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Question Why do people participate in meaningless activities such as politics, education, mathematics, philosophy and such when either we are all going to die so it won't matter what we have done, or maybe our existence and/or this world is all an illusion so it doesn't matter what happens because it's not real?

Accepted:
November 30, 2005

Comments

There seem to be some large assumptions being made here, such as: If one dies, then it won't matter what one has done. I don't see any reason to believe this. Martin Luther King, Jr, died nearly forty years ago, but what he did with is life seems to have been rather significant. My grandmother died about a decade ago, and while her contributions didn't have quite the global significance that Dr King's did, they were nonetheless important to those of us who knew her and who benefitted from her wisdom, love, and advice, not to mention her giving birth to and raising my mother, who is the sine qua non ("without whom not"), as far as I'm concerned.

Death, it has been said, is the ultimate human equalizer, and I'm not saying that one shouldn't live in full awareness of one's mortality. Indeed, I'm inclined to think that, if we did all live in full awareness of the fact that we will one day die, we would live very different lives, focused on things that will survive us rather than upon things that will not.

I'm not sure I understand what it is for something to "matter", if it isn't shorthand for mattering to someone or other. As Richard Heck points out, something a person does might matter to other people after her death. And certain things I do matter very much to me right now–or will matter to me later on–even though I know that I will die someday. Perhaps there will come a time when there's no one left in the world—at that point, "nothing will matter" in the sense that there will no longer be anyone to whom anything could matter. But it doesn't follow that the things we do now matter very much (to ourselves or to our descendents).

I also don't see how the possibility that "the world is all an illusion" should affect the issue. Perhaps if this possibility were actual, then many of the things that I assume will matter to other people will not really matter, since in that case no other people would exist. (Though there may still be things that matter to me.) For example, one might argue that it will not matter much that I am trying to conserve energy (or at least seem to myself to be doing so), if the Earth does not in fact exist. But the mere fact that it's possible that the Earth does not exist doesn't seem to have the same implications. In the same way, the fact that it is possible that I will suddenly die tomorrow does not mean I shouldn't bother putting money into my retirement account.