Josh from Living Fossils here: Thanks for the excellent post, David. Totally agree that the story we tell about fear of death is BS. My favorite version of this is that we want to have sex as a way to “fight off” death. You can see this in the work of Freud and others. (You can also see in the work of Freud the concept of a “death wish,” which makes even less sense.)
So, I agree that a fear of the concept of death isn’t a prime mover of human behavior. Still, I find that plenty of people are afraid of death, and not of the imminent type. I, for one, am afraid of dying at 100, peacefully in my bed, surrounded by those I love—because then I would lose everything and everyone I love. And cause pain to those I love. Plus, the next step is to become nothing, which I can’t even comprehend. So, I do think death is a scary thought no matter how you go. But it’s not like some underlying motivation that I carry around with me.
Another thing is that when a scimitar is coming for my head, I’m not consciously afraid. I’m afraid before and after. I can anticipate that someone might try to kill me, or reflect that they almost did. But in the moment, I’m too focused on not dying to think too much about it. The anticipation and reflection is what other animals might not have, no?
A final thought is that plenty of people have what is called “unspecific” or “generalized” anxiety. I agree that it’s more adaptive to worry about specific things, but often people just seem to get in an anxious mode, and attach that anxiety to everything. What do we think is going on here?
Thanks, Josh. Yea when I think about dying I feel a brief frisson of fear, but then I just go back to doing what I was doing before. As you say, not a prime mover. Interesting that you fear dying at 100 in the ideal way. Me personally, it doesn’t scare me at all. I’m discovering that there is a lot of individual variation in the fear of dying out there. If you ever come up with a good theory to explain this variation, let me know. I find it very puzzling. As for generalized anxiety, maybe the worries are still about specific things—it’s just that the anxiety is more easily triggered? Maybe it’s about having a lower threshold for anxiety—expecting everything to go badly? You would know better than me, but that strikes me as a plausible story. In general we should expect evolved emotions like anxiety to have adaptive functions, and to not just be bad vibes for no reason. I take it you’d agree with me there.
An adaptive function to emotions? Definitely not :) As for the variation in the fear of dying, I'll certainly keep it in mind. I like your idea of lowered threshold for generalized anxiety, though. I think that pretty much nails it. Anxiety begins with a few specific things, which don't get resolved (or get worse), and soon the threshold for a new thing to instill anxiety is so low that pretty much everything clears it. Anyway, thanks for the post and reply.
Hi David, I've had severe generalised anxiety. I've found that most people who have never been seriously mentally ill see the world as "outside in". That is: your senses pick up something from the environment, or you think a thought --> causes you to feel an emotion. So e.g. you see a tiger, you now feel afraid.
But when I became mentally ill, my brain switched to primarily "inside out" functioning. That is: I feel incredibly anxious --> find something in the environment that the emotion can attach to or a thought is produced seemingly from nothing. Unfortunately outside in still exists so I would fall down a pretty horrendous feedback loop.
Another way to think about it is what the source and dominant direction of traffic is for inner brain (emotions) vs outer brain (cognition). For me there was a superhighway from my inner anxiety part to my outer thinking part. My anxiety brain has no context for sending out anxiety signals, it's just stuck "on" all the time. My outer brain has to make sense of these signals so picks out some really random stuff or thinks random thoughts which change all the time - but mostly based around suffering and death.
I would add having had panic disorder in the past too, that I saw my anxiety as having different "frequencies", so high frequency like the violin screeches in psycho were a panic response to imminent danger (which for me also was inside out - rarely was there anything in my environment to provoke such a response), while low frequency like the "duh duh" sound in Jaws, was a generalised response for a foreboding threat that might be there but hasn't been spotted yet.
The foreboding low frequency anxiety is what I usually found to be the existential type. So imagine it is dark and you are in the forest. You can't spot any threats currently, but you know that this type of situation lends itself to a future danger to life. Importantly, low frequency anxiety is non-specific, it could be anything.
Nowadays, being much closer to being mentally healthy, I see my emotions as being like filters to influence what I notice in my environment. It is a bidirectional feedback loop with a chicken-egg source. Sometimes it is outside-in, sometimes inside-out. ie. Did spotting that homeless person in a crowded street make me feel sad, or did I feel sad so I spotted that homeless person in a crowded street? (Not the greatest example but the only one I can think of right now.)
I think for the mentally healthy, understanding the "inside out" concept can be very useful. Have you ever had an infatuation with someone, or fallen in love, then it ends, and afterwards you think "Why did I do all those things?", The entire world seems to change colour. Inside out.
