What the fear of death is really about
(Hint: it's not "nothingness")
It seems that a large portion of humanity believe that their fear of death is about the prospect of non-existence or oblivion at death. Despite its prevalence, this attribution of the greatest fear has long struck me as odd and counterintuitive. It's not just that I can't relate to it since it's never been my own fear, but that it doesn't make sense even in theory. After all, if this complete vanishing at death were even possible (which is a whole other question), it would preclude all experience, including fear itself as well as anything remotely fear-worthy, and thus shouldn't be felt as any more threatening or frightening than the apparent void before birth; or, perhaps more pertinently, the void of dreamless sleep, which is a total absence not only not dreaded but actually welcomed.
And so I think this interpretation of the source of the fear can be seen as something of a psychological red herring, a relatively superficial belief predicated on insufficient self-reflection and perpetuated in bad faith in order to distract one from the real fear. Put simply, anyone who believes their fear of death is a fear of not existing after death hasn’t gotten to the root of the fear.
As for what that root is, I think the trauma of birth may be the primary unconscious basis of whatever one interprets their fear of death to be about. Why? Because it’s the one traumatic event everyone alive has experienced, and they've experienced it when at their most sensitive and vulnerable. (Of course, I'm taking it as obvious and beyond debate that newborns are fully conscious experiencing beings, not "insensate blobs" as I once heard it put... no doubt by someone who might actually have been an insensate blob. But I digress.)
In fact, in a way birth is the first experience for the one undergoing it, since the prenatal condition is probably so oceanic that it might be more accurately represented as mostly void of experiential content — in a sense, ‘nothing’. Then a series of cataclysmic events occurs: incredible crushing pressure accompanied by unprecedented movement, finally culminating in the harshest bombardment of light, noise, and cold upon emerging on "the other side." All of this should make it clear why William James famously described the experience of the newborn as “one great blooming, buzzing confusion,” and why José Ortega y Gasset similarly said “life is at the start a chaos in which one is lost.”
And so the primordial preverbal template for a radical change of state that everyone harbors deep within them is going from oceanic voidness — ‘nothing’ — to an unprecedentedly frightening and chaotic immersion in form — ‘something.’
Now reread that emphasized sentence and think very carefully about its implications.
Here, then, is a major clue to the erroneousness and absurdity of the idea that the greatest fear is that of annihilation or coming to an end. In fact, we can now see that the truth is so far from this that it’s exactly the opposite. The real fear is that life's other inexorable bookend, death, will be a replay of the first: a violent ejection into a cold, alien, frightening experience that will not be the end of the danger, just as life proved to not be the end of the danger portended by birth.
Possibly at least three objections may be sparked by the above: one, that it fails to account for the assertion of many atheistic materialists that they really don't expect anything at all at death; two, that it contradicts the testimonies of many NDErs (near-death experiencers) that there's mostly love and light on the other side of death; and three, that it equates life with danger.
The last objection is not one I’m inclined to defend, since it’s not an abstract philosophical position but an outgrowth of my own experience of, and orientation to, life. If equating life to danger makes no sense to someone, I can respect that, while recognizing that nothing I might say would likely change that difference of orientation (not that it necessarily needs changing; indeed, since life is already a given, having a positive orientation toward it ought to be regarded as a boon).
Regarding the first objection, it's true that among atheistic materialists, some — perhaps even many — profess to be so confident in their conviction that death is simply an end that they don't even think about it. Moreover, some of these folk will also contend that they don't fear death, and for precisely the reason that they expect it to be simply a blinking out of consciousness and being. In other words, they properly grok the very point I made in the opening paragraph of this essay (and will elaborate on further below). No problem, right?
Right, but only assuming the individual is speaking in good faith in claiming they don't fear death at all. Not everyone who makes that claim is being honest with themselves, and even some who are being honest to the best of their self-knowledge might find a heretofore unsuspected primal fear of death getting triggered by an unusual crisis or trauma.
One of the most poignant and starkly illustrative examples of this is the elderly subject of a documentary short film, titled Being 97. He's not just any old man nearing death, but a philosophy professor who's written about death, as well as about self-deception. His lifelong conviction is that it's not rational to fear death. But as he feels his death approaching, he very much does find himself fearing it, while also being unable to understand why he does so. Here's what he says about this in the film (@6:22):
"In the book about death, what I said in a nutshell is there’s no reason to be afraid or concerned or anything about death, because when you die, there’s nothing. You’re not going to suffer, you’re not going to be unhappy, you are not going to be […] So it’s not rational to be afraid of death. I now think that is not a good statement, because I think it’s important to figure out why it is then that people are afraid of death. Why am I concerned about it? My argument was, there’s no good reason for it. My sense of realism tells me, well, ‘no good reason’ or not, it’s something that haunts me — the idea of dying soon. I often [..] ask myself, ‘what is the point of it all?’ There must be something I’m missing in this argument. I wish I knew."
