philosophy

How to Inhabit a Corpse

Death is certain. Suffering is guaranteed. Here is why that’s actually good news.

Odin Halvorson

16 Feb 2026 — 3 min read

Eerie Adventures 1 | Published Dec 1951 Eerie Adventures 1 | Published Dec 1951

What's it all for, anyway? We live so we can die, we love so we can lose. The world around us drifts imperturbably toward some unknown oblivion whose only certainty is the slow exsanguination of all we have ever built or known into a cold and bitter void. But is there something in here that can yet make everything worthwhile?

Most of the time, we fill our days with little sidequests; we distract ourselves from the inevitable. Or else we play pretend, making believe in greater purposes and extra-material realities in order to make bearable a reality with but one certainty: death at its end.

Within this is what the Buddha called "suffering." You cannot live life without suffering and, if you try to do so you're liable just to suffer all the more. The ancient stoics understood this as well, as we can see in Book 4 of Marcus Aurelius's Meditations:

Nothing that goes on in anyone else’s mind can harm you. Nor can the shifts and changes in the world around you.

—Then where is harm to be found?

In your capacity to see it.

Stop doing that and everything will be fine. Let the part of you that makes that judgment keep quiet even if the body it’s attached to is stabbed or burnt, or stinking with pus, or consumed by cancer. Or to put it another way: It needs to realize that what happens to everyone—bad and good alike—is neither good nor bad. That what happens in every life—lived naturally or not—is neither natural nor unnatural.

The idea Marcus is getting at is that your own perceptions of good and evil make the world so. Has someone wronged you? Will you one day die? The fact of something need not become a judgment on that thing.

Looking into the Buddhist perspective as well, we find this notion:

Even gorgeous royal chariots wear out, and indeed this body too wears out. But the Dhamma of the Good does not age; thus the Good make it known to the good.

Yes, the world is a space of suffering... but it is because of that suffering that life has any meaning at all. The goal is not to escape suffering but to revel in its presence. Or, as Marcus wrote, 2,000 years ago: "So remember this principle when something threatens to cause you pain: the thing itself was no misfortune at all; to endure it and prevail is great good fortune."

The stoics called this state ataraxia, and the Buddhists know it as Nirvana. Not a space beyond the mortal life, but something that exists here and now, present within mortality.

"Thou art a little soul bearing about a corpse, as Epictetus used to say."

Epicurus, founder of another of the ancient traditions, had this to say on the subject:

Accustom yourself to believe that death is nothing to us, for good and evil imply awareness, and death is the privation of all awareness; therefore a right understanding that death is nothing to us makes the mortality of life enjoyable, not by adding to life an unlimited time, but by taking away the yearning after immortality.

We cannot be aware of life beyond death, so our focus should not lay on it, obsessed with the end of our existence, but in the here and now. Fear of a thing increase the power that thing has over you; to be obsessed with death privileges the end of life over the life you actually have!

To this, then, I say this: remind yourself in little ways, with breath and pulse; touch, taste, thought, smell – remind yourself of the present in which you reside and watch the fear of what might be fall off you like water off the frond.

I’m Odin Halvorson, a librarian, life coach, and fiction author. If you like my work and want to support what we do here at Unenlightened Generalists, please consider becoming a paid subscriber to our newsletter for as little as $2.50 a month!

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