Why are people afraid of death?

[S@tanicoaldo]

Because the reports of the dead are that they'd rather not be dead,

Achilles: "'Say not a word,' he answered, 'in death's favour; I would rather be a paid servant in a poor man's house and be above ground than king of kings among the dead. "

But I wouldn't dwell on it much, as that causes you to lose games of Jenga

I kind of agree with her:

"For Simone de Beauvoir, the question of whether or not we should kill ourselves was incoherent. We are thrust into existence and forced to take action, the question of what sort of form that action would take, and what kind of lives we intended to live were the only possible things we could ask ourselves. Questions about the value or meaning of life were questions outside of life itself, so not relevant to what we must do while we exist, which is to take on projects in the world."

[Liquor Box]

It's a fact that everyone is going to die one day, whya re people so afraid of it?

it's like being afraid that the sky is blue, it just is, there is nothing you can do about it.

I really don't get what the fuss is all about.

I don't think that most people are afraid of dying one day, I think most people are afraid of dying soon.

That is, most people are not beset by worry about the thought that one day, in a few decades time, they will die. Fear of death usually occurs when there is an increased prospect of dying in the near future, and dying before old age is not inevitable.

[2D8HP]

I kind of agree with her:

"For Simone de Beauvoir....

Simone was way too totally BADASS to disagree with anyway.

Just sayin'

[Toastkart]

There's two sides to the question. Or rather, a distinction that needs to be made. The first is, as others have said, that people fear dying because it can be painful, unpleasant, etc. Or you don't actually die and wind up crippled or brain damaged. That's reasonable and easy to understand.

The other side, the fear of death, is an existential fear. What do you do in the face of annihilation? Personal, intimate, annihilation of your very being?

[Suttle]

“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.” - Mark Twain

[S@tanicoaldo]

Nowadays I'm more afraid of dementia and mental illness than death.

[2D8HP]

“I do not fear death.....

Let's sing about it:

[truemane]

I'm terrified of death. I consider it one of major failings as a human being. I meditate every day, I actively avoid attachments of all kinds, I consider myself an enlightened person, I'm not really afraid of anything else, I've been a practicing Taoist for two and a half decades, but all the same, I really, really (really) don't want to die.

Part of it is garden variety fear of the unknown. There will be a moment when the shades go down and there's no way to know what's past that. Thinking of that moment gives me the heebie jeebies.

Part of it is the lingering remnants of my Catholic upbringing. I'm pretty much a full-on atheist, but I'm maybe 0.01% afraid that there IS a Hell and if there is I'll wind up there (almost certainly from all the masturbating).

Part of it is fear that I'll reach death not having done "enough" with my life. I realize this is irrational since, no matter what I've done, the moment of death will be the same. But all the same, the thought of dying without having done certain things (or done more of other things, or less of others) scares me.

I'm intellectually afraid of dying, of being old and sick and alone and infirm and in pain and a burden to my family. Both sides of my family are remarkably long-lived, but one side has so much Alzheimer's and dementia and cancer that a long lifespan might prove itself to be a bittersweet blessing. But I'm afraid of those things in a very distant and rational way. Whereas I'm afraid of death with an immediate and visceral intensity that never ceases to surprise me.

[Tvtyrant]

You are biologically programmed to fear death, with the exception of particular circumstances that override it. If you don't fear death something is wrong with your programming, and if your ancestors didn't you wouldn't exist.

Overriding events could be shock (your body turning off nerves and functions in preparation for death) or protecting others (extension of protection of offspring and mates).

[Elanasaurus]

Spoiler: Off topic

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Kind off topic but what really bugs me is the idea of hell and heaven, it makes no sense for me, it's a paradox, heaven is supposed to be perfect and everyone there is happy, and hell is supposed to be eternal torture.

Let's say I'm a virtuous mother with a terrible and horrible son.

I love him despite that because... Mothers.

We die, he goes to hell to be eternally tortured and I go to heaven to enjoy perfect happiness.

How can I be happy knowing my son who I love is being tortured for eternity? it makes no sense.

Just to clarify, people who believe in Heaven and Hell like I do don't believe that there is such a thing as a virtuous person. Everyone is terrible and horrible.

That wasn't your question was it? To answer your question...I'm not sure. I could probably speculate but I don't actually know. So carry on, I have nothing to contribute.

