Why Are We So Afraid of Death?
When we should be more afraid of truly living
“People are DYING!!” someone dramatically declared to me on Facebook, before abandoning it, at the beginning of the COVID lockdowns in April of 2020. It wouldn’t be the internet without the token outrage, am I right folks? He was furious. Downright pissed. Apparently, in his mind, I was not being… I don’t know… sensitive enough or something about the fact that people were reportedly dying from COVID and I had the audacity to ask some questions about it…or something. I’ve fortunately been able to build a healthier relationship with death and the inevitability of it. When you sit down and have some tacos with it, you realize that it’s not so scary and bad. More misunderstood than anything, really.
His response was as baffling and strange to me as apparently my choices and words were to him. Up until this point, I guess nobody had never died before… or something?
Seriously though, yes, it’s true. People are in fact dying. Every minute of every single day. Of cancer. In car wrecks. From heart attacks and other cardiac diseases. And suicide. Just to name a few. I will be dead relatively soon. And so will you. And so will everyone you know, everyone you’ve ever loved and everyone that you’ve ever been close to. Will be very dead, very soon. Our lives are a blink of an eye in the time frame of the Universe and so it was weird to me that someone would have such a strong, aggressive reaction to this but then again, maybe I’m not being honest with myself when it comes to human hysteria and how it knows no limits.
Everything Dies so Others Can Live
You have trillions of cells in your body and by the time you finish reading this paragraph, millions of them will have died, only to be replaced by millions more, all of them just as afraid of dying as the next. Life feeds on life and everything that is alive right now is alive because it is feeding from the death of something else. Did you eat this morning? Well, something died so that you could live. It’s impossible to fathom the incalculable life forms including human lives that have passed on over the centuries but surely I’m the crazy one because I’m not freaking out over people dying from COVID.
“Did you eat this morning? Something died so that you could live.”
Death is just as much or more of a part of life than anything else, really. It’s normal, natural and as inevitable as the sun rising and setting and yet there are enough people that live in a state of sheer terror at the inevitability that death will sooner or later find them. I see this all the time in spirituality forums, people asking, obsessing and coming unglued about death. So much so that it causes life to pass them by. Instead of living in the moment and focusing on making their life truly count in a meaningful way, they are obsessively gripped by the fear of it but why? Why are we so afraid of it? The unknown perhaps? Perhaps because it’s a barrier that we can’t really see beyond? That’s part of it but it goes much deeper than that.
Where Does This Fear Come From?
We have different parts of our consciousness. Ask any experienced meditator or psychonaut and they will tell you that the part of their consciousness that they found beyond the ego was vast, like an ocean and calm like a peaceful sunset on the beach. This is the side to consciousness sought by many who are seeking the fabled ego death. You know, the ego death that you seek when you take a large dose of magic mushrooms, for example? Mushrooms aren’t the only way to create distance from your ego, I’m just using it as an example. The ego is a tricky thing and many question whether or not the ego truly is part of our true self. The ego is the source of our mental illnesses and the reason behind our dysfunction.
You’re not afraid of death. Your ego is. Here’s the thing. Your ego can’t exist without your body. Your ego can only exist within the limitations of your physical body and it would make sense to realize that the ego fears death because the ego cannot go beyond it. Death is the worst thing that the ego can possibly imagine. It’s a horror that it cannot face. There just seems to be something behind the ego that knows, just knows, that death will be the end of it but it’s important to realize that there is so much more to us than our egos. Human beings all too often get so caught up in the ego that the ego eclipses everything else. It’s all that they know and so they buy into the detached, selfish, limited perspectives of it and struggle to find the greater truth.
Most people these days only know how to function from their ego. They’re so carried off by it that they don’t even know it. They’re so lost in it that they have no idea how lost they really are. The ego pulls us into the futility of materialism and consumerism, convincing us that the meaning of life is found in things like success, money and… well… stuff. We spend our lives accumulating wealth, status and objects. We cling to them as our only form of connection or meaning, not realizing that they only bring us pleasure but you never see a hearse with a trailer hitch, pulling a trailer of stuff behind it.
