Near-death experiences

On March 20th, 1995, five men boarded different trains in the Tokyo subway system during rush hour. They were each holding sealed plastic bags wrapped in newspaper and carrying umbrellas with sharpened tips. Placing the bags on the floor, they poked holes in them with the umbrellas. The men promptly departed the trains while the liquid content of the bags spilled onto the floors.

Metro riders began to experience blurred or missing vision, extreme nausea, and foaming at the mouth while having seizures. Unknowingly, they were living through the deadliest terrorist attack in Japanese history. The liquid spilling from the bags was a chemical weapon—sarin gas—which killed 14 people and injured thousands more.

Author Haruki Murakami interviewed some of the survivors. They spoke about their daily lives, how they felt during the incident, and their opinions about the religious cult who perpetrated the attack. Murakami published their responses in a book called Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and The Japanese Psyche. The story from one man, Mitsuteru Izutsu, stood out from all the rest:

The day after the gas attack, I asked my wife for a divorce. We weren’t on the best of terms at the time, and I’d done my fair share of thinking while I was [traveling for work] in South America. I had meant to come out and say my piece when I got home, then I walked straight into the gas attack. Still, even after all I’d been through, she would barely speak to me.
After being gassed I phoned home from the office to tell my wife what had happened and my symptoms and everything, but I got almost no reaction from her. Perhaps she couldn’t really grasp the situation, exactly what had occurred.
But even so, I knew then that we’d come to a turning point. Or else, the state I was in had gotten me all worked up. Maybe that’s why I came straight out with it and said I wanted a divorce. Perhaps if this sarin thing hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t have been talking about divorce so soon. I probably wouldn’t have said anything. It was a shock to the system and at the same time a kind of trigger.
My family had been in such a mess for so long, by then I didn’t consider myself very important. Not that the possibility of dying wasn’t real, but, had I died, I probably could have accepted it in my own way as just a kind of accident.

So, did the other survivors also have life-changing epiphanies?

No. Most were living normal lives when they suddenly received permanent, life-long damage to their vision, a diminished ability to concentrate, and PTSD that made riding the subway out of the question.

Some harbored insatiable rage against the cult, while others didn’t have time to fully process their emotions because their jobs required them to be back in the office as soon as possible—a terrorist attack is no excuse for a delayed status report…

For most survivors, there were no silver-linings. There were no major life epiphanies. They just suffered, quietly.

So why did Mitsuteru Izutsu uniquely experience an epiphany about his life?

To answer that, we turn to a popular fable about boiling frogs:

Frogs cannot sense a slow change in the temperature of the water around them. If you plunge them into boiling water they’ll immediately jump out. But if you place them into room temperature water and slowly heat it to boiling, the frog won’t notice and will slowly cook to death.

Like the frog, some people’s lives deteriorate gradually. Entropy does that—it works on a time-frame that is imperceptible day-by-day. Without any significant crises that force us to reflect on our lives, we can float by while tolerating small increases in chronic pain.

Flirting with Death ;)

For those badly in need of introspection, perhaps there’s a market for a startup to beat you within an inch of your life to help you feel gratitude for what you have and learn what really matters. Potential names: Truth Hurts^TM, Swing and a Bliss^TM, and Slappy Happy^TM.

But for the rest of us who are not aroused by a real-life ~~fight club~~^[1], and don’t feel like waiting around for an epiphany, Mitsuteru Izutsu’s story inspired me to develop a heuristic to counter our incredible capacity to pull the wool over our own eyes.

My Death Heuristic: If I died tomorrow (and viscerally imagine my non-existence to get into the right frame of mind), what would I regret not having done? I non-judgmentally listen to myself, then work towards resolving what arises.

I’ve used this heuristic a few times. When I most recently used it, an answer surfaced out of the ether, one that I had been ignoring for years: I would regret dying without trying to help people by writing. And now that I am posting my writing in a small corner of the internet, I’m feeling more alive than ever.

Now, I embrace death. It’s my greatest teacher—it tells me what to do next.

^
Oops, I forgot the first rule.