Further, understanding the feedback loops means that the original source may be far away from how you are feeling right now. I've found I tend to give a cause to how I feel not necessarily to the most dominant event, but the last event before a major feeling is felt.
So for example, say you progressively work longer and longer hours at work, becoming more and more stressed, then you have a falling out with a friend becoming more stressed, then maybe you have a newborn baby that won't stop crying, then see a dead pigeon - boom non-specific existential thoughts of death, it must have been the pigeon - when actually it was probably all the stuff before building up an inside out response.
Finally, I've simplified things a lot above. Ultimately I've found feelings and emotions to be immensely complicated.
I'm not sure if this mini essay has helped (I did not intend it to be a mini essay!) but anyway, I'm glad I came across your substack David - thoroughly enjoy reading your work!
I’m on the same page as you but I do have a friend who is deeply disturbed by the thought of not existing to the point where he thinks about it fearfully all the time. I don’t understand it at all but it does seem like a real thing he is afraid of.
Hm, yea, I don’t doubt your friend’s sincerity, but I find his reports genuinely baffling. I myself have never had anything like the experience, and it’s hard for me to relate to it. I also cannot wrap my head around it from an evolutionary psych perspective. What’s equally mysterious is that your friend’s experience is not universal:
some people seem to have it strongly; others not at all. What explains whether or not someone is going to have this experience? I have no idea. Let me know if you come up with any good theories.
The point that some people have it and others don’t is a great one. I definitely felt it to an extreme degree when I was younger and it has somewhat diminished (especially since having children). But I definitely still feel it.
As Piotr mentioned above, I see it as something of a maladaptive byproduct of our changing consciousness, marked by lower time-discount rate, increasing sense of identity/self, and greater capacity for abstraction. So I think people with these attributes are more likely (although not necessarily) to experience it.
I also think that counterintuitively, the idea of God/eternal life might make it worse in some people rather than better because it encourages thinking past the imminent horizon, so doubts about God become an existential threat to your own personality.
I feel it constantly, and its good to hear that others have it too. It’s also comforting to know it might go away/diminish with time as it did for you.
Yeah it's very personal. I myself am much more terrified of the idea of living forever karmically or that kind of thing, due to the kinds of suffering-based reasons you outline in your essay, then just "not existing" which seems easy.
Read "Hags: The Demonisation of Middle-Aged Women" by Victoria Dutchman-Smith first. It's all about ageing, the fear of ageing, the consequences (social, cultural) of ageing, especially for women (because women have menopause, men don't; etc.)...
Our feelings are ultimately independent of reason. Thus whether we fear our mortality is not necessarily directly linked to what we think about it. We like to think we can control our emotions through reason, but we can’t ignore that our reasoning usually follows rather than precedes our feelings.
I think that the average person is not greatly bothered by his impending death simply because too strong a proclivity in that direction would be a decided Darwinian disadvantage: any genes partly underlying it would not fare well in the gene pool.
I think that what are brains are hardwired for by the evolutionary process is the fear of imminent death. For most of our lives, ending up in such situation can be only caused by unnatural factors such as accidents, injuries, violence and so on. This helps us avoid danger.
However, when thinking about the inevitability of death, we can only imagine it as inevitability of an imminent death situation. It's a cognitive error. Aging is something that actually saves us from the horror of the imminent death situation by providing a way of slow and steady decline of health until we either don't wake up one day or lose our minds such that even if the imminent death situation occurs, we no longer have any cognitive ability to realize that.
To sum up, death is inevitable, but the dreaded imminent death situation is not.
I totally get your arguments regarding what other animals might know, but what you go on to argue is going to take more thought on my part. What about when you do get older? In my experience, (subjective and anecdotal I admit) all the things you list we fear about getting older start to fade in importance, you get used to them. But the fear of our mortality going away? I call bullshit on those who spout that the elderly are more accepting of death line, or is that just me and many of those I seem to run into? When young people are diagnosed with severely life limiting terminal illness, so by definition are not going to age, do their fears evaporate? I am with with Living Fossils on this one. I don’t find much comfort in the dying at 100... scenario either. I take it the “having accomplished everything we dreamed of accomplishing in life” is tongue in cheek. Maybe it’s our point of view on this which is an age thing. I don’t know how old you are David but I hope you can come back to this article in say 35/40 years time. I will try to get my ‘self’ uploaded to a computer and look forward to reading it, to see if you have altered your opinion. (I am younger than Ray Kurzweil and he is sure it is going to be possible in his life time) That will only happen on the promise that I get wiped afterwards though, paradoxically existing forever has never floated my boat either!