Part of it is the lingering remnants of my Catholic upbringing. I'm pretty much a full-on atheist, but I'm maybe 0.01% afraid that there IS a Hell and if there is I'll wind up there (almost certainly from all the masturbating).

Crap. If you're right, I should also be 0.01% afraid of going to hell.


EDIT: somehow I had missed the whole point of this thread. Addressing that:

But you won't be there not to NOT experience things, god I wish I could be as clear as I'm in my head.

It's not so much the state of "not experiencing things" people fear, but rather the fact that they have to stop experiencing things. It's like a kid who doesn't want to stop watching TV and go to bed. He doesn't hate going to bed; he hates having to stop watching TV. Which is why my mom tries to make us stop watching TV half an hour before bedtime.

[Knaight]

But we don't live in the wild anymore.

I find it funny on how many guys want to go back to the uncivilized ages, with all this talk of alpha males and other nonsense.

In the context of deep seated neurology this means very little. The human brain is a result of a very long process of evolution, and significant features of the brain predate the species by orders of magnitude. Meanwhile most of the time the species existed was prehistory (which was absolutely living in the wild), the wild was a significant factor for most of history, and even today there are a lot of people living in conditions where death from the sort of things found in the wild (mainly disease) is a serious concern.

Neuroplasticity is a wonderful thing (and one often forgotten or ignored by certain people attributing a little too much to biological hardwiring), but it does have limits. Take the basic actions involved in not-dying. We breathe, because there's a subconscious process that dictates that we breathe, because the selection for not having that is pretty dramatic. We eat because we're hungry (or stressed, or bored, or whatever - there's some combination of deleterious adaptation and neuroplasticity working against us with regards to common stimuli here), and hunger developed because it assists in not dying. We sleep because we're tired and have the sensation of tiredness for similar reasons and with similar caveats.

[danzibr]

Well whether or not you believe in an afterlife is clearly an issue. Assuming none, well then dying kinda stops you from being able to do ....well anything. Not being able to do things tends to be something people want to avoid. You know, so they can continue experiencing things.

Dying now or dying eventually is a large difference. Just because it is an eventuality (barring things like digital mental upload and the like which might be possible), doesn't mean it's not concerning to people.

As an agnostic leaning atheist, I don't believe in an afterlife, but am still scared of death.

I like existence, existence has been good to me. I don't want it to end.

P.S. Someone once said that your life after death is exactly like your life was before birth. That gives me no comfort, because oblivion is scary. Although, I don't mind sleeping even though I tend not to dream, so maybe death will be like that slumber and I just won't wake up.

I don't have much to add to the thread, really.

Me, personally, I'm terrified of oblivion. Even then, oblivion sounds like too much. Like, now there's me. I enjoy living. I have a wife and children, spend my time with them or reading or playing games or whatever. At some point that will end, and that makes me sad, but even more, the notion of... just nothing, it's so foreign, scary. I wanna LIVE.

Now, if I had 0 doubts of afterlife and continuity of consciousness, it'd be nbd. But I'm a major skeptic.

[Anonymouswizard]

But you won't be there not to NOT experience things, god I wish I could be as clear as I'm in my head.

The bolded part is why I, personally, fear being dead more than death itself.

Yes, I did not exist for roughly 13.7 billion years. But to me the universe didn't begin 13.7 billion years ago. I know intellectually that it did, but to me it appeared on a summer day in the 1990s (actually, if we're going by memories it was either spring or autumn when I was about 4, but I'm working from moment of birth here). Assuming the fact I have weight problems doesn't affect my lifespan, I should in theory survive to the 2070s or 2080s, maybe longer, at which point from my point of view the universe ends. Even worse, except for some extremely long lived or unaging species humans are a weirdly long lived species both by accident of nature and medical health, in terms of lifespan I'm lucky to have been born human.

Death is easy, it's simply the moment where I change from the state of existence to the state of nonexistence. Okay, I'm technically religious, but I don't believe in a soul separate to the being and I certainly don't believe in any of the common ideas of a heaven. For our terms we have state A (pre-death) and state B (post-death), and in terms of interacting with the only universe we know and even thinking state A seems to be the only one that matters.

In my experience all I know is experiencing and caring about things. While I exist I can care about what I want, when I don't exist I can't even care about the fact I don't exist. I can't make a choice, and choice to me is what defines existence.

[Frozen_Feet]

Death seems so natural to me...

