The biggest disappointment in life; death.
Life, as products go, has a rather significant flaw buried in the terms and conditions: it kills you. Not eventually in some vague poetic sense — literally, personally, you. Everything you are, everyone you love, every opinion you hold about the correct way to load a dishwasher, gone. You would think this might prompt some serious collective reflection. Instead, humanity's primary response for ten thousand years was to invent better excuses. Heaven. Reincarnation. Karma. The soul. An elaborate spiritual bureaucracy designed to assure you that death is, actually, fine — that it's more of a transition, a rebrand, a brief administrative pause before the real thing begins. False prophets, priests, oracles and wellness influencers all built comfortable careers on the same premise: that the most obvious fact about human existence could be negotiated away with sufficient ritual, belief, and in recent centuries, a monthly subscription.
Two people declined to participate in the denial. Kant pointed out, in the least comforting way imaginable, that your mortality is entirely irrelevant to your moral obligations — you must act well not because you'll be rewarded for it but because reason demands it, and reason does not care that you're running out of time. Camus went further and said life is meaningless, the universe is indifferent, and the correct response is to live as fully and defiantly as possible anyway — which sounds like a motivational poster until you realise he actually meant it, and it's terrifying.
Everyone else was simply lying to you. Kindly, elaborately, with candles and incense and beautifully illustrated manuscripts, but lying nonetheless. Death is the one appointment nobody cancels, the one review that's always five stars for the universe and zero for the attendee. The only honest positions ever staked out were by a humourless German and a chain-smoking Frenchman who both, in their own way, said the same thing: yes, this is exactly as bad as it looks — now what are you going to do about it?
Need further reading in the topic:
Elias Caneti - The book against at Death
