Mariella Gattini

According to neuroscientist David J. Linden, who is dying from cancer, in a piece written by him for The Atlantic, the brain is constantly making predictions about the near future, the next few moments of it. These predictions are automatic and subconscious and can not be controlled at will, because they are hardwired to protect us from envisioning the devastation of our death. If you keep reading, you’ll find out that he himself can not imagine this world without him. He is a non believer, but now that he is dying, he understands the religious promise and appeal of an afterlife or of a come back to earth in another capacity, as an animal of a different species, or anything else in nature.

When I was studying psychology, among a myriad of other subjects, I took different courses related to learning, adaptation, death and dying, and the way we cope. In the four years I went to school full time, I learned an important number of discoveries that serve me to this day to look at life from a scientific and positive perspective. One of the elements, that I remember to this day, is that we can’t possibly predict the future, that everything we imagine is made up by our brain to produce stability in its functioning, including our dreams. The other, very important element, is that, according to research, religious people have more comfortable lives because they are surrounded by people who think alike, and who can provide reassurance when things go wrong.

Like everyone else, I can not predict the future either, but I can imagine this world without me, despite the fact that I know everyone is important in someone else’s quality of life, because people have a natural way of coping with the hardest of truths, and they don’t need me to find their own way.

Some of the strategies to cope with pain are maladapting, like the use of drugs or alcohol, but the majority of our coping mechanisms to confront life’s worst experiences are quite positive and healthy.

One of the healthiest ways to shield yourself from pain is that of creating a strong, honest connection with others, the ones who can catch you when you can not longer sustain yourself on your feet, and, in exchange, you can do the same for them when you are strong again—everybody goes through highs and lows at some point in their lives.

These support systems, that help us to cope and to keep going, are not found online, they are real, personal connections that we create in anticipation of what might happen to us in the future. Because the map in our head is not very precise and can not preview every possible outcome, we need to prepare ourselves in advance. However, I’m not talking about self-serving tricks that men like Charles Chaplin, Frank Sinatra, and more recently George Clooney, have used choosing much younger wives, who can take care of the household, you know, of the “unimportant things”.

In the case of Charles Chaplin, after a string of relationships with young women he mistreated, he married later in life Oona O’Neill, thirty-six years younger, whom he uprooted, making her live isolated in a foreign country, where he became the center of her attention for the rest of her life.

Frank Sinatra’s last wife, who had been the widow of one of his friends, was treated poorly by him, a man from a generation that called women, “broads”.

And last, George Clooney, who finally solved all his image problems by marrying a much younger, rich woman (before he made it big with his tequila brand), so that now she has to do the heavy lifting in his old age. Correct me if I’m wrong, in this particular case, but this is not what I’m talking about.

In order to be effective, support systems between people need to be free, loving, and mutual, where each one of their members are respected, protected, and none of them are manipulated or taken advantage of.

On the other hand, the idea of the afterlife comes from our religious upbringing and we use it because it makes of death something easier to swallow, less traumatic, and more sensible.

I don’t think there is an afterlife that can make sense of all our suffering in this world. Moreover, I don’t think we should try to make sense of our suffering, because it does not make any sense at all, period. We don’t learn anything from it and it does not make of us better people.

I don’t believe in the afterlife in the same way I don’t believe in Santa (spoiler alert: It does not exist). Santa has always been an invention created by big businesses to make people buy stuff they don’t need, or feel bad about not being able to afford that kind of lifestyle.

A religion, just like a political party, can be a double-edge sword, it can provide affirmation of your own set of beliefs and values, but the price you have to pay is too high, because you need to return the favor with the degradation of your own individualism and your personal freedom of thought. Belonging to an organized religion is like being in a sorority, a fraternity, or, in extreme cases, a cult that would support you in your times of need to only exploit it later one way or another by asking you to behave according to its leaders’ rules, where there is no place for personal freedom. In this master-slave relationship the only beneficiaries are the ones at the top.

According to neuroscientist David J. Linden, our brains are hardwired to make predictions about our near future because it presupposes that there will be a future, so that we can function knowing that at some point we are irremediably going to die.

The way I cope is based on what my grandmother said over and over throughout her life: “We live our hell, our purgatory, and our heaven right here on this earth, so that when we are gone, we are simply gone.” If you think about it, it really helps.