Why Do We Fear Death If We Have Never Experienced It?
Maybe we aren't afraid of death. Maybe we're afraid of losing the life we know. How can we fear something our own consciousness has never experienced? And there is a beautiful contradiction here. We have experienced pain , so we know what pain feels like. We have experienced loss , so we know what losing someone feels like. We have experienced darkness , so we know what darkness feels like. But we have never experienced being dead. Yet the thought of death can produce fear, anxiety, avoidance, even though there is no firsthand experience of “being dead” stored in our memory. And there's an even stranger layer. Maybe we're not actually afraid of death itself . Maybe we're afraid of: the process of dying — pain, suffocation, helplessness losing people we love losing everything we've built the uncertainty of what comes after the idea of not existing and perhaps most importantly… our inability to imagine our own absence. Try this thought ...
