that allows you to process, you can think through their life and you can put them in

00:16:40.380 one of two categories, right? If you put them in the good category, like they wanted to positively

00:16:48.760 impact the world and they did positively impact the world. And especially if they did most of the impact

00:16:53.880 that they were planning to have, and they didn't leave that many untied threads as my mom did, 0.52

00:16:58.440 then you can better emotionally categorize, okay, I don't really need to feel that bad over the

00:17:04.360 things they didn't get to experience. She didn't get to experience her grandkids growing up, but she

00:17:08.480 could largely know what that was going to look like to some extent, right? She accomplished the

00:17:13.140 things she wanted to accomplish in her life. However, the reason why it's good to also have this

00:17:17.680 negative, oh, their life did not reach its potential is that then you can relate to their death in a

00:17:23.560 different way, which is you relate to their death as something to learn from. Oh, this person

00:17:28.660 actually ended up getting addicted to meth and then did a bunch of really terrible things and hurt the

00:17:32.620 people around them. Then you can start to say, okay, let's still give their life meaning through

00:17:38.380 taking it as a learning experience. Like where were the choices they made that pushed them into a

00:17:44.320 timeline in which their life became non-efficacious to the people around them? And how can I not make those

00:17:52.840 choices and how can my kids or other people in my family not make those choices? So you're still

00:17:59.000 drawing something from the death. And then the other thing is to think about is did you treat that person

00:18:06.800 the way you would have wanted to treat them? And if you get negative emotions from that, you should

00:18:11.320 learn from those negative emotions in your current interactions with people. But Simone, I'd love to hear

00:18:17.800 what you think of this system and what you think of other cultural ways of reacting to death.

00:18:25.960 Yeah. One thing I was thinking about when you were talking about this and the idea that people really

00:18:29.860 need to be dramatically mourning is that both in ancient Egypt, but even still today in some cultures,

00:18:36.440 you can hire professional mourners, which is so crazy that like in ancient Egyptian funerals or

00:18:43.760 funerary rites and traditions, you would have like literally professional mourners who would like-

00:18:49.080 Oh, this was true in like Victorian England too. And in ancient Rome, I think?

00:18:53.120 Maybe in ancient Rome. I know for sure Egypt. I also remember like one of my top favorite TV shows,

00:18:59.600 The Moaning of Life with Carl Pilkington. He travels for the episode they do on death to Taipei

00:19:05.360 in Taiwan where he hires a professional mourner. And then she shows him like how to do it. And he's

00:19:11.680 really bad at doing it. And she's like getting frustrated. But I think it's really interesting

00:19:16.520 that in some cultures, you would hire someone to do that instead of do it yourself.

00:19:21.320 In Korea, you have this, but you also will hire people to come to your wedding and stuff like that.

00:19:26.020 There are professional wedding attenders. It's to make it look like one, your social network was

00:19:32.120 larger and the emotional impact you had on people was bigger. Like you had an emotional impact on a

00:19:37.360 wider array of people. And that's a quality of your life. One of the most interesting things that

00:19:42.400 I've had some people who I've known, who have been, they've really told me that they see like

00:19:47.680 your scorecard at life being the number of people who show up at your funeral.

00:19:51.800 Yeah. Yeah.

00:19:54.240 And potentially how famous those people are as well.

00:19:56.460 Yeah.

00:19:56.720 And I'm like, wow, I really, that is almost like a negative scorecard for me. How many people did I

00:20:04.160 hurt through passing? I don't know if that is.

00:20:08.880 Oh, I don't think people who throw, who show up at your funeral have necessarily been hurt by your

00:20:14.260 passing. I think there are people who want to get together with people who cared about you and

00:20:17.520 celebrate your life. Let's be fair there.

00:20:19.800 Yeah. But here we're talking about this performative mourning that you see across cultures.

00:20:23.900 And I think you might be misinterpreting this morning. I think actually that it's more along

00:20:28.940 the lines of for many people, the kind of mourning that is societally expected and that is seen as

00:20:34.360 expressing love and dedication to the person who has died just can't, it's not natural for them to

00:20:40.680 do it. It doesn't feel right to them. And so hiring someone helps with processing the grief and making

00:20:47.800 you feel like you've checked the box because you can't do that yourself. Like everyone processes grief

00:20:53.080 differently too. I think both culturally and genetically, we deal with grief in different ways.