Setting aside the potentially problematic fact that he's merely assuming death is an end, if my birth trauma hypothesis is correct, that would go a long way toward explaining why someone who's as astute as a professional philosopher might fear death despite a lifelong certainty that there's no reason whatever to do so. The fear is so deep and primal that no amount of rationalizing or motivated believing about death will be able to dispel it.
And just to put a cap on this particular objection, it's important to bear in mind that the aforementioned "primordial preverbal template for a radical change of state that everyone harbors deep within them" (i.e., transitioning from a peaceful or familiar state to a chaotic and terrifying one) has nothing at all to do with any beliefs, convictions, theories or assertions about there actually being such a state-transition at death. The point is that a) each of us has experienced at least this one radical transition, b) it was scary and traumatic because we were so open and vulnerable, and so c) at a deeply unconscious, primitive level of the brain or mind, another scary transition is what is feared. At this level of the psyche, it really doesn't matter whether you (merely) believe that death is either an end or another transition.
As for the second objection, it's indeed true that many NDEs of a positive nature (not all of them are positive) are characterized by profound and certain recognition of ‘coming home’ and being loved unconditionally — pretty much the opposite of the scenario in my stored birth trauma hypothesis. But the fact that folks who have such experiences almost invariably lose their fear of death doesn’t contravene my theory, since the NDE has essentially neutralized the earlier trauma for those few who experience NDEs. That leaves the vast majority who can only use belief in NDEs to quell death anxieties that are often insidiously misattributed, as already discussed.
A couple further thoughts on those misattributed death anxieties, this time vis-à-vis NDEs. The fact that NDEs are almost always enthusiastically celebrated for their alleged evidence of postmortem survival of consciousness is based on the assumption that the fear of death is always and only a fear of coming to an end, an assumption which, once again, is dubious: you cannot fear what cannot be experienced; if you think you’re afraid of ‘nothingness,’ you’re almost certainly reifying it as an experience of nothingness. (I will unpack this notion of reifying nothing, along with a few other very specific possible sources of confusion around the fear of death, toward the end of the piece.)
Also, having read and heard literally hundreds of NDEs, my impression is that a lot of the purported similarities between them are vastly overstated by commentators, probably because they’re so focused on them as life-after-death testimonials that a kind of confirmation bias kicks in to overplay the commonalities of the experiences.1 But in my view, there’s such a vast range of seemingly very idiosyncratic or personal content, both positive and negative, and so many instances of what seems almost like dream logic in how many of these experiences unfold, that the only elements of them that make me reluctant to completely dismiss them as mere hallucinatory phenomena are well-documented instances of ‘veridical perception,’ and the fact that virtually every NDEr claims their experience was far more real than their everyday life, let alone than their dreams or any prior psychedelic trips. Be that as it may, due to this preponderance of highly diverse and mutable content, from the most heavenly to the outright hellish, I see only more subtle samsara in NDEs and thus nothing worth celebrating.
Getting back to the fear of death, there might be an even deeper and subtler element of the ultimate fear whereby a "fear of non-existence" is actually valid, and that has to do with there not actually being a real, solidly existing "self" at all. Consider, for example, the fact that the first year or two after birth is, for the vast majority of people, a complete blank. That's because it's during this earliest stage of cognitive development that the ability to reflexively abstract oneself as a subjective experiencer apart from the objective content of experience first comes online, then becoming ever more reinforced by subsequent conditioning. Of course, the brain also has to develop the neurological pathways to both encode and access narrative memories, which hasn't yet occurred in infancy; but this can be seen as one of the elements further reinforcing the reifying belief in selfhood.
So, since this "self" was literally fabricated into being at some point well after birth, I believe that at some subconscious level of everyone its constructed and (thus) mirage-like nature is intuited. That is, one suspects that there is no center to the cyclone-like din of thought and perception. In addition, since "the world" itself is necessarily and obviously known only via thought and perception, even the apparent substance of that cyclone is sensed as ephemeral and empty. Thus I think that the putative fear of non-existence, which most people erroneously project onto an imagined future experience of death, is really the fear of fully realizing the truth of one’s ever-present non-existence or no-thing-ness.
