I recently started watching the television show Vikings on The History Channel. If you’re a man, you should too.

It follows the life and growth of legendary viking Ragnar Lothbrok as he rises from a farmer to a fearless leader. I’m only 6 or 7 episodes in, but the show has already illustrated some powerful concepts quite clearly. Below I’ll cover two of these concepts that revolve around the prospect of death.

1. Death isn’t that big of a deal

At the end of the most recent episode I’ve seen, the viking village is celebrating the death of it’s previous leader.

Everyone is drinking and cheering as a few men prepare his dead body for its journey to the afterlife. The tradition involves placing the body on a boat with some of the dead man’s possessions, killing one of his female slaves and placing her next to him, and then lighting the boat on fire and sending it down the river.

In the crowd is one English priest who was taken as a slave on a prior raid into England. He’s since been integrated into the viking culture and is frequently used to contrast a typical westerner’s perspective with that of the native norsemen. As they prepare to slit the throat of the female slave, he shakes his head, turns, begins to walk away, and says “I don’t want to watch.”

Before he’s able to take a single step, one of the vikings, a boy nonetheless, stops him and exclaims “it’s only death!” Offended by the Englishman’s ignorance to such a common part of life, he forces him to look on.

While we don’t live in the times of the vikings where people were cut down by swords in battle, we all die just the same. Yet somehow our society has conditioned us to ignore the reality of death. We talk about the dead as if they were still living. We cultivate an environment where talking about death is seen in a negative light. We watch films like Indiana Jones and fantasize about elixirs of never-ending life. When one of ours dies, we dress them up in fancy clothes and make-up so that we can talk to them as if they were still living.

Nearly everything we do surrounding death is based on the premise of trying to ignore a simple reality: everyone dies. And by trying to ignore death and pretend like it doesn’t exist, we turn it into a huge deal. The downside of this is that we begin to have an ungodly fear of dying – one so big that we become a slave to it, and are unable to fully live out our own lives.

2. Death shouldn’t be feared

The negative consequences of fearing death couldn’t be made more clear than in a battle scene from an earlier episode.

The vikings have recently plundered a English village and are making their way back to their boat. As they approach the beach where it’s docked, they see a force of English soldiers awaiting them. It’s not a large force, but they still outnumber the vikings about 2 to 1. Do the vikings run or quiver at the prospect of dying? No. They are confident in the face of death and flawlessly execute tactical maneuvers such as forming a shield wall to defend against a host of incoming arrows as you can see above.

After fending off the arrows they proceed to take on the English soldiers. They suffer a few casualties, but kill all but a couple English soldiers who flee. And this victory can wholeheartedly be attributed to their fearlessness. When the fight enters close quarters, the Englishmen collapse under their fear of death. They lose their cool, their technique, and their lives as result. It couldn’t be made any clear than when the commander of this force returns to his king and defends his loss by saying “they fought like demons, like men possessed– with no fear of death.”

Again, we don’t fight in close quarters combat in the streets of modern cities, for the most part. But nevertheless the fearless man will emerge victorious in situations we do face. He will perform far better in a job interview. He will perform far better when approaching girls at the bar. His acceptance of his coming death will allow him to perform better in nearly every aspect of life.

And this is why we all must accept the fact that we’re going to die. Otherwise, we will be a slave to our fear of it.