(rough translation of article in Italian)
Humankind’s basic goal is survival, staying alive at all costs. This seems unquestionable. Every time there is a birth, a wedding (a potential pregnancy), a healing or the saving of lives, everyone celebrates and is happy. This is a sign of success. When there is death, however, nobody would dream of being happy. It is a tragic event, a loss and definitely a great failure.
The problem here is that, despite humankind’s immense survival efforts, life so far, without exceptions, has always ended in death.
Pragmatically, life is the delay of death.
So we could say that humankind’s primary purpose is to delay as much as possible what will inevitably happen.
When someone dies there is great pain and no one dares to smile, like they do for births and weddings. On one hand, there is pain and sincere condolence, but on the other there is a great embarrassment. This is because every death implies a failure of the purpose of life, which is survival. Death is a failure. Even if we feel sympathy for those who die, deeply within we consider them a failure. We use phrases like “he didn’t make it”, “she lost her battle with (name of illness)”, “he couldn’t stay alive”. We may have loved and esteemed the dead when they were alive, but now that they are dead there is disappointment, precisely because they did not manage to survive.
On the other hand, if they managed to survive, even at the cost of horrible sacrifices and suffering, then on the contrary it would be a triumph. “He won the battle against death!”, “She defeated the disease!”, “He made it!”. In this case it is a great success, from which admiration and popularity derive.
You can also gain admiration and popularity if you die as a hero saving the life of other people. In this case you die but thanks to you others can survive. But if you just die, and that’s it, this is useless. The shame of failure weighs on the ordinary dead, the fault of not being alive anymore. Sometimes this fault is passed on to other people or circumstances that caused death, in case this was due to accidents, negligence, crimes. Death is a failure, of which someone or something must be blamed.
That’s the way it goes in a world where survival is the purpose.
But apart from this world, what is your purpose?