Before concluding this topic, I want to clarify something that may help to counter what could strike some as a certain insensitivity, dismissiveness, or dogmatic arrogance on my part concerning what is or is not behind one’s deepest fear. What I mean is that I really do understand how anyone who loves life and who lives life without any grossly inhibiting or impeding neuroses would be saddened at the thought of someday not being around to enjoy it anymore (but n.b.: sadness ≠ fear). Further, there are all kinds of other psychological and pragmatic elements that factor in to one’s ruminations on death, such as concerns about the continued well-being of one’s family and friends in one’s absence; regrets over any perceived failures and unfulfilled potential in one’s life (i.e., one’s legacy or lack thereof); and not least, the specter of any physical suffering during the dying process itself — assuming, of course, that death doesn’t come too suddenly either to prepare for or to suffer over, the thought of which can actually add yet another source of death-related anxiety to the mix.
And yet, however valid all of these concerns most assuredly are, they are not the same as the great fear one feels when looking directly and closely at the awesome mystery of death.
Regarding the what I referred to earlier as "very specific possible sources of confusion around the fear of death" leading people to erroneously fear non-being, here are what I see as four of the most likely schemas, any one or more of which might be in effect in any given instance:
○ Imagining the world going about its business with oneself no longer in it, in which case one’s implied absence unavoidably conjures a sort of negative presence: basically, one inadvertently renders oneself into a virtual ghost helplessly watching the world going on without one;
○ Reifying nothing into an experience-of-nothing, perhaps imagining it as drifting on and on endlessly in the voidness of space. While to me that might sound a damn sight more peaceful than almost any typical day here in the purgatorial bardo of corporeal existence, I don’t want to belittle or dismiss anyone who might be frightened at the thought of it, however ill-founded such a scenario may be2;
○ Taking the prospect of one's eventual demise as a present-tense negation of all one’s enduring values and meaning, and thus as an insult and immediate threat;
○ Conflating the totally natural anticipatory sadness and psychological and pragmatic concerns outlined above with the first of the two far deeper fears explicated earlier (i.e., an unconscious fear of being ambushed by another birth-like trauma; cf. Francis Bacon’s “I do not believe that any man fears to be dead, but only the stroke of death”).
In conclusion, I recognize that probably most people need to hold on to at least some of their illusions or confusions to varying degrees. My comments throughout this essay on the topic of the deeper foundations of the fear of death arise from decades of intermittent despair and existential crisis-fueled contemplation on these subjects, including brushes with suicide, and so I’ve found my ponderings infused with an urgency and desperation that only true mortal crisis can generate. As such, much of my writing on the subject might prove impenetrable to those whose own reflections have perhaps not been so urgent and vital, and are thus more abstract and conceptual.
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1 For a more robust substantiation of this, see the references to the work of Pim van Lommel in my essay Some Thoughts on NDEs.
2 One thing that continues to amaze me is that even highly educated, intelligent, and psychologically or philosophically savvy individuals are among those who fall prey to this basic confusion. Consider, e.g., the famed Spanish writer Miguel de Unamuno, who from childhood on found the prospect of nothingness to be terrifying, whereas descriptions of the torments of hell left him indifferent. The philosopher Thomas Nagel, in a famous essay that he actually begins by acknowledging the fact that some regard concern over oblivion as “confused,” argued that, if nothing else, death as annihilation is bad because it deprives one of life which, a priori, is good (an assumption that antinatalist philosopher David Benatar, and honorary antinatalist E.M. Cioran, to name just two, would no doubt hotly dispute). Over the years I’ve surveyed scores of celebrated works by this caliber of thinker which take as a given that to cease to exist is the most dreadful fate (Sartre’s BEING AND NOTHINGNESS, Tillich’s THE COURAGE TO BE and Becker’s THE DENIAL OF DEATH are a few of the most culturally influential examples that I’ve sampled).
Closer to home, a friend of mine who’s a PhD psychologist and spiritual seeker, and unabashedly terrified of non-existence, told me that when her daughter was small, she assumed the kid shared her annihilation terror and so told her about reincarnation to proactively comfort her. To her surprise the little girl reacted with horror at the idea.
I’m beginning to suspect something like an innate psychological polarity which produces either an accepting or rejecting orientation to existence itself, maybe in a way comparable (but otherwise completely unrelated) to the way extroversion and introversion represent, respectively, the tendency to gravitate either toward or away from socializing.