In the past, humans accepted death as a divine providence, but modern society pushes us to avoid it and stay healthy. Now that health has become a competitive factor, how should we live our lives?
Death has long been feared by humans and seen as a fate. The ancients accepted death as a divine providence and were in awe of the world after death, but by the Middle Ages, religious views began to change dramatically. Priests proclaimed that death was not just an end, but a new beginning, where one could be saved by God. As a result, people gradually began to accept death more lightheartedly, with an expectation of divine favor rather than a fear of it. This way of thinking became deeply ingrained in people’s daily lives throughout the Middle Ages.
Over time, with the advent of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, the age of the gods slowly came to an end, and a more human-centered mindset began to take hold. Death became a personal matter. Each person’s life became important, and death was no longer perceived as an act of God, but as an individual’s fate. As individualism spread, people became more focused on their own lives and deaths, and this led to major changes throughout society.
However, this individualism didn’t last long. With the advent of the Romantic era, people began to place greater value on love and sentimentality. People no longer just feared their own deaths, but the deaths of their loved ones. Romantics loved the beauty of nature, music, and art, and that love eventually extended to relationships between people. This led to a new perception of death. Not only my death, but also your death was perceived as an event that caused me deep sorrow.
So, how do we view death in the modern world? The remarkable advances in science and medicine have changed our perception of death yet again. Advances in medical technology have given us ways to avoid death, or at least delay it. As life expectancy increases and diseases become more preventable and treatable, death is no longer seen as an inevitability, but as something that can be controlled. People no longer view death as something to be feared, but rather as something to be valued for staying healthy.
In the modern world, we are inundated with information about health. Whether it’s a TV show, an article on the internet, or even social media, we have health information at our fingertips. Information that was once unavailable to us unless we sought the advice of a medical professional is now accessible to everyone. Every day, we gain new knowledge about our health, and we want to use it to take care of ourselves. However, with this flood of information, it’s easy to become obsessive about our health. Doctors recommend staying healthy for a better life, but sometimes this can be overwhelming.
When my grandmother was sick, one of the most common phrases I heard in the hospital was, “You should just die!” This statement probably came with a lot of mixed emotions. It could be a combination of feeling sorry for the family, the burden of the hospital bill, or despair at the never-ending pain. While in the ICU, your grandmother had to endure constant pain, and she may have questioned whether life was worth continuing. In these situations, we wonder how we should approach death. What does the patient really want? Medical professionals do everything they can to prolong a patient’s life, but sometimes they wonder if they’re causing them additional suffering in the process.
Modern society forces us to pursue health. Students need to be healthy to study, workers need to be healthy to work, and patients need to be healthy to prolong their lives. But who is this push for health really for? In the modern world, health has become more than just a matter of survival, it’s a matter of competition. In order to live longer and healthier, we have to constantly take care of ourselves. This can sometimes make us feel like we’ve been stripped of our options.
After all, in the modern world, health has become a requirement not only for survival but also for maintaining social status. This means that the fear of death is no longer just the end of life, but a social failure. In an era where death is taboo and everyone is forced to live in a state of enforced health, what choices do we have? Asking these questions, we need to think deeply about life and death once again.
