Scared of Dying?

At some point in everybody’s life, they will die. It happens for a variety of reasons, and most of the time it’s involuntary. It’s safe to say that a large majority of people do not want to die, or at least fear the moment of their own death, and so they fear the fact that they can and will eventually die. And although death is often pointed to as an unknown, it is not an abstract thing in the human mind. That fear of death stems from the active comparison to life and the individual’s quantification of life.

One of the things most people know about death is that, past a certain point, the older a person gets, the more prone they are to a “natural death”, as one’s organs have been keeping them alive for a long time and just get tired and fail, so they can no longer stay alive. What is surprising is that the older people get, the less and less they fear death. In a study done by Dr. Karl A. Pillemer on elderly people, “the vast majority of [the] respondents described themselves as not thinking about death much, and much less so than when they were younger. It’s true...that research shows lower death anxiety with advancing age.” Note that these people didn’t want to die; they simply didn’t fear it. The correlation is certainly there. This shows that people who think about death less fear death less. This isn’t simply a case of older one gets, the less one fears death. It’s also not a case of being scared of dying just being hardwired into the human mind. It’s a subconscious feeling of how much their life is worth. A person who has lived for 90 years would most likely feel that their experiences, if quantified, would be worth more than the experiences of one who has lived for 18 years. These elderly people aren’t afraid of death, because at this point in their life, they feel like what they’ve done is worth something.

What’s truly compelling is that, in this case, people with mental illnesses actually have similar mindsets when it comes to death as elderly people do. Mental illness is a big cause of a person wanting their life to end. According to the University of Santa Cruz, when talking about young people, “A major cause of suicide is mental illness, very commonly depression. People feeling suicidal are overwhelmed by painful emotions and see death as the only way out.” As opposed to people who simply don’t fear death, those who are feeling suicidal actually do want to die. This relates to this idea of comparing the knowledge of life to death. These suicidal people see that dying is a good alternative to living, as they think death is better than life. They think about it, and they say that dying, even if they don’t know what that entails, is a “way out” from the thing they know about. If one considers life like an object, they simply don’t want to own this thing that they know they don’t want, so they’re not scared to lose it.

So, what happens if a person does value their life, but still chooses the opposite? There’s another group of people who actually choose to die: Kamikaze. These are Japanese pilots who suicide into Allied ships with their own in order to kill large numbers of enemies will little to no possible opposition. However, according to English Online, “not all pilots volunteered out of love for their homeland…Pilots who didn't volunteer were seen as cowards.” This is a similar idea to how people with mental illnesses actually want to die. The Kamikaze usually didn’t actually want to end their life, but if one considers life like an object, the pilots didn’t want to have this life in which they are considered a coward. The value they placed on their life was low. The alternative, which is suiciding into an Allied ship and dying, seemed better than that life. They saw dying as a good alternative to life since they actually feared what they knew in this life.

Ultimately, every person is going to die at some point, and although many people might not think that being scared of death matters to them, its influence goes beyond being comfortable with dying to actually just being comfortable with living. This idea of quantifying life and giving it a value, while interesting at first, can very clearly have drastic consequences. If one constantly just thinks about whether or not their life is worth something, there is a chance they would come up with the answer, “No,” which begs the question, “Then why continue?”  Death is not something that should be thought about all the time, as a life lived in fear is not one lived in peace. The solution is simple: just stop thinking about it.