For anyone remotely schooled in the basics of evolutionary psychology, this should not be any surprise. Quite simply, it’s what helped our ancestors pass on their genes to future generations. Sometimes that fear can be overridden by other concerns, for example avoidance of pain or ideological considerations, but it seems unlikely that anyone would want to die if they were living comfortably and had not been conditioned by their experience of life to believe that death is something inevitable and desirable.
I started to fear death when I was kid. I had been told (quite reasonably, in hindsight) that if I closed my eyes after going to bed then I would go to sleep, and I had misinterpreted that to mean that that’s what sleep was. So I started to wonder why it was that when the alarm went off in the morning it felt as if only a fraction of the nine hours or so that should have elapsed had actually done so.
Eventually I figured it out, of course, and started to familiarize myself with the concept of consciousness, and it occurred to me that there was a stream of consciousness that kind of “leapt” from the moment I went to sleep to the moment I woke up. That was OK, but then I started to wonder what would happen to this “stream of consciousness” when I died, and then I started to get really scared.
Perhaps some people reading the above paragraph will find it resonates. Many people, I dare say, will find that it doesn’t. No matter. The point is not how and in what circumstances we become aware of our inherent thanatophobia, but that—with few if any exceptions—we all have it, albeit to varying degrees.
Some of us would prefer not to know about it (see my previous article on fear of knowledge), but whatever philosophical Idealists might say most of us assume most of the time that not being aware of something does not mean that it doesn’t exist. Thanatophobia does, including yours. If you are still not willing to accept this, then it’s probably best if you stop reading now, because the rest of this article will assume that you do.
Some of us would prefer not to know about it (see my previous article on fear of knowledge), but whatever philosophical Idealists might say most of us assume most of the time that not being aware of something does not mean that it doesn’t exist. Thanatophobia does, including yours. If you are still not willing to accept this, then it’s probably best if you stop reading now, because the rest of this article will assume that you do.Good, so you’ve accepted that you are thanatophobic. Welcome to the club. Now the question is what to do about it, the two opposing extremes being: try to repress it as much as possible, or embrace it with all your being.
Repressing it was my first strategy. I had no idea what to do with this fear, except that I wanted it to go away. And my strategy for making it go away was essentially to not think about it. And that worked, most of the time. Meanwhile I was being brought up by church-going parents, singing in the choir, playing the church organ, and generally doing what I was told. I had enough of a grasp of reality to doubt that eternal life was a real thing, but I was at least willing to admit the possibility. Eventually I started to draw more and more comfort from that idea, becoming an evangelical Christian and participating actively in church life and Christian student organizations. And that also worked, for a while.
But then it didn’t, and one of the reasons it didn’t was that the non-Christians I was associating with (“non-Christian” being how I thought of them at the time, not necessarily how they thought of themselves) just seemed more “real” than the Christians. Looking back, I guess it was simply because they were less deluded.
But then it didn’t, and one of the reasons it didn’t was that the non-Christians I was associating with (“non-Christian” being how I thought of them at the time, not necessarily how they thought of themselves) just seemed more “real” than the Christians. Looking back, I guess it was simply because they were less deluded.Eventually I figured out that I was as likely to go to hell (another thing I feared) for believing in such stupidities as I was for not believing them, and I rather abruptly broke off links with church life and many of the relationships that surrounded it. And of course, my thanatophobia returned with a vengeance.
One very good reason for repressing thanatophobia is that if we don’t it can drive us nuts. Nobody can tolerate being scared the whole time, and the risk—even, arguably, the certainty—of dying is always there. So we must suppress it. We wouldn’t have it, however, if it wasn’t serving a useful purpose, and it is also thanatophobia that makes us look before we cross the road. So while there are times when we must suppress it, there are other times when we do and must embrace it.
So far this is nothing that should be particularly shocking for anyone. What is shocking for many people, however, is the possibility that we might develop technology that extends life well beyond our current life-spans. And the reason it is shocking, in my view, is that it interferes with people’s delicate strategies for managing their thanatophobia.
Even when they allow thanatophobia to motivate them to look before crossing the road, most do not allow themselves to be aware that this is what is motivating them. Anything that reminds people that they are not only likely (perhaps even certain) to die, but that they are terrified of this prospect, tends to horrify them. So they enter what Aubrey De Grey has described as the “pro-aging trance”, in which they convince themselves that since aging (and eventual death) is inevitable it must be desirable, and that because it is desirable it must also be inevitable.
Even when they allow thanatophobia to motivate them to look before crossing the road, most do not allow themselves to be aware that this is what is motivating them. Anything that reminds people that they are not only likely (perhaps even certain) to die, but that they are terrified of this prospect, tends to horrify them. So they enter what Aubrey De Grey has described as the “pro-aging trance”, in which they convince themselves that since aging (and eventual death) is inevitable it must be desirable, and that because it is desirable it must also be inevitable.What this means, in my view, is that whatever we think of the pros and cons of radical life extension, if we are to steer ourselves as individuals and as a species through the “bottleneck” of the next few decades, we need to make greater efforts to embrace our fear of death. We need to allow ourselves to be aware of that fear, and allow it to motivate us, without completely taking over.
What this means in practice will depend greatly on each person’s circumstances, beliefs and values, and we will still find plenty to disagree on (including the pros and cons of radical life extension), but whatever we desire as individuals we will in any case be in a much better position to achieve our goals, and we are also more likely to be able to agree on common goals and resolve global conflicts.
Hence the message of this article: embrace your thanatophobia.
Images:
http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/shortcuts/2012/oct/23/doctors-death-pathway
http://www.taringa.net/posts/imagenes/16056606/
Fondos-de-escritorio-HD-nuevos-alguno-te-llevas-seguro.html
http://jessicaalbahdiphonewallpaper.blogspot.com/2013/03/
death-wallpapers-desktop.html#.Urd6EZCJDAQ
http://www.mitochondrialdnatesting.com/function-of-mitochondrial-dna.html