00:20:57.100 And there's just some people who like naturally are going to lose it and go crazy and look like

00:21:01.200 they're mourning properly and the way that in that very dramatic way. And then other people just

00:21:05.720 won't. And maybe a way to still feel like you're societally checking the box is by hiring someone to

00:21:12.780 do it in a very stylized way. The professional mourner from that episode of the moaning of life where

00:21:19.120 Carl Pilkington learned more about death was totally not someone who would plausibly be a friend

00:21:26.180 showing up at a funeral who was sad. She was dressed in traditional wear. She had a very

00:21:30.480 style, a very stylized way of mourning. So I think it's more about checking a cultural box

00:21:37.540 than it is. I think that's about cultural drift that you're seeing there. So I think what you're

00:21:42.320 seeing is, keep in mind, cultures evolve over thousands or hundreds of years, whatever. I think

00:21:46.760 initially what you had there is a culture where people began to, as they do in our culture,

00:21:51.420 sort of attribute how good a person's life was or how strong a relationship they had with someone was

00:21:57.580 by how that person is reacting. And then initially, like you can think in ancient Rome or something

00:22:02.800 like that, where you would have a lot of people who they might not know. And this person is being

00:22:05.920 judged publicly. It's okay. Let's get as many people to plausibly mourn as possible. But then after that

00:22:12.560 happened, it began to become known that this was something you did, that you're supposed to hire

00:22:17.060 public mourners. And then it just became this derived cultural tradition, which no longer really

00:22:23.140 served the initial purpose of the tradition. I don't think that's a sign. I don't think that when

00:22:27.800 they were first hiring people to do this, that they were doing it just to, in a way where it would

00:22:35.660 have been obvious that these people didn't know the person. Do you disagree? Or do you think that?

00:22:42.220 I think I disagree. I just think that this kind of mourning doesn't come natural to a lot of people

00:22:46.000 and that there's still this feeling like you have to do something. And I think one of the biggest

00:22:50.960 things that happens when someone encounters death, even if you are in a culture that has a lot of

00:22:59.160 tradition, is this feeling of, okay, what do I do? I need to do something. But there's not that much to

00:23:05.400 do aside from make sure that all the things that person did, or like basically wrap things up for

00:23:09.760 that person and replace any work that they needed to do. So I think, I think the mourning is a part of

00:23:14.380 that. Like, I think I'm supposed to mourn. Like, I need to do something, right? So what do I do?

00:23:18.180 So I would agree with that. I think that cultures that give people a specific death 1.00

00:23:22.220 task, a specific death task, they do help people process the deaths easier because they're like,

00:23:30.140 okay, once you have done X task tied to the death, then the way that you're supposed to relate to

00:23:36.620 that is over and you have emotional permission to move on without being a bad person.

00:23:42.420 Like one of our friends texted us after we, we let them know that this had happened. And he was

00:23:47.220 like, Oh, you know what one culture does is everyone sits on the floor. Like the family of the lost one

00:23:53.540 dines on the floor for a week and then they get off the floor and they're supposed to get back with

00:23:57.680 their lives. But I feel like there's that neat and there's the Victorian you wear mourning and then

00:24:01.340 you wear purple and there's all these, the colors you wear, but yes, eat on the floor for a week or

00:24:05.420 wear black clothing or burn something or whatever, but you need to do something and it has to feel,

00:24:11.840 and then it's done. And then I think that helps you understand that the thing has been done.

00:24:16.960 This is why for our culture, I really want to focus on ensuring the things that are done

00:24:21.860 are specifically efficacious. So rather than just like wearing funny clothes, like you want to

00:24:27.040 actually end up better off than you were before. Well, this is the problem with the wearing funny

00:24:31.540 clothes solution is then you get some people who begin to associate that again with how much they

00:24:37.520 cared about the person. So like in Victorian culture, you'd have some women who would just 1.00

00:24:41.820 never change out of their mourning clothes. Like Queen Victoria. Yeah. Where they wanted to show like,

00:24:46.860 I extra cared about this person and I am going to show that through an indulgence in this particular

00:24:53.880 aspect of the mourning process. Reviewing the whole process efficacious throughout, then there is no

00:25:01.380 way that a person can negatively indulge in it. Yeah. And actually the Queen Victoria is a good example

00:25:07.120 here because she did phone it in after Albert died and she used her mourning of Albert to justify

00:25:12.440 that. So she really hurt her nation by choosing to check out after her husband died and by indulging in 0.98

