From the Community | This Ash Wednesday, choose compassion over optimization

Ariana Duduna ’28 is a sophomore at Stanford. She also writes for Stanford’s journal of Christian thought, Vox Clara.

For many American parishes, Ash Wednesday brings the highest Mass attendance of the year, in many cases surpassing Easter and Christmas, even though it is not a holy day of obligation for Catholics (days when Mass attendance is required). Distinct from joyful celebrations of Christ’s birth and triumph over death, Ash Wednesday offers no consolation. Instead, it reminds believers of humanity’s inevitable end.

Christians line up in church to have their foreheads marked with ashes and hear the solemn words, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return” (Genesis 3:19). Perhaps for this very reason, Ash Wednesday has remained entirely free of secularization, whereas only 46% of Americans celebrate Christmas, a heavily commercialized holiday with cultural significance beyond religion, as a primarily religious occasion.

This peculiarity feels acute at Stanford, as Silicon Valley culture battles its confused relationship with death. Over the past two decades, Silicon Valley has poured over five billion dollars into the longevity industry, financing a growing effort to slow down and manage the negative biological effects associated with aging. The impulse is almost Dorian Gray-esque: a desire to escape deterioration at any cost, ignoring the cost’s secondary impacts as long as they are out of sight. 

Among the most visible figures of the longevity movement, Bryan Johnson, a former tech CEO and founder of Braintree, has transformed his persona into a public experiment, directly proclaiming a conquest against humanity’s mortal nature. His philosophy, provocatively titled “Don’t die,” has pinpointed existence as “the highest virtue” humanity can achieve, transforming the oldest human question from asking how to live into challenging how long we can last.

Yet, within the same zip code, death takes a different shape entirely: for over a decade, Palo Alto’s teen suicide rate was over four times that of the national average, which researchers largely attribute to academic pressure. Statistics have improved through community investment and prevention policies, but just this month, the city considered shutting down a railroad crossing after a 17-year-old died there by suicide. If existence is truly “the highest virtue,” why, in the very place investing billions to make death optional, are so many young people eager to escape?

Ash Wednesday proposes a third perspective: that death is neither a bug to be engineered nor a solution to be sought. Rather, death is a reality of humanity that we should face, both with sorrow — just as Jesus wept at the death of Lazarus — and with hope. In the Catholic tradition, mortality doesn’t diminish human dignity but highlights it. Even God chose to become mortal, to die, so that death itself could become a point of union where human suffering is met by divine companionship.

As we begin this Lenten season, Catholics are asked to do something countercultural: embrace discomfort deliberately. The first discomfort is facing our own mortality and contemplating our own death. In the upcoming 40 days, we are invited to genuinely mourn and feel sorrow at our failures and the injustices we’ve caused.

The acts of penance (prayer, fasting and almsgiving), commonly known as “giving something up,” can easily be viewed through the optimizing lens of Silicon Valley. Give up sweets, lose weight. Give up social media, gain productivity. But the discomfort Lent asks us to embrace loses its meaning when separated from faith and charity. The core point of Lent is that we embrace discomfort, increasing our capacity to love others rather than maximizing our future benefits. Lenten fasting isn’t a diet, but an act of solidarity with those who go without, not by choice but by necessity. As Pope Benedict XVI said, “By freely embracing an act of self-denial for the sake of another, we make a statement that our brother or sister in need is not a stranger.”

This practice of self-sacrifice may seem foreign, but it cultivates something our culture has lost: the capacity for genuine compassion. Compassion literally means “to suffer with” — not to feel sorry for someone from a distance, but to join their discomfort. You can’t optimize your way into compassion because compassion requires precisely what optimization seeks to eliminate: voluntary, unproductive suffering.

This is my first Lent as a Catholic. In my spiritual journey, I have found answers to many questions about the universe that once felt impossible to resolve. Yet perhaps the richest aspect of this tradition is not the answers themselves, but the new questions I now ask. Christianity explains suffering as a consequence of misused free will, but it does not promise to fully eliminate it in this life. I have not yet found an answer to the question, “How can I stop suffering?”, but I have found guidance in answering the question, “How can I suffer well?”

Instead of treating my anxieties about schoolwork, summer internships and career plans as mere problems to solve, I have begun to view them as opportunities for communion with others navigating the same struggles. In small, ordinary acts of charity, such as taking an hour off from studying to sit with a friend, I’ve found myself practicing compassion, joining them in their frustration and confusion rather than trying to escape my own. By sharing in others’ struggles, I’ve come to understand what compassion actually means.

Embracing suffering has become for me an act of transformation. It shifts my focus from mere performance, such as better grades or superior internships, to true human flourishing. Personal becoming defies optimization. In cultivating patience, humility and charity, I find myself attending more deeply to those around me. These virtues demand a deliberate slowing: listening without preemptively crafting responses, and prioritizing others’ struggles over my plans.

In Silicon Valley’s “fail fast” culture, mistakes are learning opportunities to be processed and moved past. Lent instead pushes us to mourn our own failures, offering attention without an expected return. Not every failure can be reframed as growth. Sometimes we’ve caused real harm to real people, and the appropriate response isn’t to “learn and move on” but to sit with what we’ve done, to grieve it and to let that grief transform us rather than just advance ourselves. 

Bryan Johnson might not have it right. You and I are going to die. However, I do not see that as the problem we’ve been taught to believe it is. What Lent and Ash Wednesday suggest is that our mortality can complete us rather than diminish us. Death, when faced with both sorrow and hope, can draw us together. Mourning our failures opens us to others’ suffering; it makes compassion possible.

I encourage everyone, Catholic or not, to sit with two uncomfortable truths: your mortality and the places you’ve fallen short. Let yourself be dust for a moment. You might find, as I did, that it is only from that place, once you are stripped of the illusion of control, that anything worth living for becomes visible. Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

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