Death & Subjectivity

epistemological freedom

03 March 2025

They had an iron meteorite there, under glass, but you could touch it. It was carbon-dated to couple a billion years old. I stood there for a good ten minutes. Felt connected to those few billion years and the few billion I’d never live to see. And realized, there’s no mistake I could make—no mistake that would matter—as long as I didn’t live forever. - Maddie Kim¹

A lot of my life has been spent trying to figure out what the right thing to do is. In Philosophy, that would be called “Ethics.” The study of choices is how I’d put it. And all my life, that has been my pursuit. Endlessly asking myself what the right choice is, was, or will be.

There’s this unceasing desire innate to myself that demands the correct choice or at least knowledge of it. And unfortunately for me, everything I have learned has merely taught me that this desire is a fool’s errand. That there is no right choice, no right ethics.

Every choice must be categorized, rationalized, justified, or forgiven. There are no bad people, only bad choices. But unfortunately, I’ve come to understand that there aren’t really any bad choices, either. At least not in any categorizable sense. Maybe there aren’t even any choices. So what do I tell this desire?

When Maddie Kim spoke the words above, it resonated with me in a way that felt personal. The endless pursuit of categorizing my mistakes is in close relation to Sisyphus’s journey: unending, never making progress, yet unavoidable. insurmountable. But she argued that mistakes were meaningless for a very simple reason. And that it is that reason that frees us. She believed that it is not Death that is the enemy of biological existence, nor of our lives as agents, nor of any choices we could make. Rather, it is Death that frees us from our choices. It is what frees us from the bind of ethics.

There’s something oddly tantalizing about the prospect of freedom in Death. Humanity has often had a kind of toxic relationship with Death. It ends our choice and frees us from it. We stop existing and stop having to exist. It is ironic in that we are all Sisyphus, almost mesmerized by the desire for the boulder to roll back over us.

And yet, we keep rolling the boulder up the hill.

…

They say pain fades with time, but not for me. And that’s what I fear—for myself, for my son. Not eternal life, but eternal pain. - Maddie Kim

In all my years, I have still never come any closer to understanding what the right thing to do is. I have never found it any easier than last time to understand my set of choices taken and before me, grappling with the subjugation of freewill.

Recognizing that we lack any access to “truth” is the easy part. The hard part is accepting that. We want so badly to imagine ourselves able to make a choice that somehow justifies itself within a set of ethics. But we can’t.

Knowing we will greet Death is the easy part. Accepting that is the hard part. It’s the part that some find so difficult they fantasize about an injection to save them from the prospect, fantasize about uploading themselves to a robotic or digital consciousness, even fantasize about infinite life in heaven, safe from Death in perpetuity.

But I think Madison Kim’s point reminds us that the acceptance of Death is one of the most freeing points in life. Recognizing Death as our liberator, not our subjugator, is ironically empowering. Death is an end. It’s an end to the weight of our choices and actions, an end to the struggles we face, an end to every bit of pain we have experienced. It frees us from our imperfect lives.

And just like Death, Subjectivity (a much less symbolic and poetic word, unfortunately) too can free us. Only, it is not that they await us at the end. Instead, they walk us down the path from start to finish, holding our hand as we latch onto them or pull away, as we beg them to leave or pretend they do not exist. But they know if they leave, we stop existing.

Just as so many cling to their ideals of immortality, many cling to their ideals of objectivity: a life without subjectivity. But this does not exist. And I think that’s more freeing than we think. Because it saves us the burden of a perfect life.