If you are in the middle class and therefore less susceptible to deaths of despair, it is not at all difficult to avoid seeing a dead body or attending a funeral until you are decades into your life. Death is simply not present to contemporary people in the way it was for nearly all of human history. The experience of death is largely a choice for many of us until it ultimately isn’t. But this only means that the anxiety of death, the fear of sudden and eternal nothingness, shifts to an anxiety of living. Am I living a full and satisfying life? Is it enough? In that way, our avoidance of death
...more
