Why do we fear death? Is it the fear of death or the fear of missing out? Sajid Javed Follow Apr 6 · 6 min read

A person standing on a transparent glass on top of a skyscraper — Acrophobia Trigger

When asked “What do you fear the most?”, we get some usual as well as unusual answers for the question.

Usual would be the fear of heights (acrophobia), flying (aerophobia), spiders (arachnophobia),lightning (astraphobia), being alone (autophobia), crowded spaces (claustrophobia), blood (hemophobia), animals (zoophobia) and so on.

While unusual would be the fear of names (onomatophobia), beards (pogonophobia), clouds (nephophobia), chickens (alektorophobia) and the list goes on.

So far we have documented 101 phobias, in general, but the most common and consistent fear that people have or rather the fear that we are interested in is the fear of death.

Here I want to discuss the psychological and philosophical aspects of this fear rather than the statistics from certain surveys about the matter.

When we go one step deeper into this phobia, we come across the fear of pain and suffering, the fear of non-existence, the fear of the unknown, the fear of eternal punishment, the fear of loss of control, or the fear of leaving your loved ones behind, the fear of missing out and all of these mentioned fears are the underlying transparent ingredients that make your ultimate fear of death.

FEAR OF PAIN:

Some fear excruciating pain (cancer or other terminal illness) that eventually leads to demise.

FEAR OF THE UNKNOWN:

Some fear the unknown, as in nobody really knows what happens when you close your eyes and slip away to the other side, nobody has lived to tell the tale, to put it paradoxically.

FEAR OF ETERNAL PUNISHMENT:

If you were brought up by religious parents, you’d be aware of the horrifying theories they have about the afterlife, that sort of upbringing also contributes to the already horrifying image of death that we have in our mind- the fear of eternal punishment, the fear of being held accountable for every misdemeanor and then being punished a thousand folds over for every naughty thought, every conscious action, and every subconscious action, the day will come and you will answer, for all, for everything and you better have some good answers. So it adds to already unpleasant and inevitable thoughts that we have about dying one day. Not cool, to put in millennial language.

FEAR OF LOSS OF CONTROL:

Some fear the loss of control, this is an odd one but real none the less, they spend their whole lives avoiding risks or undergoing rigorous, frequent health checks and the thought of losing control gives them hellish nightmares.

FEAR OF MISSING OUT:

While some fear to leave their loved ones behind, this I’d say is the most common one and can very easily be excused, they fear what will happen to those entrusted to our care, or missing parties and pleasant moments with their dear ones.

And the list of these underlying causes goes on and they differ for some individuals and are the same for others.

But we want to go one step deeper into it and lets discuss this phenomena of demise in the light of different schools of philosophies in a brief and simple manner.

WHY FEAR THE INEVITABLE?

Ancient Chinese Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi argues that death is a part of our life cycle and since we don’t reject other inevitable parts of this cycle like going from baby to toddler, toddler to teen, teen to adult and adult to elder then why should we reject this one part of that cycle. In fact, we celebrate the other life cycles or changes with birthday parties, proms and graduations while this change or rather the death of us or our loved ones, sends shivers down our spines.

So death according to Zhuangzi is just one more change — why treat it differently? Instead, he said you should celebrate the death of a loved one just as you celebrated every other life change that they experienced. In his view death can actually seem selfish.

“When its time for the people to move on, the last thing you should do is hold them closer.”

I CAN USE SOME DEEP & DREAMLESS SLEEP:

Similarly, many other philosophers have and still believe that death is nothing to fear.

Socrates has a rather interesting approach to this dogma. When he was condemned for corrupting the youth of Athens by teaching them individuality and faced his own imminent death, he remained calm and unafraid. He didn’t think that we could know if there’s an afterlife or not but he thought there were only two possibilities and neither of them was anything to be afraid of. The two possibilities being either death is deep and dreamless sleep OR a passage to another life. He further argues that if it is a dreamless sleep I could use some good night rest & the passage to another life seems good too, I would get to hang out with some of the greatest thinkers of the past that have already died. Either way, there is nothing to be afraid of. Well unless the person in charge in that afterlife is the Christian god, that could be a troublesome scenario but hey, we’re in this together. By his standards, almost every person living right now is soon going to be barbecued in hell. So at least we’d have Trump and Hitler with us there, that should ease the misery a bit.

THE HARM THESIS — WHAT IS DEATH?

To better explain this thesis, let us take an example of the lives of two peoples, the first person is exposed to good experiences, healthy relationships, and a good amount of positivity in his life, so the number of good experiences outweigh the bad ones and since life is good, he considers more would be better for him. So for him, death is the end of those experiences and thus he considers death as a ‘harm’. while the second person has seen bad luck, tragic events, the death of loved ones, and overall grimness his whole life. So we cannot apply the same outlook for the second person, he would consider death as an escape from his sheer painful existence because in his case he has more pain than pleasure and would consider that the life available is not worth having. In both cases, death is the end of sensations and experiences, but the difference lies in whether the experiences are good or bad.

WHY NON-EXISTENCE IS NOT AT ALL THAT BAD

Now let’s see what the materialists (someone who believes that YOU=YOUR BODY) have to say about this.

Materialists argue that when you are everything that your body is, death just means non-existence. And there wasn’t anything scary about that either because there won’t be any YOU to have any feelings about non-existing.

Epicurus, the founder of Epicureanism (greatest good is to seek modest pleasures in order to attain a state of calmness, freedom from fear) argued that fearing nonexistence is not only stupid, but it gets in the way of enjoying life. You are alive and experiencing sensations now. So, make those sensations as great as possible and don’t worry about when those sensations are going to stop! The point he was trying to make is that if something is bad for you, its generally bad for you at that particular time (ex: hangover is bad for you at the moment when you get one and if you keeping worrying about the hangover you’d miss out on the party). He further argues that death can’t be bad for you at any particular time because once it arrives, you’re gone. As in, You and Death cannot co-exist.

FINAL WORDS:

We can go on and on about this grim but interesting matter and go in depth about comparativism, premature death, eternalism and so on but i think a few things that we can take from this are:

-Live your life in the present moment and not in the constant agony or fear of death and future.

Or like Ivan Illich put it, “To hell with the future. It’s a man-eating idol.”

-Make peace with your inevitable fate and taste the freedom.

-Accept your mortality and the mortality of your loved ones and live every moment as if your last and finally embrace the departure.

Let’s end it with a bitter-sweet extraction from a poem by W.H Auden, shall we?

‘The years shall run like rabbits,

For in my arms I hold

The Flower of the Ages,

And the first love of the world.’

But all the clocks in the city

Began to whir and chime:

‘O let not Time deceive you,

You cannot conquer Time.

‘In the burrows of the Nightmare

Where Justice naked is,

Time watches from the shadow

And coughs when you would kiss.

‘In headaches and in worry

Vaguely life leaks away,

And Time will have his fancy

To-morrow or to-day.