Is the fear of death holding you back?

Death is at the root of everything we fear and are anxious about

Near-death experiences (NDEs) are reported by about 17% of those who nearly die. NDEs have been reported by children, adults, scientists, physicians, priests, ministers, among the religious and atheists, and from countries throughout the world.

The National Center for Biotechnology Information

After a near-death experience, it’s not uncommon to hear how someone reevaluates and makes profound changes to their life.

Dr. Greyson, professor of psychiatry and neurobehavioral sciences, studies near-death experiences and has interviewed thousands of people who’ve had them, in an NPR interview he says, “I've got story after story of people who couldn’t go back to the same profession, people who were, say, career police officers who couldn’t shoot after a near-death experience, of people who were in competitive businesses who no longer felt it was meaningful to get ahead at someone else’s expense”. Greyson says these people often change their careers, or make other dramatic lifestyle changes. Sometimes the changes are so drastic that their family members “don't have the same values in common anymore”.

It begs the question, what is it about nearly dying that influences profound life change?

I believe Dr. Greyson answers this when in the same interview he says, “a decreased fear of death [is a] consistent pattern [that] follows a near-death experience”. Based on that point, it’s possible to speculate that for those who made changes to their life after a near-death experience: it was the fear of death that was stopping them from being true to themselves.

Losing your fear of death must be liberating. I do not doubt that it would change how you make decisions and influence your overall outlook on life. By that, I don’t mean you’d be drawn to unnecessary risk-taking or death-defying feats. I mean many of your important life decisions would probably be different going forward.

Our DNA still “wants” the same two things it did thousands of years ago which are reproduction and survival. All of our emotions are there to encourage or discourage behaviour to keep us alive or reproduce. At a subconscious level, this forms the nucleus of all of our decisions today. It’s the bedrock of our emotions. It’s not evident at a conscious level because it’s drowned out by our overwhelming sense of free will — it might not feel like you’re being drawn to one thing over another because of your DNA programming but you are, we all are.

Public speaking, money & the unknown

There’s an adage that I’m sure you’ve heard, that goes along the lines of “People fear public speaking more than death.” It may be an exaggeration but it’s fair to say that on the whole people don’t like it and many fear it. I was petrified of public speaking. I remember when I had to do it for my previous employer — it was the only thing I could think about for days before speaking at a conference. I found it debilitating. Needless to say, when you analyse it rationally, it doesn’t make sense. Our lives aren’t in danger when speaking in front of an audience. It’s our pesky outdated DNA causing us problems in today’s modern world.

The common evolutionary explanation behind why we fear public speaking is that we’re used to living in tribes and rejection from a tribe would hamper our survival chances, so speaking to an audience (and messing up) would make us vulnerable to rejection. The other theory is that for most of our existence, having lots of eyes watching us would have been an existential threat. It’s possibly a combination of the two which for many of us means it’s an all-around unpleasant experience.

Maybe you’re not afraid of public speaking but instead of heights, flying or spiders. We all have irrational fears that stem from a fear of dying. It’s not just irrational fears though, it’s everything else. Everything you fear or are nervous about or have anxiety over relates to death. Whenever we fear something, it’s an attempt by our DNA to steer us in a direction and keep us alive when thousands of years ago most of our decisions were related to survival.

The lure of money (resources) can be seen as a proxy for survival when for most of our existence a lack of resources would have meant probable death. Today the likelihood of dying from starvation is close to zero, but we still have that fear ingrained in us when we become slaves to our careers, irrationally hoard money or are fearful about quitting a job — we’re hard-wired to be fearful of anything that affects the accumulation of resources. But just like a fear of public speaking, it’s irrational.

I have a friend who has more money than you can imagine, but he still can’t stop the pursuit of accumulating more wealth. On one occasion, he stopped work to retire, but it wasn’t for long as he felt that he needed a bit more to make retirement that bit more comfortable. This isn’t a particularly original story, as the saying goes “greed can never be satisfied”. I speculate that people like this have a strong fear of death and this explains their perpetual desire to accumulate more resources. If my friend had a near-death experience, then there’s no doubt in my mind that he would stop his irrational hoarding and start living a different life.

