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Our fear of death, at least as far as I can tell from a sample of one, is not of our own death. We all go to sleep every night and just disappear. We lose everything. I mean, deep sleep for almost everyone is synonymous with oblivion. You lose your sensory experience, you forget your life. If you never woke up you wouldn’t notice it. And this is—many people have noticed this, perhaps most famously, the Roman poet Lucretius. If death is synonymous with non-existence, there really is nothing to fear, and slipping into it may feel just as satisfying as slipping into sleep. That’s not what we’re worried about. We’re worried about the process of dying perhaps and the process of being ill and in pain. And we’re really worried about losing the people we love while we’re alive and having nothing to think that’s consoling in the midst of that bereavement.
Sam Harris