Appeal to nature is the weakest weaksauce argument you could involve in this kind of argument. It leans on implicit idea that "natural" = "good" and hence not something to be afraid of, but even cursory examination shows how ridiculous this is:

Mental illnesses are natural. Diseases are natural. Bears are natural, snakes are natural, spiders are natural, darkness is natural, high places are natural, social situations are natural - majority of all the things humans ordinarily fear are natural. Nature is full of things which contribute to human suffering and hence to human fear of death. Stating that they're natural doesn't even begin to address why people fear things.

As for the old and the terminally ill, they may seem more accepting of death because they have come to terms with the specific deaths they know to be close by. This doesn't mean they'd be okay with all other kinds of deaths. Most of those old people probably wouldn't be fine with being murdered, just to give an example.

Spoiler: As for your paradox

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Actual theology-based anwers are beyond the scope of these forums, but the key fallacy is in the idea that love is mutually exclusive with justice. In your scenario, the mother knows the punishment of their son is absolutely just. She knows, in cosmic terms, that her son is exactly where he is supposed to be. Hence his punishment is no obstacle to her happiness. The secular equivalent is a mother who sent their drug-addict son to rehab. Sure, to the son the experience may be torturous, but the mother may in fact be relieved and happier knowing they're in treatment than if they weren't.

[truemane]

Spoiler: Off topic

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Kind off topic but what really bugs me is the idea of hell and heaven, it makes no sense for me, it's a paradox, heaven is supposed to be perfect and everyone there is happy, and hell is supposed to be eternal torture.

Let's say I'm a virtuous mother with a terrible and horrible son.

I love him despite that because... Mothers.

We die, he goes to hell to be eternally tortured and I go to heaven to enjoy perfect happiness.

How can I be happy knowing my son who I love is being tortured for eternity? it makes no sense.

There isn't a lot of discussion about this point in any of the major religious texts, but it's not a massive leap to assume that any sort of 'eternal life' would require a transmutation of consciousness.

Perceiving things the way we do as humans, an eternity of anything would eventually be the worst thing ever. To be sentient and self-aware 'forever' and not go insane would require us to perceive the universe very differently than we do now.

And so it's not a massive leap from that point to imagine that such a transmutation would also take care of these kinds of concerns, based as they are on very human, very mortal, attachments and feelings.

[S@tanicoaldo]

Just to clarify, people who believe in Heaven and Hell like I do don't believe that there is such a thing as a virtuous person. Everyone is terrible and horrible.

That wasn't your question was it? To answer your question...I'm not sure. I could probably speculate but I don't actually know. So carry on, I have nothing to contribute.

I didn't want to break the rules, so you know I went with a generic reason, but just substitute that for water you believe people have to do to go to the good place, Do a handstand in Paris or accept Elvis as your lord and savior, this kind of thing.

if a mom did it but her son didn't, she would be devastated and unable to truly enjoy the good place.

[truemane]

if a mom did it but her son didn't, she would be devastated and unable to truly enjoy the good place.

Unless the experience of entering the Good Place altered her perspective to the point where that was no longer the case.

[S@tanicoaldo]

Unless the experience of entering the Good Place altered her perspective to the point where that was no longer the case.

I belive you are overly underestimating the whole mother's love thing, that **** can move mountains.

Besides what kind of good place is that? "Welcome to the good place, the lobotomy is on the house!" it's the same as oblivion if you are not going to be yourself.

[Florian]

if a mom did it but her son didn't, she would be devastated and unable to truly enjoy the good place.

That's the "blind love" argument and I think it´s overall a pretty weak one. See, going to "a place" is keyed to a fundamental understanding of ethics and morals and it could be doubted that accepting or finding excuses for raising a serial rapist or suicide bomber actually means mum understood them in the first place.

[truemane]

I belive you are overly underestimating the whole mother's love thing, that **** can move mountains.

Besides what kind of good place is that? "Welcome to the good place, the lobotomy is on the house!" it's the same as oblivion if you are not going to be yourself.

(I think this is still on the good side of the TOU since we're discussing the philosophical nature of consciousness and actual religious doctrine, but I'm still proceeding carefully)

I'm not saying a lobotomy (although, maybe, who knows? Maybe eternal bliss is only available to the lobotomized, maybe Nurse Ratched had it right all these years and Ken Kesey was the jerk), I'm suggesting a change in the way you perceive time and space. Enlightenment might be a better word, although I was trying to avoid a term with an implicit value judgement. Transcendence, maybe, is better.

