Take our Positive Aging Test

Find a therapist specialized in aging concerns

Fighting the inevitable might be noble and life-affirming, but can also be futile and exhausting.

Thomas isn’t arguing that death can be avoided, only challenged; accepted not passively but passionately.

Raging against the dying of the light may be the will to live, but it risks ignoring the wisdoms of darkness.

Dylan Thomas’ most famous poem, “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night,” urges us to “rage rage against the dying of the light.” As a philosophy, it’s certainly a rousing call to arms and a stomping affirmation of life over death, but it also comes with small print.

Fighting the inevitable—fighting a battle you will not win but fighting anyway—might be noble and life-affirming, but it can turn futile and exhausting in the face of an immovable object. It can set you up for a kind of emotional hernia, in which striving becomes strife, and you end up feeling like someone in a supermarket sweepstakes, racing through the aisles trying to stuff as much into your cart as you can before the timer goes off.

At its farther extremes, it can lead to the absurd and self-defeating belief that aging can be “cured” or even reversed, and death dodged with an afterlife, though it’s understandable why such beliefs would metastasize in the face of the devastating truth that—as Buddha put it—we are of the nature to grow old, to sicken, and to die.

As for the denial of death, the psyche knows better. There’s no trash icon in there, and whatever you suppress will just keep coming back, urgent and rebellious. As the artist Frida Kahlo once said, “I drank to drown my sorrows, but the damn things learned how to swim.”

Aging isn’t a malfunction, nor death a failure. They’re features, not bugs.

The Wisdoms of Darkness

Raging against the dying of........

© Psychology Today