Tom Shakely

Scott Beauchamp writes on the causes and consequences of a “world without kith or kin,” a culture where family and friendships, and the sacrifice and cost associated with both, are understood to be the barrier to, rather than the primary means of achieving, a meaningful life:

The Japanese word kodokushi roughly translates to “lonely death.” The term might be a touch poetic for what it actually describes, conjuring as it does the romantic image of an individual stoically riding off alone into oblivion. An existential cowboy leaning in his saddle towards the darkening horizon, embodying all the heroic maverick energy that our contemporary world so highly values. The apotheosis of freedom in current Western society being a complete atomization of self, an undoing of all the bonds which constrain us, kodokushi almost sounds like something to aspire to.

The material reality of the “lonely death” is grim. Disgusting, even. It is an odor the neighbors do not notice until it is already too late. It is the kinetic hum of maggots digesting an undiscovered corpse. It is the slow accumulation of “past due” notices in the mail, piling up until a stranger comes to query the “customer” in person and finds their liquefying remains. It is the cagey instinct of the entrepreneurs who have capitalized on kodokushi as a business opportunity, monetizing their lurid and sad deaths by offering special cleaning services for the tiny apartments of elderly folks who have died alone and unnoticed and are well into decomposition. In a phrase, it is the complete thing-ification of people who have outlasted their use-value. It is the fate of people who, as Simeone Weil quoted from The Iliad in a similar context, have become “dearer to the vultures” than their loved ones or community. Kodokushi is the process of humans being reduced to garbage. And it is not unique to Japan. As the first generation of humans “liberated” from kin-connections ages and dies, kodokushi becomes a global phenomenon.

Scholars who study demographic shifts refer to what happened in relatively wealthy, Western countries after the Industrial Revolution—a decline in both death and birth rates—as the First Demographic Transition. You can basically sum it up as the process of large, extended families, shrinking down to the nuclear unit. What is occurring now—the epidemic of loneliness, the severing of deep familial ties, kodokushi, etc.—is known as the Second Demographic Transition (SDT). …

Either way, and however far back in the dim memory of the human story you might trace the lineage of the drive to sever connection to and responsibility for one another (we can certainly go back at least to Cain), when taken to its logical conclusion the result always seems to be the same: people are transformed into refuse. …

The desire to collapse in on ourselves like dying, solitary stars, might be older than ancient. But more recently we can see it manifest in last centuries various ideological turns against both tradition and, more importantly, the notion of a transcendent reality. …

Any number of contemporary songs or movies come to mind where the family is seen as something to liberate oneself from in order achieve a deeper contentment and truer sense of self. Few examples exist of art which conveys the horror of the isolated individual, imprisoned by solitary desire. French author Michel Houellebecq might be the rare example of an artist who unflinchingly gazes into the abyss of modern self and, with a cold eye, catches sight of all the ways in which constructing a world composed simply of desire sated and desire thwarted contributes to profound human misery.

A question we ignore in our obsession with achieving greater levels of autonomy and self-actualization is something like: What is the liberated individual liberated for?

When we break free from our family and friendships and communities, what other world is it that we’ve broken into? Breaking away from the personal and social and moral and ethical constraints of daily life and into a place of abstracted individuality is pre-civilizational. It’s regressive.

Marianne Williamson recently observed that Americans are too frequently prescribed antidepressants for what she called “normal human despair”:

“The twenties can be very hard. They’re not a mental illness,” Williamson told BuzzFeed News in an interview Friday. “Divorce can be very difficult, losing a loved one, someone that you know died, someone left in a relationship and you’re heartbroken — that’s very painful, but it’s not a mental illness.”

“You had a professional failure, you lost your job, you went bankrupt,” she continued. “Those things are very difficult, but they’re not a mental illness.”

Williamson, a self-help author, has previously weighed in on the topic of overprescribed antidepressants, tweeting in June 2018 that such medications are being prescribed “many times when people are simply SAD.”