00:25:19.000 her mourning that much. Yeah. She hurt a lot of people. She hurt an entire nation possibly. And of

00:25:25.820 course her children, like her children, a lot of them weren't, you didn't get great outcomes. I think

00:25:29.800 she could have been a better mother to them. Like all these things, it wasn't great. Yeah. So if she had

00:25:34.600 by our cultural standards, the better way to demonstrate her care for him instead of through this

00:25:42.000 mourning theater is to judge what he valued and ensure that you lived a life that achieved as many

00:25:51.660 of those values as possible. Right. Yeah. And then I think the other way that we relate to mourning,

00:25:57.020 and this is a really interesting thing because it has to do with how we relate to our kids and how we

00:26:01.880 relate to elders in our society is us as a cultural group. I think one of the things that you relate to

00:26:09.980 mourning is using, oh, all of the successes I'll have in the future that they won't get to react to.

00:26:14.620 And a lot of people naturally, they grow up to some extent, trying to impress their parents or trying

00:26:20.960 to get approval from their parents and our culture, because we have this very unique cultural setup,

00:26:29.260 which is descendant worship, which is to say that we value the respect we earn from our descendants

00:26:38.260 much more than the respect we earn from our ancestors. So my mom, for example, does exist in

00:26:49.320 every one of her grandchildren to an extent, both culturally and genetically, right? So in a very real

00:26:55.700 way, it is an iteration of her judging me. But more important than that, viewing things this way

00:27:05.720 culturally has a lot of positive side effects. First, it causes me to focus really heavily on

00:27:12.200 the value set that I teach my kids. Because the value set that I teach my kids will be the value

00:27:18.960 set that I am judged by in a meaningful sense. That is so much more important than the value set that

00:27:26.440 whatever serendipitously your parents came to, right? The value set you're... And keep in mind,

00:27:31.880 I can teach my kids a value set, and they may adopt some other value set. What this also does is it

00:27:37.400 teaches me to value wherever they saw problems was in my value set. They are younger than me.

00:27:44.200 Presumably, I gave them every intellectual advantage I could, whether that's material they could learn,

00:27:49.960 whether the way that they emotionally developed. So if they believe that aspects of how I see the world

00:27:56.920 are wrong, unlike my parents, which had almost intrinsically less information than I have,

00:28:04.920 my kids have more information than I have. And any difference in information is due to how I did as

00:28:12.920 parent, right? So it teaches me to extra pay attention to where my kids disagree with me,

00:28:20.200 and potentially update my own mental models based on that, and my own goals in life based on that.

00:28:26.200 Which I think leads to a much healthier family dynamic.

00:28:30.920 Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, I like that framing of it. And yeah, I think my mother passed

00:28:37.080 years before yours did, and in a very different process. But the thing that has given me the most

00:28:43.720 closure, or happiness, or a feeling of resolution with my mother is seeing so much of her in our kids,

00:28:49.400 and in myself, when I became a mother, which happened after she passed. So like,

00:28:53.160 Talk about how you conceptualize time, and how that's changed how you view the mourning process.

00:28:58.200 Yeah, okay. The DR of it is that I essentially don't think that I'm a continuous person at all.

00:29:04.360 And I first discovered this upon receiving a letter from myself in the past, like five,

00:29:08.360 five years ago, and was like, whoa, I don't know who this lady is. And it made me realize that who we

00:29:14.200 are dies all the time, I'm going to wake up tomorrow a slightly different person.

00:29:18.280 And so the idea that someone dies is ridiculous, because okay, that particular consciousness ended,

00:29:25.000 but also, it was always ending, like they were always there's this constant renewal,

00:29:28.280 this constant change of who we are. And I also, because we have this sort of very mechanistic,

00:29:33.880 Calvinistic view of the world, we, we see everything that has happened, and will happen is,

00:29:40.200 and is happening all happening at the same time, it is all already happened, it is all happening.

00:29:45.080 And so when someone passes away, it doesn't undo the fact that they exist, or did exist,

00:29:50.120 or will exist, they are very much still here. And so the entire way to say that is that they still

00:29:55.320 exist when they existed within the timeline. And that our position in the timeline today is not

00:30:01.960 a privileged position in the timeline. And this is very important in how we see the world, how we see

00:30:07.320 moral good and everything like that. That's why I don't value sort of the state of people today,

00:30:13.320 whether it's their happiness or agency more than people in the distant future, in terms of the actions

00:30:18.840 and the way I try to judge whether or not I'm living a good life. But because I don't have this sort of

00:30:25.480 privileged position of the now, people who existed in the past, they still very much,

00:30:32.120 in a very real and material sense, still 100% exist last week. My mom is still alive last week.

