Afraid of Death? Why?
The Greek philosopher Epicurus (341-270 BC) thought at length about death. Epicurus asked himself whether it makes sense to be afraid of death. Epicurus proposed two main arguments why it did not make sense to be afraid of death:
1. The no subject of harm argument
If death is annihilation, says Epicurus, then it is ‘nothing to us.’ If death is bad, for whom is it bad? Not for the living, since they are not dead, and not for the dead, since they do not exist.
Epicurus adds that if death causes you no pain when you’re dead, it is foolish to allow the fear of it to cause you pain now.
2. The symmetry argument
A second Epicurean argument against the fear of death is the ‘symmetry argument.’ He says that anyone who fears death should consider the time before he was born. The past infinity of pre-natal non-existence is like the future infinity of post-mortem non-existence. But we do not consider not having existed for an eternity before our births to be a terrible thing; therefore, neither should we think not existing for an eternity after our deaths to be evil.
Do not let the fact of death be a reason for you to be unhappy. Death is a fact of reality, and like all facts is objectively neutral. Death is not as bad as the stories we tell about it.
The problem of death exists mainly for the people who remain alive. The person who is gone might have been the main source of happiness for a loved one. The task for those who remain alive is to find replacement sources of happiness. For some people this might take many years.
