A desire to live or the uncertainty of death?

Yesterday, I heard Amar Singh of the Samajwadi Party talk about his experience on dialysis and why he went in for a transplant. In his own words, "I thought it better to die than to continue on dialysis. At the end of the dialysis session, I used to feel totally weak and drained. The process sucks out all your energy."

I understood what he was saying. I totally empathized with him. He subsequently got a renal transplant in Singapore.

Despite suffering day after day, session after session, thousands of people undergo dialysis. Why? To continue living. Most people have a host of side effects of kidney disease. This makes life all the more difficult. Add to this, other problems which healthy people also face - that of their family, their jobs, their finances. Keeping all this in mind, I often wonder, why do we go on?

Is it really a desire to live this kind of a life? Or is it a fear of the unknown called death? Nobody knows what death is like. Nobody knows for sure what comes after. This can be extremely unsettling. Could death be worse than the life we are currently leading? What if it really is? Are we better off now?

Comments

B said…
Apart from the eternal philosophical aspects of this topic which have caused the birth of all religions and millions of theories ... I think we are simply genetically programmed to want to live and want to extend our species. That seems to be the objective of all living things we see. Somehow it is a driving force to just survive and live and further multiply. Many can say its all in the mind...but I think it is just our physical structure (I emphasize physical here). Oh well, this emphasis on physical is obviously coming from the so called metaphyiscal mind...but the brain itself is physical...and so the loop goes on and on.....