00:30:42.520 She is still experiencing everything she went through last week. But this requires a different

00:30:49.720 way of relating to time than I think most cultures do today. And I think one really perverse thing that's

00:30:55.640 been elucidated to me through her death. And through how I've seen people react to it is

00:31:02.280 yesterday, my brother and wife had another kid. Or was it the day before yesterday?

00:31:06.200 This is on Friday. So yeah, three days ago now.

00:31:08.840 Yeah. And this happened like the day or two days after my mom died. And being kid number three for

00:31:14.520 them, a lot of people don't really care anymore. Once you get to kid number three, four, it stops becoming

00:31:20.760 such a big thing. People are like, oh yeah, another one, right? But when you think about it,

00:31:25.880 that kid being brought into the world is such a more meaningful thing in the scales of life and death

00:31:33.640 than an older woman dying. She had max 20% of her lifespan left, maybe 10% of her lifespan left. 1.00

00:31:42.200 She had very little efficacious that she was going to do from this point forward in terms of changing

00:31:47.480 the world, me knowing the trajectory of her life. And yet this new life brought into the world has

00:31:53.160 an entire lifespan in front of them, a entire 100% of their life in front of them. And it could be a

00:31:58.440 very long life. It could be a very efficacious life. And that's so devalued in terms of the happiness that

00:32:06.840 is bringing people when contrasted to the death of an elderly person.

00:32:10.840 So in other words, yeah, the reaction of people to your mother's loss is so much,

00:32:15.400 it's so disproportionate to the reaction of people to the arrival of a new child in the world that it

00:32:20.600 feels weird to you, especially considering that the life impact, the life experience,

00:32:25.320 the change to the world is so much more meaningful with this new arrival.

00:32:28.840 Yeah. And this is really highlighted for us as people who have a new kid every year,

00:32:33.080 basically people asking our kids age, I go with three, two, one, and we're about to do our next

00:32:37.000 implementation this week, right? Frozen embryo transfer. Yeah. Tomorrow.

00:32:41.720 Tomorrow. Ah, so again, another new potential life coming into the world. It is just interesting.

00:32:48.040 And I think morose as a society, how we have so devalued the lives of the next generation.

00:32:55.320 And while we aren't a society that practice ancestor worship, I do think that we

00:32:59.800 disproportionately value the lives of the old and undervalue the lives of the young and the 0.99

00:33:05.240 perspectives of the young. That. And I think that there's just a very toxic culture around

00:33:10.840 death that leads to a lot of negative impact. So I think one is we don't know how to deal with

00:33:16.920 death because we don't have a culture around it. My mom told me when I was younger, she said,

00:33:21.240 Oh man, I love how in Japan, when someone dies, like there, everyone knows what happens. Everyone 0.90

00:33:25.560 has a role. Like your neighbor brings you this and your family does that. And everyone knows what

00:33:29.640 happens. And here in the U S like no one really knows what to do. And another friend was telling

00:33:33.960 us how they work in, in, in the, they work with public schools and they have, they encounter

00:33:39.320 children's funerals because they oversee districts with a lot of students that do have premature and

00:33:44.520 very young deaths. And he sees families just spending thousands and thousands of dollars on

00:33:49.720 these elaborate funerals for these children that they've lost because they don't know how to deal

00:33:53.640 with it, but they're doing, they're going into debt. They're doing this to the detriment of themselves

00:33:57.880 and other siblings. Like they're hurting their own families and life's potential because of this

00:34:03.560 inability to know what to do that in this feeling, like you have to do something. So I feel like

00:34:08.280 there's a very toxic lack of tradition around death and mourning that is not through any like

00:34:15.640 open maliciousness because of free market forces. Obviously there are industries that have cropped up

00:34:20.040 around this that encourage people to spend their money away to deal with this.

00:34:24.200 But our culture doesn't relate to death. And I think that this is a really important

00:34:28.120 thing that you're saying here. People see it as they go their entire lives without seeing somebody

00:34:32.840 die. Very frequently in our society. This is very rare, historically speaking. They just like,

00:34:39.720 death is a universally bad thing. It is something that is not supposed to happen. Like it's actually

00:34:45.720 almost not supposed to happen. Something has gone wrong when someone dies.