Not sure I agree. The poet Philip Larkin claimed he was afraid of being dead i.e. no longer being here or anywhere and I see no reason to disbelieve him. The idea that, providing you have fulfilled your reproductive purpose, you can view your own non-existence with equanimity strikes me as fanciful.
I also think a general fear of the unknown is a part of it. And while the article is correct that evolution doesn’t care about survival, our nervous systems and egos certainly do. There is definitely more to this.
It's a silly notion. We all know exactly what it's like to be dead. Think back to before you were conceived or born. That's death. You didn't exist. At another point, you will not exist again. Larkin feared something of which he'd have zero awareness. It's not unknown; it's known to all of us. For Larkin or anyone to say they fear death is the equivalent of saying they're afraid of the thousands of years during which they didn't exist, that is, before their birth.
I don't doubt that Larkin was afraid, but he evidently didn't examine his own logic or self-attachment.
Of course, the fear is ego-driven. There's that, but it has nothing to do with being dead. The ego dies with the body.
I think you're confusing two things: one the way people should think and another the way they do think. Larkin never claimed he was being rational.
That apart, the idea that you should be as uncaring about the thousand years after your death as you are about the thousand years before you are born is something I've heard many times and has never managed to convince me.
There are many emotions you can examine and conclude are irrational but this rarely makes them disappear. For example, it's irrational to have a panic attack in a supermarket. Nothing terrible's going to happen to you but knowing that doesn't help.
Great article. The myth that the fear and denial of Death is the root and cause of all Human behavior is just another pseudo-intellectual idea created by Psychoanalysis.
I've read Ernest Becker's book The Denial of Death and it was one of the most overrated, pseduoscientific, pretentious works of Psychology ever written. It's like all Becker did was take Freud, replaced "sex" with "death" and called it a day.
Lovely thoughts, well put. I agree on all counts. I also have a fascination with death (I think we all do to some extent), and I don’t think it’s necessarily a status game. Coltan Scrivener has written a lot of cool stuff on “morbid curiosity” (he has a substack with that name), and I’m convinced that our fascination with death and the macabre evolved to help us learn important info about danger, decay, illness, and threat while keeping ourselves at a safe distance from it. So I don’t think morbid curiosity is necessarily bullshit. I think it might actually be the purest form of genuine curiosity.
Josh from Living Fossils here: Thanks for the excellent post, David. Totally agree that the story we tell about fear of death is BS. My favorite version of this is that we want to have sex as a way to “fight off” death. You can see this in the work of Freud and others. (You can also see in the work of Freud the concept of a “death wish,” which makes even less sense.)
So, I agree that a fear of the concept of death isn’t a prime mover of human behavior. Still, I find that plenty of people are afraid of death, and not of the imminent type. I, for one, am afraid of dying at 100, peacefully in my bed, surrounded by those I love—because then I would lose everything and everyone I love. And cause pain to those I love. Plus, the next step is to become nothing, which I can’t even comprehend. So, I do think death is a scary thought no matter how you go. But it’s not like some underlying motivation that I carry around with me.
Another thing is that when a scimitar is coming for my head, I’m not consciously afraid. I’m afraid before and after. I can anticipate that someone might try to kill me, or reflect that they almost did. But in the moment, I’m too focused on not dying to think too much about it. The anticipation and reflection is what other animals might not have, no?
A final thought is that plenty of people have what is called “unspecific” or “generalized” anxiety. I agree that it’s more adaptive to worry about specific things, but often people just seem to get in an anxious mode, and attach that anxiety to everything. What do we think is going on here?
Thanks, Josh. Yea when I think about dying I feel a brief frisson of fear, but then I just go back to doing what I was doing before. As you say, not a prime mover. Interesting that you fear dying at 100 in the ideal way. Me personally, it doesn’t scare me at all. I’m discovering that there is a lot of individual variation in the fear of dying out there. If you ever come up with a good theory to explain this variation, let me know. I find it very puzzling. As for generalized anxiety, maybe the worries are still about specific things—it’s just that the anxiety is more easily triggered? Maybe it’s about having a lower threshold for anxiety—expecting everything to go badly? You would know better than me, but that strikes me as a plausible story. In general we should expect evolved emotions like anxiety to have adaptive functions, and to not just be bad vibes for no reason. I take it you’d agree with me there.
An adaptive function to emotions? Definitely not :) As for the variation in the fear of dying, I'll certainly keep it in mind. I like your idea of lowered threshold for generalized anxiety, though. I think that pretty much nails it. Anxiety begins with a few specific things, which don't get resolved (or get worse), and soon the threshold for a new thing to instill anxiety is so low that pretty much everything clears it. Anyway, thanks for the post and reply.
