I Studied Philosophy Because I Was Afraid Of Dying.

I studied philosophy because I was afraid of dying.

It started in the summer of 2008, on the island of Corfu, Greece. I was twenty, travelling Europe between semesters, and woke one morning in a hostel with a splitting headache and a strange electrical sensation that began at the base of my neck and radiated outward to my fingertips. I laid still for a moment, trying to identify it, then sprung out of my bed in a panic. In a cold sweat despite the thirty-one degree heat, I found the housekeeper and asked where the nearest doctor was.

My friends and I walked down a hill under a clear blue sky, during the kind of day that makes you appreciate being alive. In a small room with a fan that clicked every thirty seconds then reversed direction, a doctor with curly black beard listened to my symptoms and told me, matter-of-factly, that I might have meningitis.

What followed was the most acute fear I had ever experienced. It was loud and it tainted everything I experienced. I was dying. I knew it in my bones, and I kept thinking about a scene from Donnie Darko, where Donnie talks about his dog Callie with his therapist.

Donnie: “It reminded me of my dog, Callie. She died when I was eight, and she crawled underneath the porch.”

Dr. Thurman: “To die?”

Donnie: “To be alone.”

If a dog knew when they were going to die, so would a human. With a month left on my trip, I flew home. I wanted to see my mother one last time.

It was, of course, a panic attack. The headache resolved, but not until I forced a Canadian doctor to give me a CT scan. After that, within a few months, I stabilised. But something had shifted.

That fall, as an elective, I took an introduction to philosophy course. The textbook, “The Experience of Philosophy” had a section on death. The header quote, which I remember to this day, read: wherever you go, whatever you do, an armed assassin walks behind you.

I was sold. Philosophy, I believed naively, would give me the answer I needed. It would tell me how to live under the weight of knowing the clock was running out.

What I found instead was that philosophy made the anxiety worse. The more carefully I looked at the question, the heavier it became. But I kept going, because I also found genuine value in learning how to think and how to problem solve. I finished my undergraduate degree in philosophy at the University of Alberta in 2011.

The Hum

For the next nine years, I managed the anxiety without defeating it.

If anyone had asked me, at any point during that period, whether I was thinking about dying, the answer would have been yes. The panic attacks stopped but the underlying current never did. It became a low, constant voice, like background noise to every waking moment.

The obsessions cycled. Heart attacks for a few months. Then skin cancer. A mole I had checked three times in a year. Throat cancer when I had persistent phlegm. A stretch where I convinced myself that forgetting words mid-sentence was early onset dementia. A simple utterance on a TV show could send me into a spiral of obsession, and when each obsession would run its course, lose its grip, another would take its place. I understood the pattern. I could identify the script as it was running and ignore it. But I couldn’t turn it off.

I managed it through physical discipline. Training kept me healthy and exhausted enough that there was less room for the rumination. I had accepted this as simply part of who I was. A hypochondriac. A person for whom the background noise of mortality was slightly higher than average.

Then in early 2020, the entire world became hypochondriac.

When COVID reached Canada in February, I was getting over a cold. As an asthmatic, respiratory symptoms linger for weeks, as dry coughs and the occasional shortness of breath. Every cough at the time became evidence and confirmation that “I have COVID” or “COVID is going to kill me.”

Locked at home with nothing to do but ruminate, I had consistent panic attacks for the first time since Greece. Not occasional ones. Constant, all-consuming, for weeks. I would wake at three in the morning certain I was dying, lie there cataloguing symptoms, checking my pulse, and going crazy.

I had just been accepted into an MFA program in Saskatoon. I was going to be living alone in a new city. So, I made a decision: I was going to fix this, finally, before I left.

Cognitive Behaviour Therapy

I found cognitive behavioural therapy through my own research and booked an appointment with a specialist the same afternoon I ordered a workbook. Because it was COVID and everyone was momentarily hypochondriac, the earliest appointment was six weeks away.

So I read the workbook. Two hours a day, three hundred pages of clinical psychology written for people whose anxiety had become unmanageable.

Anxiety is adaptive, it told me. It exists to direct attention toward genuine threats. You cannot eliminate it and you should not try. The goal is not to resolve anxiety but to change your relationship to it. The goal is to stop treating it as a problem requiring a solution and start treating it as a state, like all other states, that are a part of life.

I looked at everything I was doing to avoid or resolve the anxiety. I had, for example, stopped drinking coffee or reading about COVID or COVID-related data. So I reversed course. I drank coffee. I read the COVID news. When the shortness of breath came, I sat with it rather than fleeing it. I tried to feel anxious on purpose, the way an athlete trains in conditions harder than competition.



“Yes, if I lived in this feeling for the rest of my life, I would be okay,” I would tell myself.

When I finally saw the therapist and described what I had been doing for the previous month, she told me I had already done everything she would recommend. At the second appointment there was nothing left to cover. I rode my bike home, wind on my smiling face, and noticed, for the first time, that the voice was absent.

Six years later it has not returned, and I no longer think of myself as a hypochondriac.

Not because I solved the anxiety, but because I stopped trying to solve it. The voice stopped precisely when I no longer cared if the voice stopped.

I understood this at the time as a clinical outcome. A technique that worked. What I didn’t understand yet was that it was pointing at something larger than simple anxiety.

Studying Existentialism During My MFA

The anxiety was gone but the underlying question remained. I was going to die. That fact had not changed. Everything I built up until that point in my life, the meaning I made through writing, the relationships I had maintained, the person who had thoughts and fears and anxiety, that person would be erased, as it would be erased for everyone who had ever lived.