00:34:48.840 Something has gone terribly wrong. You go to a hospital because they are going to fix you.

00:34:53.560 If you are sick and you are ill, and they have failed when you die. It's just,

00:34:57.720 there is no, this is when it's okay to die in our society. Whereas most societies historically had

00:35:04.600 contexts where you were like, ah, yes, that's an honorable death. That death was okay.

00:35:09.720 Yeah, just like it happens.

00:35:12.200 Yeah. And I think one thing that may change how I relate to death and one reason why I'm

00:35:16.040 maybe so much more comfortable with it is early in my career, you're getting Malcolm Lord here.

00:35:19.960 I did work with a ME, a medical examiner. So I would go and collect brains for my lab,

00:35:25.320 because we were looking at a different brain morphology, but I'd get to read the person's

00:35:29.480 psychiatric files. So all of their interactions with their psychologist before they died, like

00:35:34.760 leading up to their deaths years, leading up to their deaths. So I'd get like a full profile on all

00:35:38.680 of their innermost thoughts. And I'd go and I'd get to see their body and I get to pick up their brain.

00:35:43.240 Then I'd then be taking that back to my lab. And so I saw a lot of dead people, like a lot of dead

00:35:48.600 people. And it may, I almost wish more people could have that experience so that they understand

00:35:56.360 that death is something that happens and it's all around us and our society covers us up. That was

00:36:03.160 one thing about the ME. If you're in the ME in a large city, something that becomes really clear to

00:36:07.080 you is just people are constantly dying around you. ME being medical examiner, right?

00:36:12.920 Yeah. And you just don't see it. Like if you're in a major city, there are people dying every single

00:36:18.600 day. There are rooms full of dead bodies every single day. And you just don't see it.

00:36:28.120 Yeah.

00:36:28.440 And it also, other learning from the ME, don't text and drive. Those were usually the most

00:36:33.880 gruesome bodies. Do not text and drive. 0.51

00:36:35.640 No boys and girls. 0.84

00:36:37.960 Oh, and the other thing you learned is that fat is even like grosser on the inside than it is from

00:36:44.200 the outside. So don't text and drive and wash your figure.

00:36:50.040 Useful. It helps me. Motivation in two areas. Also don't, don't drink and drive. That's another

00:36:55.560 thing we could see in the ME. But actually texting and driving seemed to, that was like way more

00:37:00.280 people than drinking and driving from my memory. Oh gosh. Yeah. I think you're more impaired even

00:37:05.160 than when you're drunk, which is, it's insane that texting and driving is not more, I guess,

00:37:09.960 persecuted or prosecuted. You would expect texting and driving to be more prosecuted based on the number

00:37:14.840 of deaths that it causes every year. Yeah.

00:37:16.840 This has been a fantastic toxin. Yeah. We didn't get into the lessons I learned from my mom. So we'll

00:37:21.240 talk about that in some other podcasts. And I really hope that if I was to die, that you wouldn't

00:37:26.600 go into this big performative mourning thing. I know that you care about me and that you'd focus on

00:37:31.240 our kids because that's what matters most to me. Kids first and foremost. And then second,

00:37:36.280 the way to honor you would be to carry forward your goals and mission to honor what you were doing,

00:37:42.280 to honor your work. And I hope you would do the same for me. Yeah. And remember, if you're ever

00:37:46.920 wondering what your husband would think of what you were doing or any success that you've had,

00:37:51.880 that what my kids think of you matters so much more than what I think of you.

00:37:55.400 Same, Malcolm. I love you very much. And yeah.

00:38:01.160 And please don't die.

00:38:02.680 Please don't die. Yeah.

00:38:03.800 It would be logistically very difficult.

00:38:06.280 I do not want to inconvenience you. But yeah, I also love your mom a lot. I know you do too.

00:38:11.640 And nothing will change the impact that she's had on us and nothing will take that away.

00:38:16.120 Yeah. And that's a really good thing. Yeah. She lives on.

00:38:19.560 And this is what she wanted to an extent. She was very clear in her will and everything like that.

00:38:23.560 Only celebrations of life. No mourning, no anything like that. So it's also not against her wishes.

00:38:28.840 Yeah, exactly.

00:38:30.120 All right.

Based Camp - August 02, 2023

Based Camp： People Don't Know How to Die Anymore

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