It doesn’t matter how expensive or fancy the box is that they bury you in, it doesn’t matter if you get the pure sterling silver handles because nobody will see it once it goes into the ground. By all means, get buried in the expensive suit that’s lined with Italian silk, nobody will see it after you go in the hole and it will only be ruined once you get nice and, you know… juicy. We can’t solve the dilemma of dying by acquiring better and fancier stuff, that’s my point. In fact, I think it makes the impending experience of death that much worse and much more terrifying.
The Illusion of Fear
The terror that people have about death is also just one symptom of the collective fear that is now gripping society. I’m grateful to say that I’m not afraid of much these days, including death but the thing that scares me most is to see how easily people are being controlled by fear and how willing people are to sacrifice their own happiness and freedom for a sense of safety and security from the fear that’s overwhelmed them. People aren’t just afraid of dying. They’re afraid of almost literally everything and if there’s one thing I’ve noticed about the most fearful people is that it’s damn near impossible to help them see beyond the illusion and deception of fear.
“People aren’t just afraid of dying, they’re afraid of everything.”
One of the reasons why we’re afraid of death is also how we talk about it. We are pack animals who share fears with each other. As a survival method, we tend to adopt the fears of others and we can’t deny that if everyone tells us to be afraid of something then we likely are going to be afraid of that thing too.
The words and language that most people use about death is always the language of fear, we’re often afraid of death simply because we’re told to be and then we carry on the tradition by speaking about it in such a way that causes fear. Many of us are afraid of death because that’s what good, obedient drones do. Our thoughts and our words are putting energy into this fear and causing it to grow.
There’s little evidence that death is bad, scary or painful. The fear of death is irrational and unfounded. If anything, there’s evidence that death is a wonderful, peaceful and liberating event when we are finally free from the tortures of the ego. If you believe what people have to say from near-death experiences and if we knew for certain that those accounts were true and real, we might be killing ourselves to get there.
The problem isn’t death, it’s our failure to understand it as well as a crisis of fear. Show me someone who is terrified of death and I’ll show you someone that hasn’t lived in a meaningful way. That’s not intended to be an insult, by the way, I’m just stating the facts. We’re obsessed with junk values and meaningless pursuits all the while time is wasting away so of course we’re buried in our egos and afraid to die and the answer to resolving this is in the aforementioned ego death and finding greater connections to things that actually give us purpose and meaning.
If you’ve lived your life in a deeply meaningful way, death just isn’t so bad. I remember the late and grate Wayne Dyer giving one of his final talks before he died. He obviously had some foresight because he talked about his imminent departure which I believed happened a few short months later and he stated that he wasn’t afraid to die because he had lived in a deeply meaningful way. The dude was ready to commence.
When a person loosens the grip that fear has in their life while creating distance from their ego, they begin to see greater truths. Living in fear isn’t living, for example. Do you really want to know what’s scarier than death? Wasting life in desperately miserable states of fear! I have lived that way before, it’s horrible! It’s hell. If you ask me, there’s nothing worse than living in fear. Instead of being afraid of dying, we should be afraid of never truly living.
Worry is Useless and Destructive
Ultimately, it’s useless to be afraid of things that we can’t control. When we fear things that we can’t control then those things control us. Death will come, your day to die will come and in the meantime, it’s crucial to make the most of every moment. Living in the moment is something that we talk about but what does it actually mean? If you constantly live in ego, it will be almost impossible to experience it. And that’s the key. To experience it. Go and find it. But don’t ask the ego how to get there or you’ll just become more lost.
Meditation has changed me and changed my life in more ways than I can list by helping me have a perspective of myself, of life and of this apparent reality. For now, I’ll just say that it has helped me with my fear and anxiety. So much so that I no longer fear death. In fact, I think I would welcome it. I want off this ride of infinite sorrows but I know that my day will come and I have a lot of valuable things to learn and do in the process.
How do you overcome your fear of death? Here’s my short answer. Meditate. Sit down and figure it out. Do it every day. Struggle through it. Face it. Stare it down and make peace with it.
By the way, you’re going to suck at meditation in the beginning and your ego will want you to quit but your ego is what got you here in the first place so why would you keep trusting it? Find some true meaning, purpose and connection. Exercise empathy, compassion and connect with what is really important. Do these things, and you’ll be on your way. Your fear of death will begin to subside.