Hi David, I've had severe generalised anxiety. I've found that most people who have never been seriously mentally ill see the world as "outside in". That is: your senses pick up something from the environment, or you think a thought --> causes you to feel an emotion. So e.g. you see a tiger, you now feel afraid.
But when I became mentally ill, my brain switched to primarily "inside out" functioning. That is: I feel incredibly anxious --> find something in the environment that the emotion can attach to or a thought is produced seemingly from nothing. Unfortunately outside in still exists so I would fall down a pretty horrendous feedback loop.
Another way to think about it is what the source and dominant direction of traffic is for inner brain (emotions) vs outer brain (cognition). For me there was a superhighway from my inner anxiety part to my outer thinking part. My anxiety brain has no context for sending out anxiety signals, it's just stuck "on" all the time. My outer brain has to make sense of these signals so picks out some really random stuff or thinks random thoughts which change all the time - but mostly based around suffering and death.
I would add having had panic disorder in the past too, that I saw my anxiety as having different "frequencies", so high frequency like the violin screeches in psycho were a panic response to imminent danger (which for me also was inside out - rarely was there anything in my environment to provoke such a response), while low frequency like the "duh duh" sound in Jaws, was a generalised response for a foreboding threat that might be there but hasn't been spotted yet.
The foreboding low frequency anxiety is what I usually found to be the existential type. So imagine it is dark and you are in the forest. You can't spot any threats currently, but you know that this type of situation lends itself to a future danger to life. Importantly, low frequency anxiety is non-specific, it could be anything.
Nowadays, being much closer to being mentally healthy, I see my emotions as being like filters to influence what I notice in my environment. It is a bidirectional feedback loop with a chicken-egg source. Sometimes it is outside-in, sometimes inside-out. ie. Did spotting that homeless person in a crowded street make me feel sad, or did I feel sad so I spotted that homeless person in a crowded street? (Not the greatest example but the only one I can think of right now.)
I think for the mentally healthy, understanding the "inside out" concept can be very useful. Have you ever had an infatuation with someone, or fallen in love, then it ends, and afterwards you think "Why did I do all those things?", The entire world seems to change colour. Inside out.
Further, understanding the feedback loops means that the original source may be far away from how you are feeling right now. I've found I tend to give a cause to how I feel not necessarily to the most dominant event, but the last event before a major feeling is felt.
So for example, say you progressively work longer and longer hours at work, becoming more and more stressed, then you have a falling out with a friend becoming more stressed, then maybe you have a newborn baby that won't stop crying, then see a dead pigeon - boom non-specific existential thoughts of death, it must have been the pigeon - when actually it was probably all the stuff before building up an inside out response.
Finally, I've simplified things a lot above. Ultimately I've found feelings and emotions to be immensely complicated.
I'm not sure if this mini essay has helped (I did not intend it to be a mini essay!) but anyway, I'm glad I came across your substack David - thoroughly enjoy reading your work!
I’m on the same page as you but I do have a friend who is deeply disturbed by the thought of not existing to the point where he thinks about it fearfully all the time. I don’t understand it at all but it does seem like a real thing he is afraid of.
Hm, yea, I don’t doubt your friend’s sincerity, but I find his reports genuinely baffling. I myself have never had anything like the experience, and it’s hard for me to relate to it. I also cannot wrap my head around it from an evolutionary psych perspective. What’s equally mysterious is that your friend’s experience is not universal:
some people seem to have it strongly; others not at all. What explains whether or not someone is going to have this experience? I have no idea. Let me know if you come up with any good theories.
The point that some people have it and others don’t is a great one. I definitely felt it to an extreme degree when I was younger and it has somewhat diminished (especially since having children). But I definitely still feel it.
As Piotr mentioned above, I see it as something of a maladaptive byproduct of our changing consciousness, marked by lower time-discount rate, increasing sense of identity/self, and greater capacity for abstraction. So I think people with these attributes are more likely (although not necessarily) to experience it.
I also think that counterintuitively, the idea of God/eternal life might make it worse in some people rather than better because it encourages thinking past the imminent horizon, so doubts about God become an existential threat to your own personality.
I feel it constantly, and its good to hear that others have it too. It’s also comforting to know it might go away/diminish with time as it did for you.
Yeah it's very personal. I myself am much more terrified of the idea of living forever karmically or that kind of thing, due to the kinds of suffering-based reasons you outline in your essay, then just "not existing" which seems easy.
you gotta write a book man
Thanks. Yea, maybe I will at some point. Any kind of book you had in mind?
Read "Hags: The Demonisation of Middle-Aged Women" by Victoria Dutchman-Smith first. It's all about ageing, the fear of ageing, the consequences (social, cultural) of ageing, especially for women (because women have menopause, men don't; etc.)...
