Tragic optimism in the face of the worst
Death isn’t something we tend to talk about a lot, especially not in the office, especially not in what we call Western society. But it’s something that’s pretty much unavoidable after this past year. Today, I’d like to talk about mourning, avoidance, and the glimmer of hope we can take from all of this pain and suffering.
Last week, three people I knew died. Two were too young, one was quite old, and all will be mourned and missed by loved ones.
Death has played a larger role this past year than most of us have been accustomed to. According to the CDC, the Covid-19 pandemic drove a 15% increase in the US death rate from the previous year. In fact, 2020 was the deadliest year in recorded US history. For some other places, the story was even worse.
The scale of death this past year means that almost all of us have experienced its effects, either via the death of someone we know or simply by being aware of the number of deaths and the threat to our lives lurking in the air. One problem we face now is that we are not used to talking about death — and how we deal with death has a massive impact on how we live and see the world.
Love to those suffering
If you are bereaved right now, my heart goes out to you. As the psychologist Clifford Lazarus writes, “[T]he best, basic advice to those in mourning is do not rush, take your time to work through the pain and the void, seek assistance from understanding and sagacious people, consider grief counseling as an option, and try to keep active… Despite being a near-universal experience, most people experience mourning in a unique way.”
In many cases, this pain will never completely go away. My mom told me this past weekend that she still bursts out sobbing thinking about her mother, my grandmother, who died 24 years ago.
But bereavement can be a transformational experience for some people. Researchers call this process “post-traumatic growth” (PTG), and they have found that bereaved individuals report increased confidence, resilience, a greater sense of purpose, lower levels of materialism, increased spirituality, and “a sense of inner well-being”. This growth can exist alongside PTSD or other negative conditions, but it tends to be significant and permanent.
The nasty side of avoiding the topic of death (please keep reading even if you don’t feel like it right now!)
For those of us not directly affected by death, however, the situation can be paradoxically grim. Researchers have found that vague reminders of death — of which we’ve gotten plenty this past year — can increase our tendencies toward aggression, materialism, and tribalism. These aren’t exactly the traits we would associate with personal growth and transformation. Some researchers have speculated that everything from conspiracy theories to street protests to Covid denialism can be traced to our subconscious reactions to the increased presence of death in our lives.
To summarize: we can grow when we are forced to face death head-on, but pushing it to the backs of our minds can make us nasty and mean. So, it seems to follow that the first thing we might consider is being a little bit more open about the topic of death. Let’s remember and honor those family members, friends, colleagues, and others whom we’ve lost. Let’s give ourselves time and space to mourn — even at the office.
Studies have shown that two factors can mitigate the negative tendencies associated with heightened awareness of death: self-esteem and worldview conviction. Self-esteem is the feeling that you are important in this world. Worldview conviction is how strongly you believe the answers you tell yourself to the big questions in life. It just so happens that increasing self-esteem and building a worldview that you find convincing are key aspects of the sort of transformation that people experience after losing a loved one. So what exactly can we do?
Tragic optimism
About ten years ago I suddenly found myself terrorized by thoughts of death. It caught me by surprise, in a bathroom of all places, and for at least a year I couldn’t really think of anything else. It kept me up at night. I developed an acute fear of flying. I had to stop reading Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search of Meaning, his life-affirming account of surviving a Nazi concentration camp, because I just found the topic too terrifying. I couldn’t even find comfort in my cat, because all I could think when I pet him was how he, like everyone and everything else in this world, was doomed to die.
I’m not sure what brought this on, but I suspect it had something to do with the way I never processed the death of my friend, Bunny, who died of colon cancer two years earlier.
The fever first began to break when a friend who was recovering from a debilitating depression shared an observation distilled from Buddhism: no one asked to be here. Every human being on this planet is doomed to suffer and die. But while we’re here, we create the meaning of life every single waking second, in our relationships with other people, with other living creatures, with art, with nature, and with ourselves. We are more than just our minds and spirits and bodies — we are also these relationships, and they live on even when we die.
In his book, Frankl developed the concept of “tragic optimism,” which Canadian psychologist Paul T. P. Wong breaks down as
- Acceptance of the worst
- Affirmation of the value and meaning of life
- Self-transcendence (altruism)
- Faith in God and others
- Courage to face adversity
Acceptance, affirmation, altruism, faith (whether you consider yourself religious or not), and courage. However you’re feeling right now, you’re not alone. And however someone seems, they might be suffering. It might seem trite, but maybe all we need for our self-esteem is to remember that we could comfort someone today, and all we need for our worldview is to stay open to optimism in the face of tragedy.