So what is this all for?

I arrived at the MFA with a philosophy background and a short story collection forming around the question of meaning in the face of mortality.

I read widely in existentialism, both before my MFA and during it. Kierkegaard’s leap of faith. Nietzsche’s declaration that God was dead, not as a prescription but a diagnosis. Sartre’s claim that humans could simply create their own meaning, an idea Viktor Frankl echoed from inside a concentration camp in Man’s Search for Meaning.

Sartre’s answer never satisfied me. Self-created meaning is real. I don’t doubt that people generate genuine significance through their relationships, work, or day-to-day commitments. But it doesn’t address the annihilation problem. The meaning you make, even if it outlasts the maker for some time, will eventually die out. Eventually, the maker, and everyone who remembers the maker, and the civilization that might have preserved some trace of the maker, will be gone. Self-created meaning is both true and insufficient.

The philosopher who got closest, in my estimation, was the French Algerian Albert Camus.

In The Myth of Sisyphus he named what he called the Absurd, which is the collision between the human need for meaning and the universe’s fundamental silence on the matter. We push the boulder (meaning) and it (the universe) rolls back.

The task is eternal and the summit is unavailable. This isn’t pessimism, Camus insisted, but an accurate description of the situation. And the honest response is not denial or despair but acceptance, “to imagine Sisyphus happy,” he said.

I wrote my thesis in the territory Camus had mapped, and produced 12 short stories around the “absurd” and a pending novel.

I found the diagnosis accurate, even compelling, but ultimately his prescription incomplete and I was personally unsatisfied.

We must imagine Sisyphus happy asserts the emotional outcome rather than deriving it. Why happy rather than despairing? Why happy rather than simply continuing? The question that follows the diagnosis, simply made me ask, “so now what?”

Like my hypochondria, what I yearned for was certainty.

Metamodernism

During the MFA I was also regularly taking extra graduate courses in English. As a fiction writer, I was interested in contemporary literary culture. I had studied, in a literary context, Romanticism, Modernism, and Postmodernism. I knew Modernism’s confidence that rigorous investigation would converge on truth. I knew Postmodernism’s response: that capital-T truth was a construction, that grand narratives served power, and that the territory was inaccessible behind the infinite regress of language and ideology.

By the mid-2010s, it was clear that something had shifted. The postmodern mood had exhausted itself. Turn on any post 2016, male-led podcast, and you’d hear the host decry the postmodern left.

So, I started researching what had replaced it and found, in an introductory essay by Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker, the term metamodernism.

The meta comes from the Greek metaxy, meaning between, in oscillation. Metamodernism is the oscillation between modernist sincerity and postmodern irony, held simultaneously in a “both/neither” way. It acknowledges that objective truth is unavailable, that the postmodern insight is correct, while insisting we should pursue it anyway, with full sincerity, as if it were reachable. The donkey chasing the carrot knowing it will never catch it, but chasing anyway. Not because it has forgotten the impossibility but because chasing is the only available response to a world that requires navigation.

Reading this I felt something clarify.

My anxiety around death and meaning had always felt like a special torment. It was a question that should have an answer, as important of a question as it is, and one that other people had perhaps found while I kept failing to. What metamodernism—and my hypochondria, my dive into CBT—revealed was that it wasn’t special.

Every genuine question has the same structure. The territory always exceeds the map. The gap between what we need the world to contain and what it actually contains never fully closes. Not for meaning, or physics, or politics, or grief. No, what I realized was that anything and everything humans investigate honestly and deeply enough is not fully accessible. It is territory all the way down.

The anxiety dissolved not because the question was answered. It dissolved because I stopped experiencing my inability to answer as something that needed to be solved. I had been accurately perceiving the universal condition and mistaking it for a specific deficiency.

Metamodernism as Prescription

What I understood then, and took longer to articulate, was that three completely independent investigations had arrived at the same place.

The CBT workbook, working from clinical observation, found that opposing anxiety makes it worse and holding it makes it manageable. Don’t resist the anxiety. Acknowledge it, and function, anyway.

Camus, working through literary philosophy, found that demanding resolution from a universe that cannot provide it produces what he called philosophical suicide. The honest response is to hold the collision and continue. His prescription was incomplete, but his direction was correct.

Metamodernism, working through cultural theory, found that the oscillation between the modernist demand for complete maps and the postmodern acknowledgment of their impossibility could be inhabited simultaneously. Act as if the map is adequate while knowing it isn’t. Try anyway.

Three routes to the same posture. Not because they were in conversation with each other. But because the territory kept producing the same corrective from every direction of honest approach, and all three were honest attempts to solve territory, with the only honest response.

We must not imagine Sisyphus happy.

We must imagine Sisyphus continuing because continuing is what honest engagement with an unresolvable condition looks like when it’s working. The satisfaction I had been looking for arrived when I stopped requiring it as a precondition, the same way the anxiety resolved when I stopped requiring its resolution.

The incompleteness must be baked into the foundation of any honest inquiry. The gap between the territory and the map is then acknowledged as permanent, and the attempt made to map it is made, anyway.

I didn’t arrive at this through argument. I arrived at it through necessity, starting with the simple sound of a fan flicking in a room in Corfu, through a workbook read two hours a day, through Camus naming the problem but not quite finishing the answer, and finally, through a specific framework that didn’t promise more than the territory contained.

The lived experience came first. The philosophy came second. This publication is the attempt to share both.

The territory will always exceed the map, but you should try to map it, anyway.