The Blessing of Fear of Death

While browsing through various posts on Substack recently, I noticed that many people ask themselves and others various existential questions, a large number of which are devoted to the nature of the human fear of death. Simply put, why are we afraid of death? My short post today contains a few of my thoughts on the subject. It is not a psychologically and philosophically in-depth analysis of this phenomenon, but simply a few thoughts that came to mind while reading these posts and entries expressing people's existential fears. I am certainly not the person who has finally figured out this problem, but I simply suggest trying to simplify things as much as possible, because most likely the simplest answer is usually the right one.

If you would like to explore this topic further, please feel free to comment on this post.

We fear death in order to live, to survive, to live long enough to pass on our genes to our offspring, to care for them until they become independent. It is a deeply rooted instinct, an evolutionary adaptation. If an antelope were not afraid of death, it would not be afraid of the lion that would devour it, and it would not survive long enough to pass on its genes to its offspring. If it weren't for the fear of death, its entire species would become extinct. If the lion weren't afraid of death, it would go to the edge of a cliff, fall and kill itself, and would not pass on its genes to its offspring. Its entire species would become extinct. In my opinion, this is the evolutionary basis of our fear of death. All other arguments, both philosophical and psychological, arose in our brain, which is extremely developed thanks to evolution and which created consciousness, which in turn creates the illusion that we are unique in the animal world. This illusion also gives us an evolutionary, adaptive advantage. It is through this sense of uniqueness that humans have dominated the natural world and begun to explore space in search of other worlds, but I do not think they will ever find a world beyond the natural one, because what humans call supernatural comes from the fantasy of their own minds, from the illusion of the soul, which is created for them by their own consciousness, which is nothing more than a product of their physical brain and can be easily turned off during anesthesia. No matter how romantic our speculations about the immortal soul and the afterlife may be, everyone should have at least a basic ability to distinguish between what is objective fact and speculation. Otherwise, according to the slogan on the poster in Fox Mulder's office from The X-Files, depicting a photo of an alleged UFO proclaiming “I Want to Believe,” everyone will consider what they want to believe to be the truth. But apparently that's how it will be, because our consciousness creates the illusion of us being supernatural beings.

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