I'm talking more like, having all of creation revealed to you, and that revelation altering your perspective. In the same way that growing up alters your perceptions of the things your parents did to you when you were a teenager. You grow up, you gain some life experience, and suddenly you see the things they did TO you as things they did FOR you. And you're still you, just not the same you that you were when you were 14 (thankfully).

So it's not an absurd leap to assume that passing out of the mortal sphere could include a similar shift whereby local and specific suffering is revealed to be necessary or virtuous or somehow serving the greatest possible good.

I mean, if you got to the Good Place and just sat there on a cloud (or Ted Danson's Fro-Yo shop, or whatever) and looked down at earth and watched everyone you loved grow old and suffer and die, and make mistakes you would want to warn them about but can't, and you perceived time and space and morality the same way you do now? Then there's no way the Good Place wouldn't be torture. For everyone. Even if your entire life system were filled with Good Place inductees.

So, it's always seemed to me, if there is a Good Place, it would almost necessarily have to include some kind of transformation in the way we perceive in order for it to include any but the most superficial kinds of happiness.

[S@tanicoaldo]

That's the "blind love" argument and I think it´s overall a pretty weak one. See, going to "a place" is keyed to a fundamental understanding of ethics and morals and it could be doubted that accepting or finding excuses for raising a serial rapist or suicide bomber actually means mum understood them in the first place.

Wow, wow wow calm down, I'm talking about a sinner not mass murderer.

Like a guy who is a sinner but overall a pleasant and nice person.

Maybe he doesn't believe in the Good place creator or maybe he masturbated to tentacle porn or something, not really good place material but not a bad person overall.

Isn't true love about loving someone despite their flaws?

EDIT:

(I think this is still on the good side of the TOU since we're discussing the philosophical nature of consciousness and actual religious doctrine, but I'm still proceeding carefully)

I'm not saying a lobotomy (although, maybe, who knows? Maybe eternal bliss is only available to the lobotomized, maybe Nurse Ratched had it right all these years and Ken Kesey was the jerk), I'm suggesting a change in the way you perceive time and space. Enlightenment might be a better word, although I was trying to avoid a term with an implicit value judgement. Transcendence, maybe, is better.

I'm talking more like, having all of creation revealed to you, and that revelation altering your perspective. In the same way that growing up alters your perceptions of the things your parents did to you when you were a teenager. You grow up, you gain some life experience, and suddenly you see the things they did TO you as things they did FOR you. And you're still you, just not the same you that you were when you were 14 (thankfully).

So it's not an absurd leap to assume that passing out of the mortal sphere could include a similar shift whereby local and specific suffering is revealed to be necessary or virtuous or somehow serving the greatest possible good.

I mean, if you got to the Good Place and just sat there on a cloud (or Ted Danson's Fro-Yo shop, or whatever) and looked down at earth and watched everyone you loved grow old and suffer and die, and make mistakes you would want to warn them about but can't, and you perceived time and space and morality the same way you do now? Then there's no way the Good Place wouldn't be torture. For everyone. Even if your entire life system were filled with Good Place inductees.

So, it's always seemed to me, if there is a Good Place, it would almost necessarily have to include some kind of transformation in the way we perceive in order for it to include any but the most superficial kinds of happiness.

Yeah I too used to be all over that "Nirvana" and "Dante's heaven" idea, that we become above pitty feelings and emotions and that soudned like a the best of good places. True enlightenment is to be above all this suffering and materialism.

And then I watched Princess Kaguya and now I'm in the middle of a spiritual crisis.

[Sylian]

I actually once wrote a 13 page philosophy paper on the badness of death. While there have been people who agree with you that death is not bad since we are not there to experience it (Epicurus famously argued in favor of this), I do believe that death will, generally, harm us.

It (generally) harms us because it deprives us of other possible goods. If a person dies at age X, then they lose out of any goods they would have experiences after age X. For instance, if a man dies in a car crash at age 24, and he otherwise would have lived a good life and died at age 60, then he lost 36 years of life (and lots of experiences connected to that life). We thus have reason to avoid death, at least to some extent, since an early death would (likely) be harmful to most people.

Of course, this isn't what you're asking. You're asking why people are afraid of death. I think that, in general, younger people are more likely to be afraid of death than older people. Dying at 30 is generally worse than dying at 95, since you'd likely have much less life left and less is lost by dying. I don't think most people are all that scared of living to 100 (in a healthy shape) and then dying, but instead they'd be more scared of dying in an accident, or a crime, or from some disease. It is rational to have some fear of death in order to avoid situations where you might die early (for instance, avoiding accidents and avoiding things like smoking or heavy drugs).

