When death is seen beyond the narrow lens of individuality, we notice that our entire being is a dispensable piece of information for nature to progress ahead.
Evolution has little interest in your being happy, beyond trying to make sure that you’re not so listless or miserable that you lose the will to reproduce. - Oliver Burkeman
We often think of death only in terms of the individual as if every individual is an isolated unit, complete by their-self. A heightened importance to the self in our minds also makes our death more important than that of everyone else's. Meanwhile..
Nature does not find its members very helpful after their reproductive abilities are depleted (except perhaps special situations in which animals live in groups, such as the need for grandmothers in the human and elephant domains to assist others in preparing offspring to take charge). Nature prefers to let the game continue at the informational level, the genetic code. So organisms need to die for nature to be antifragile—nature is opportunistic, ruthless, and selfish. - Nassim Taleb
In Matt Haig’s book How to Stop Time, the character of Omai, who has lived through several centuries and seen more than his share of deaths, notes:
People you love never die. They don't die. Not completely. They live in your mind, the way they always lived inside you. You keep their light alive. If you remember them well enough, they can still guide you, like the shine of long-extinguished stars could guide ships in unfamiliar waters. If you stop mourning them, and start listening to them, they still have the power to change your life. They can, in short, be salvation - Matt Haig
To look at death as a collective experience is different from mourning the individual. To look at death from this lens is to allow what existed to live on, within you. It is to keep alive the wisdom of nature in the infinite spiral of mortality.
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