“The answer to depression is more scientific research only if you think of it simply in biomedical terms. The medicalization of depression is a creation of the medical industry,” she tweeted. “For millennia depression was seen as a spiritual disease, and for many of us it still is.”

I think this is true. And I think this also pairs well with Christopher F. Rufo’s City Journal piece on how those who have true addictions, affiliations, and illnesses in San Donato Val di Comino are treated in a humane way:

At six o’clock each morning, the alcoholics, addicts, and mentally ill residents of San Donato Val di Comino, Italy, emerge from their homes and congregate—sometimes together, but mostly alone—in the cafés around the town’s main square. Some of the hardened alcoholics order an espresso with a shot of liquor, then climb into work trucks and head out to farms and construction sites. The mentally ill—who suffer predominantly from depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia—order cups of coffee or sit at the patio tables emptyhanded, an indication that they have run out of cash for the month.

My father was born in this village, where I’ve observed this early-morning ritual during family vacations over the past two decades, but this time it struck me in a new way. For the past 18 months, I’ve reported on homelessness, addiction, and mental illness in American cities and spent many hours with America’s most vulnerable residents, who, on the surface, struggle with the same afflictions as the residents here in San Donato.

In fact, the contrast is profound. In West Coast cities, tens of thousands of addicts and mentally ill people live outdoors in horrific conditions and survive on a combination of panhandling, prostitution, and property crime, which, in turn, creates disorder on urban streets. Not in San Donato, however: here, addicts and the mentally ill are deeply integrated into the community and maintain a dignified standard of living. Their families and relatives look after them and stay involved in their lives. When necessary, the municipal government provides employment sweeping the streets, and local businesses sometimes pay mentally disabled residents to serve as lo spanno, an informal occupation that entails walking through the streets with a loudspeaker announcing products newly available in the town market. The community plays a role in helping the most vulnerable, not through compulsion or formalized social programs but instead through the values of self-help and community responsibility.

In San Donato, a man found sleeping on the streets would suggest a moral scandal. The village would shame the homeless man’s family into taking him in to provide financial, practical, and psychological support. The reason that nobody sleeps on the streets here isn’t medical or technical—it’s cultural. Despite massive economic and social change over the past century, Italians have retained a culture of family and responsibility that strictly limits the expression of pathological behavior and enforces a standard of dignity that encourages addicts and the mentally ill to participate in society despite their condition.

Andrew Critch reflects on funerals, and whether our way of burying our dead is as much about honoring their bodies as honoring their memory. Specifically, Andrew suggests buying “biographies instead of expensive burials:”

Cemeteries and funerals are beautiful, because they tell a story of the past that we care about. They’re also somewhat expensive: families routinely spend on the order of $10k on funeral and burial rites for their families. There are people whose entire jobs are the preparation of bodies for funeral rites. Can we tell the story of the past better, but for the same cost?

I believe we can. If your loved one is close to death or has recently died, instead of planning for an expensive burial funeral, you might consider instead planning for the cheapest possible disposal of their earthly remains, and use the excess money to hire a biographer. The biographer can talk to your loved one’s family, and even your loved one directly if they haven’t yet passed, and write down people’s most treasured or meaningful memories about them. Your children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren could have much more than a tombstone to remember them by.

If more people adopted this tradition, cemeteries could become libraries where we keep tomes of stories about our lost loved ones, both bitter and sweet. When we bring flowers to the cemetery, we could leave them next to a book containing their life story. We could re-read their memories, and perhaps even take some time to read through the memories of other people we don’t know, and develop a feeling of what it was like to be them. Probably some people would take an interest in reading the stories even of strangers. Perhaps these “cemetery historians” would even bond when they meet at the cemetery, and recommend their favorite stories to each other. Together, we’d have a culture more capable of preserving and cherishing the memories of the people we’ve lost.

I don’t see this as being in competition with a proper funeral or burial at all, but as a natural part of the planning process that funeral homes or others could adopt as part of their service to respect the bodies of the dead and honor their memory.