Our feelings are ultimately independent of reason. Thus whether we fear our mortality is not necessarily directly linked to what we think about it. We like to think we can control our emotions through reason, but we can’t ignore that our reasoning usually follows rather than precedes our feelings.
I think that the average person is not greatly bothered by his impending death simply because too strong a proclivity in that direction would be a decided Darwinian disadvantage: any genes partly underlying it would not fare well in the gene pool.
I think that what are brains are hardwired for by the evolutionary process is the fear of imminent death. For most of our lives, ending up in such situation can be only caused by unnatural factors such as accidents, injuries, violence and so on. This helps us avoid danger.
However, when thinking about the inevitability of death, we can only imagine it as inevitability of an imminent death situation. It's a cognitive error. Aging is something that actually saves us from the horror of the imminent death situation by providing a way of slow and steady decline of health until we either don't wake up one day or lose our minds such that even if the imminent death situation occurs, we no longer have any cognitive ability to realize that.
To sum up, death is inevitable, but the dreaded imminent death situation is not.
I totally get your arguments regarding what other animals might know, but what you go on to argue is going to take more thought on my part. What about when you do get older? In my experience, (subjective and anecdotal I admit) all the things you list we fear about getting older start to fade in importance, you get used to them. But the fear of our mortality going away? I call bullshit on those who spout that the elderly are more accepting of death line, or is that just me and many of those I seem to run into? When young people are diagnosed with severely life limiting terminal illness, so by definition are not going to age, do their fears evaporate? I am with with Living Fossils on this one. I don’t find much comfort in the dying at 100... scenario either. I take it the “having accomplished everything we dreamed of accomplishing in life” is tongue in cheek. Maybe it’s our point of view on this which is an age thing. I don’t know how old you are David but I hope you can come back to this article in say 35/40 years time. I will try to get my ‘self’ uploaded to a computer and look forward to reading it, to see if you have altered your opinion. (I am younger than Ray Kurzweil and he is sure it is going to be possible in his life time) That will only happen on the promise that I get wiped afterwards though, paradoxically existing forever has never floated my boat either!
Thanks, yea a lot of comments here have made me rethink my thesis here. I plan on revisiting this topic in a future post.
This is your best post.
Not sure I agree. The poet Philip Larkin claimed he was afraid of being dead i.e. no longer being here or anywhere and I see no reason to disbelieve him. The idea that, providing you have fulfilled your reproductive purpose, you can view your own non-existence with equanimity strikes me as fanciful.
I also think a general fear of the unknown is a part of it. And while the article is correct that evolution doesn’t care about survival, our nervous systems and egos certainly do. There is definitely more to this.
It's a silly notion. We all know exactly what it's like to be dead. Think back to before you were conceived or born. That's death. You didn't exist. At another point, you will not exist again. Larkin feared something of which he'd have zero awareness. It's not unknown; it's known to all of us. For Larkin or anyone to say they fear death is the equivalent of saying they're afraid of the thousands of years during which they didn't exist, that is, before their birth.
I don't doubt that Larkin was afraid, but he evidently didn't examine his own logic or self-attachment.
Of course, the fear is ego-driven. There's that, but it has nothing to do with being dead. The ego dies with the body.
I think you're confusing two things: one the way people should think and another the way they do think. Larkin never claimed he was being rational.
That apart, the idea that you should be as uncaring about the thousand years after your death as you are about the thousand years before you are born is something I've heard many times and has never managed to convince me.
There are many emotions you can examine and conclude are irrational but this rarely makes them disappear. For example, it's irrational to have a panic attack in a supermarket. Nothing terrible's going to happen to you but knowing that doesn't help.
Great article. The myth that the fear and denial of Death is the root and cause of all Human behavior is just another pseudo-intellectual idea created by Psychoanalysis.
I've read Ernest Becker's book The Denial of Death and it was one of the most overrated, pseduoscientific, pretentious works of Psychology ever written. It's like all Becker did was take Freud, replaced "sex" with "death" and called it a day.
So, we're back to status!?
You must be new here
Lovely thoughts, well put. I agree on all counts. I also have a fascination with death (I think we all do to some extent), and I don’t think it’s necessarily a status game. Coltan Scrivener has written a lot of cool stuff on “morbid curiosity” (he has a substack with that name), and I’m convinced that our fascination with death and the macabre evolved to help us learn important info about danger, decay, illness, and threat while keeping ourselves at a safe distance from it. So I don’t think morbid curiosity is necessarily bullshit. I think it might actually be the purest form of genuine curiosity.