What makes the prospect of death distinctive in the modern age is the background of permanent technological and sociological revolution against which it is set, and which serves to strip us of any possible faith in the permanence of our labours. Our ancestors could believe that their achievements had a chance of bearing up against the flow of events. We know time to be a hurricane. Our buildings, our sense of style, our ideas, all of these will soon enough be anachronisms, and the machines in which we now take inordinate pride will seem no less bathetic than Yorick's skull. . Alain De Botton
About This Quote

In the world of technology, people seem to be fascinated with the future, but when they talk about the future, they often speak about things that haven’t been invented yet. In many ways, it is a form of wishful thinking. It ignores the very real problems that we face in the present and in our immediate future. The point is that we want to live forever in a world that will soon be gone.

We want technology to continue on indefinitely, but we know that technology will not exist forever. So what is it that makes death so different? The answer is this: death has become so common and so unremarkable that we find it hard to take seriously. That’s because we don’t know how to talk about death anymore.

We have lost all of our religious ideas about it and we have lost all of our philosophical ideas about it and we have lost all of our traditional ideas about it and we have lost all of our moral ideas about it and we have lost all of our practical ideas about it and we have lost all of our ceremonial ideas about it and we have lost all of our literary ideas about it and we have lost all of our artistic ideas about it and we have lost all of our musical ideas about it and we have lost all of our social ideas about it and we have lost all of our aesthetic ideas about it and we have lost all the language by which the dead were mourned.

Source: The Pleasures And Sorrows Of Work

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