Death’s Sweet Embrace
Think of your demise—often—as the ultimate immersive experience
HBO’s The White Lotus wrapped up last Sunday. It’s a great show I recommend. Think: Succession but at a luxury Hawaiian vacation resort.
In the final episode Jennifer Coolidge’s character (who is perfect in the role) says something that got me thinking about my own work. Coolidge’s character is a rich and broken, the type who uses far-out spa services and offbeat treatments to try to feel normal.
In the final episode she describes death as the “ultimate immersive experience,” like it’s perhaps the perfect spa treatment.
In my new book, The Comfort Crisis, I investigate the connection between modern comforts and conveniences and some of our most pressing problems, like heart disease, diabetes, depression, and a sense of purposelessness. Turns out, engaging with a handful of evolutionary discomforts can dramatically improve our mental, physical, and spiritual wellbeing. One of those fruitful discomforts? Thinking about dying. Taking into our mind and being with that “ultimate immersive experience,” as Coolidge puts it.
Death has always been the most uncomfortable fact of life. And as modern medicine, comforts, and conveniences have given us more years, we’ve seemingly become less and less comfortable…
