Why We Fear Death
A fundamental distinction that was never made
Why do we fear death? Why do most of us consider dying a negative experience when there’s nobody alive to tell us how being dead feels?
In his book Death: Philosophical Soundings, Philosopher Herbert Fingaratte argued that fearing one’s own death was irrational:
“When you die there is nothing. Why should we fear the absence of being when we won’t be there ourselves to suffer it?”
This raises an interesting question. How and when in our development do humans decide that living is good, while dying is bad? Sure, our brains come with a pre-installed instinct of self preservation. It allows us to quickly learn not to touch a hot stove or stick our fingers in a wall socket. In that sense, humans are no different from other animals: we naturally try to survive.
While this might explain why living things tend to avoid situations in which they perceive a risk of death or injury, this doesn’t address why a person trembles before the very concept of their own nonexistence.
Perhaps our brain’s unwillingness to die is a by-product of our survival instincts. But is evolution elaborate enough to teach our brains that dying, even of natural causes, is unfavorable on an abstract level?
It seems more likely that our unwillingness to die is a product of nurture, not of nature. So, let’s have a look at what our upbringing tells us about death:
HOW OUR ROCKY RELATIONSHIP WITH ‘DEATH’ DEVELOPS
- As children, we’re told that everyone’s lives, including our own, are bound to end one day. This is when we are first introduced to the word ‘death’. The concept of death still feels foreign though, as we struggle to understand what it means for a life to effectively end. So far, we have neither a positive nor a negative perception of death. Our understanding is entirely neutral, since the word ‘death’ does not yet elicit any profound emotional response.
- As we grow older, we watch our loved ones die. This evokes feelings of intense sadness and suffering. We begin to view death as the culprit for our losses. Our perception of death is permanently switched to negative.
- We observe a correlation between bodily decay and the likelihood of one’s death. As those around us grow older, their bodies grow weaker and their physical suffering generally increases up to the moment of death. Once again, death is blamed for its direct relationship to physical deterioration. This further exacerbates our negative perception of death.
By the time we begin to ponder our own inevitable demise, our perception of death is decidedly negative. While we don’t know the answer to what happens after we die, we have unwittingly allowed our previous run-ins with death — including objectively negative experiences such as losing loved ones and beholding bodily decay — to shape our perception of it.
This could very well be the reason why humans are scared of dying. While on a rational level we may be aware that our death and absence from the world cannot possibly cause us to suffer, on a subconscious level we have combined our past traumatic experiences, which we attribute to the fearsome word death, with the notion of our own life’s finite nature.
This subconscious combination has clouded our ability to distinguish between the notion of ‘death’ as something negative that hurts us throughout our lives, taking away those we love, and ‘death’ as a mysterious, undefined, and therefore neutral experience that we will have to face one day before our existence in this world transforms into something different i.e. the idea of death as a new beginning.
But what if humans could resist the urge to view death so holistically? It would be fascinating to learn about a culture whose language does not have a single word for ‘death’. A language that would use two distinct words to discern between two conflicting notions of death, with word ‘A’ used to capture the essence of death’s impact on living people, and word ‘B’ to describe a state of not living. Thus, word ‘A’ would be seen as negative, while word ‘B’ would have a neutral connotation. If such a culture did exist, granted my explanation of why we fear death is correct, they would have a less pessimistic outlook on their own mortality.
If you’ve made it this far, you might start to get irritated by the fact that I have not given a single practical tip on how we can overcome our fear of death. We may want to start by accepting that there’s no shame in fearing death. In 2018, When Herbert Fingaratte turned 97, he recorded a video with the Atlantic. When asked if he still stood by his book’s central argument that fearing death is irrational, he said:
“I now think that is not a good statement”.
Before his passing in 2018, Fingaratte’s own mortality suddenly began to haunt him. This prompted the philosopher to revise his previously held views on death.
A wariness of death is something that most of us, including myself, share. It’s also true that dead people don’t live to tell the tale of what happens afterwards. This eternal truth remains unknown to everyone alive today. Lovecraft even wrote that the fear of the unknown is our oldest and strongest fear. But the unknown also offers us a deep excitement and inspiring curiosity. While we are living, it is my belief that we should try to channel this curiosity and excitement while being mindful of the fact that fear is a normal part of life (and death).
