In capitalist realism, things can seem like they’re either fundamentally unchanging from day to day or changing at such a large, impossible scale that one must get swept up in it. It can be helpful to personalise these changes by identifying the way they threaten one’s way of being – by facing one’s existential death.

A threat to one’s way of being could be an accident that makes being a sports-lover impossible. It could also be the structural change in the local economy that will make the identity of being a coal worker impossible. Or one could identify as the community-maker among one’s friends, hosting joyous get-togethers that become harder and harder to make happen as the friends couple up and retreat into family and career life.

When confronted with a feeling of fear, or nostalgia, or anger, it can be helpful to try to place this feeling in a context of what way of being of yours is threatened by an emerging change. You might read an article about some politician immediately becoming a lobbyist for the industry they were formerly asked to regulate and find that it makes you angrier than other news about politicians’ bad behaviour. When reflecting, you find that this threatens your belief that, no matter how imperfectly, it is the goal of politics to represent its people against other interests and makes your way of being a voting citizen impossible. Seen like this, the anger can move from being directed at some particular act towards being directed at a larger change that would otherwise be too abstract to get emotional about. On a practical level, this lets you redirect your emotional energy created by the incident to something that may actually effect change. On a philosophical level, it gives you an opportunity to let your emotional judgment cut through the mist of everydayness to reveal what is actually at stake, and what you actually care about.

Of course, not all threats of existential death are bad. Feminism ideally threatens and ultimately destroys the way of being a patriarch, even though this will also mean an existential death for many men. Death itself doesn’t have a value, but it will always be intense and it will always be painful for those beings that die or lose something.

In the case of the community-maker who finds their lunch invitations rejected because work takes priority, taking the existential threat seriously means not getting frustrated with their friends but rather seeing the structures that make such community impossible for all who aren’t students or retirees. Facing death in this way then lets them recognize the radical changes they’d have to make to continue their identity, either in themselves and who they relate with or in the world they live in. It crucially gives the option to prevent this death, even if only through reinventing themself.

Taking an existential threat seriously also means taking seriously the pain of death. The options are suffering through it and encountering great pain, adapting one’s way of being to fit in with a new world but not losing it entirely, or changing the world itself. None of these options is easy. If your being a patriarch is threatened, adapting to a new world might be reflecting on your desire or expectation to be listened to and ultimately obeyed. You might find that part of it is a desire to help people (that maybe gets caught up with an assumption that you know how to help people) and then adapt to become someone who listens, is an ally, and ultimately uses his privilege to lead and confront other men about their behaviour. If the way of being that is threatened is that of a joyful community-maker and you find it increasingly impossible as your social world moves into the private, it might be worthwhile simply accepting this change and giving yourself space to mourn for something that cannot happen again. Or you might dedicate yourself to an anti-capitalist cause with the clear vision of giving people the time and leisure to turn back to one another rather than only their own, little, private causes.

References

For a description of existential death, refer to the beginning of William Blattner’s essay “Temporality” in the Blackwell Companion to Heidegger: “Existential death is the condition in which Dasein is not able to be or exist, in the sense that it cannot understand itself, press ahead into any possibilities of being. Existential death is a peculiar sort of living nullity, death in the midst of life, nothingness. What would it be like to suffer existential death? To be unable to understand oneself is not for one’s life to cease to matter altogether. […] The issue – Who am I? How shall I lead my life? – matters to me, but when existentially dead no possible answer matters. All answers to these ques-tions are equally uninteresting. This is what Heidegger calls anxiety, although on its face it sounds more like what we today call depression: the total insignificance of the world, including the entire matrix of possible answers to the question: Who am I?”

To get an overview of alternative ways of looking at existential death, consider the page titled “IV. Summary” in the foreword to Carol White’s “Time and Death”

If you want to get deep into the discussion of how Heidegger’s view on death may be interpreted, try Iain Thomson’s essay “Death and Demise” in the Cambridge Companion to Heidegger’s Being and Time