(It's also worth mentioning that many people believe in an afterlife, and might not be afraid of death as much as living in a dreadful afterlife).

[S@tanicoaldo]

(...) he otherwise would have lived a good life and died at age 60, then he lost 36 years of life (and lots of experiences connected to that life).

Hahahahaha you speak as if life was just plesure and leisure.

[2D8HP]

Okay.... when a topic gets this deep and interesting I assume that any thorough responses on my part will break Forum rules, so I'll just post that I feel the same way as some of you.

[S@tanicoaldo]

Statistically speaking it's more probable that you will live a sad and unfulfilling life then a pleasant one, so your numbers just don't add up.

If we were beings of pure logic we would conclude that life is pointless since we spent most of it sleeping, on traffic or working.

Most people don't enjoy working or staying on traffic, so most of our life is spent doing unpleasant and unhappy things, hence life is mostly composed of unpleasant moments so it's not worthy living a lot.

Wow, that took a dark turn.

[thorgrim29]

To paraphrase Hitchens (because I can't find the exact quote, it was probably better when he said it because... well he was Hitch):

"We all live with the constant knowledge that one day somebody is going to tap us on the shoulder and say not that the party's over, but something much worse, that the party goes on but that we have to leave."

Also something to the effect of:

"We're shot from our mother's uterus like a cannonball racing towards a wall full of rusty spikes, and it's our duty to life the brief moment before we hit it in an interesting and ironic way".

Basically, I by and large like being alive, so I would rather not stop being alive... even though I am convinced that at that point I won't be in a position to care about it one way or the other the idea of an end to my experiences is scary.

[warty goblin]

I belive you are overly underestimating the whole mother's love thing, that **** can move mountains.

Besides what kind of good place is that? "Welcome to the good place, the lobotomy is on the house!" it's the same as oblivion if you are not going to be yourself.

But I'm not going to be myself ten minutes from now. Why would I be myself after I die?

Anyway, non-existence doesn't scare me that much. Possibly because I've always cultivated a sense of my own irrelevance. If I drop dead tomorrow, somewhere less than ten people will be deeply upset, a somewhat larger number of others will be somewhat sad, maybe as many as a hundred others will notice in some bureaucratic capacity, and basically everybody else on the planet won't care or know at all. In a hundred years the largest difference between me having lived and never having existed will probably be some C02 in the atmosphere and a large pile of trash. Perhaps some slightly different genes in circulation if I have children.

I can be horrified by this, or not. Being horrified about my impermanence and irrelevance seems counter-productive, because it won't matter anyway, and is mere vanity on my part. The world got on just fine without me - by a number of metrics would probably be better had I never existed - it will continue to be just fine after I'm gone. Sure, non-existence is difficult to imagine, but this is more a limitation of my imagination than a reason for terror.

Not that I generally usually talk this way. For some reason it makes people assume I'm unhappy or there's something wrong with me. I don't understand that, it seems honest to me, but whatever.

[S@tanicoaldo]

But I'm not going to be myself ten minutes from now. Why would I be myself after I die?

I find this idea so silly, you still are yourself, you are a better version of yourself, with all the collected knowledge and experiences of your "past self’s" that's different then having all your being erased.
It’s not the same, it’s not even an absurd simplification it’s just wrong.

[Florian]

Wow, wow wow calm down, I'm talking about a sinner not mass murderer.

Like a guy who is a sinner but overall a pleasant and nice person.

Maybe he doesn't believe in the Good place creator or maybe he masturbated to tentacle porn or something, not really good place material but not a bad person overall.

Isn't true love about loving someone despite their flaws?

Just using an extreme position to showcase a flaw in your argumentation. We tend to be lenient towards "ours" and forgive them small "sins" when they do unto themselves or others, but it´s a big deal when they do them unto us and that's a whole different level of betrayal. It´s like having fun when cheating you wife, but a serious drama when your wife cheats on you.

[AuthorGirl]

The idea of dying at some point in the distant future doesn't scare me. I'm more afraid of dying before I get to learn and experience at least some of the things that are supposed to come with life.

I'm really young though, so I have a lot ahead of me, which might skew my perspective a bit.