It can be difficult to tell to what extent the rise of social media has revealed pathologies that were already all around us or played a specific role in creating them. But spend any meaningful length of time observing people getting into outlandish debates or indulging in self-absorbed posting sprees, and you might justifiably reach the conclusion that there are not a lot of people who spend enough time visiting cemeteries.
■ Not in the ghoulish sense, of course, but in a basic act of getting grounded with reality. There are lots of people who seem to be out of touch with not only their own mortality but also with their place in a long, unbroken chain of human existence.
■ It’s easy to fall for the myth of having made oneself from scratch, but every one of us is the lucky product of lots and lots of generations before us, all of whom struggled, all of whom faced difficulties, all of whom faced far more adversity than most any of us will ever see in the modern world. Yet all of them cared about their loved ones, feared death and dying, wanted success, and hoped for a better life just like we moderns do.
■ Having a tangible connection to the meaning of mortality and the essential need to understand gratitude for those who came before us is a grounding sensation. And it’s apparent this sensation is absent from a lot of lives, like the ones who sacrifice living in service of not dying.
■ There’s probably no better cure than a visit to the burial places of one’s own ancestors (the more generations, the better), but even in the absence of that, thoughtfully immersing oneself in the awareness that we are all fortunate simply to be here is a worthy use of time. Nature wiped out billions of other bloodlines all around our own ancestors, so the odds were stacked pretty high against any individual one of us making it here.
■ Lots of people with the very same human essentials as our own came before us. Really grasping that -- sometimes by touching a headstone -- makes a world of difference to how seriously one takes the fleeting distractions of the present.