Another example of how our behaviour is dictated by how we lived thousands of years ago is the fear of the unknown. When we foraged in unknown grasslands or unfamiliar territory, there would have been a higher probability of death, so being fearful of the unknown was an invaluable tool for survival. Being fearful made us extra sensitive and hyper-alert to what could be hiding in unfamiliar surroundings — a snake, a lion or an unfriendly tribe ready to punch, capture and kill us. So being hesitant and unsure about the unfamiliar was a good thing — those that were blasé wouldn’t have lasted long and nor would their DNA. A fear of the unknown was once a life saver, but now it stops us from changing jobs, moving town, leaving a partner or trying something new. When we fear the unfamiliar or change, it boils down to a fear of death.

Fear was an exceptionally useful emotion (a valuable tool) that kept us alive. When we were afraid of something, it meant our lives were in danger. Today, it’s an emotion that rarely serves us well. Our fear that originates from preventing death can stop us from living a better life.

Rick and Morty

The Blips and Chitz arcade

Rick and Morty is a sci-fi cartoon about crazy inter-dimensional adventures with a nihilistic mad scientist called Rick and his good-natured grandson, Morty.

There’s an episode where they visit a futuristic amusement arcade with a virtual reality life simulator game called Roy: A Life Well Lived. To play the game, you put on a headset and begin with no previous memories — once in the game, players aren’t aware that it’s a simulation and time passes at a one-second to one-month speed ratio, so the game feels like a lifetime but in reality, it’s about 10-15 minutes. Just like any arcade game, there’s a monitor screen so others can stand around and see how well or poorly you’re playing — the goal is to guide Roy through life, from childhood to death.

Morty has the virtual reality headset put on his head and the next moment he wakes up in bed as Roy. We see him begin at school, become a football player, get married, and give up his dream of being a professional football player to work at his father-in-law’s carpet store, be diagnosed with terminal cancer, beat cancer, go back to work at the carpet store after a full recovery, and falling to his death when climbing a ladder to get a Persian rug for a carpet sale at the age of 55. GAME OVER.

Now that the game is over, Morty’s disoriented and confused in the amusement arcade and shouts, “What the hell! Where am I?” His grandfather, Rick says, “You were just playing a game. It’s called Roy. Snap out of it, come on.” Once Morty is fully conscious and aware of what’s going on, Rick exclaims, “You beat cancer and then you went back to work at the carpet store? Booo!!”

Rick puts on the headset and tells Morty, “Now if you’ll excuse me, it’s time to thrash your Roy score […] the difference between you and me, Morty. I never go back to the carpet store.” Rick then proceeds to take an unorthodox approach to playing Roy by taking him “off the grid”.

Once the scene has ended (which can be watched on YouTube), you can’t help but think about your own life and whether you’re “playing it well”. If your life ended and it turned out to be a video game, is there anything you regret or is there anything you would change the next time you play? There were a few people who wrote their thoughts in the comments section below the clip:

Right now... somewhere out there... my buddies are standing around my arcade game yelling “Dude, you're so boring!”

—@merisonola

If I die and wake up from this game I will be so happy. I get to try again and do better the next time!

—@eyescreamcake

Man whoever is playing my life is not doing it right.

—@ghfd6821

This video game thought experiment of how well you’re living your life is a version of the deathbed test — which is when you assess your life from the viewpoint of a future version of you lying on your deathbed.

Imagine you’re dying

Imagine for a minute that you are lying on your deathbed and looking back on your life — what do you wish you had done differently? Or maybe you have an important life decision that you’ve been mulling for a while — does this deathbed version of you decide or think differently compared to you?

I’m sure some of you would agree that an imagined dying version of you thinks differently compared to your “current you”. Your future self (with little time left) wants you to have lived a full life without regret whereas your current self is often lured by whatever seems safe, predictable and expected.

An imagined future, dying version of you doesn’t have fear for the current you and wants you to live the best life possible — so this imagined version of you can be an excellent source for advice, a mentor — a shield from our malfunctioning DNA that is trying to stop us from dying in a world that has very few threats. It can be used as a peephole into the minds of those who have had near-death experiences and lost their fear of dying.

Fear is the most primal of emotions, which time and time again makes us choose incorrectly, makes us stick to a well-trodden path, and makes us fearful or anxious over things that have a zero probability of death. All of which can lead to regret when we look back on our life from our deathbed.

Poet, mathematician, photographer, priest and author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871), Lewis Carroll, summarised it well when saying, “In the end, we only regret the chances we didn’t take, the relationships we were afraid to have, and the decisions we waited too long to make.”