Steve Jobs passed away yesterday. It wasn’t something unexpected since his latest medical leave from Apple was speculated to be a result from his fight with cancer. Nonetheless, the news took me by surprise.
While I was standing in line at Peete’s, I was reading the newspaper that was left on one of the tables. The paper printed a cover story about the innovator, inventor, and black turtle-neck-wearing-czar of cool technology. As I was reading the article I was asked by a fellow patron, “pretty sad news, huh?” Yes. Of course it is sad news; death is rarely ever anything but.
The Patron calmly asserted that his death was probably better than what he was going through with cancer. “After all,” he said, “better to not exist than to exist in that kind of state.” I don’t think he really meant that. How, in any world, is it better to not exist than to exist? Non-existence can’t be better for anyone. It certainly isn’t better for the one that doesn’t exist because “better” is probably a state for people that actually exist. It certainly isn’t better for those people that do exist because a person’s existence may be inconsequential to most, but incredibly personal to others. Neither group would affirm the situation to be better. This truth seems self-evident. I can see it played out in the way our legal system functions. We send more people to prison for life than we sentence them to death because a fundamental human principle is that existence is better than non-existence.
