“As a well spent day brings happy sleep, so life well used brings happy death.”
Leonardo da Vinci
A long time ago, whenever I would think about my own death, it would scare the shit out of me. I used to tell myself: “What the hell? I don’t want to die. I want to live forever, if only scientists could come up with some immortality pill or something”
I was avoiding dealing with the fatality of my own death, and we all do this at some level, whether consciously or not: Some just repress the idea of death all together and lock it in the deepest corners of their unconscious, others find refuge in believing in an after-life, others yet spend thousands of dollars to refrigerate their bodies after their death so that scientists can bring them back to life if and once they find an immortality pill.
All of these people have something in common: They do what they do to avoid dealing with the pain, fear, and existential dread that thinking about their ultimate death brings.
But unless you face these painful emotions and thoughts linked to the idea of your own death and move past them, it would considerably limit your life and keep on influencing your actions and decisions without you even being aware of it.
So How Do You Deal With the Fatality of Your Own death? How do you come to accept it?
But not just that, How Do You make Death Your Ally in Living a Profound, Rich and Meaningful Life?
Why Repressing The Idea of Your Death Leads to a Wasted Life
There is no escape from the fact that we are all going to die, and there are generally two ways of dealing with it: Either you accept it and move past it, or you deny it’s existence and suppress it along with the painful emotions it ignites in you.
Now, what happens if you repress the idea of your own death?
You will become like most people, who go through life as if they will never die, and that is exactly why most of them live a passive & meaningless life.
Because why would you create something wonderful out of your life now if you subconsciously think that you will live forever?
Why would you go through the struggle of opposing other’s people opinions and living an authentic life true to your soul if you think that you have time?
Why would you want to travel the rocky road of actualizing your own potential and becoming all of what you can be if your mind tells you that your time on Earth is infinite?
Why would you be motivated to walk through the hard path?
After all, it is far easier to just live a comfortable life, do whatever you are told, and live for instant gratification and pleasures. Why bother going after a more meaningful life?
See, you will only start to bother when you start to consciously bring to your awareness the fatality of your own Death and stop repressing it.
Death is the end of you, of your life on this planet, of everything you have ever experienced.
Contemplating death makes you realize that there is an end to all of this, that there is just no time for goofing around in endless distractions.
It makes you think instead about what is really meaningful in your life, what is truly important to your authentic self, and filters out all the rest.
Death is What Gives You the Courage to Truly Live.
Now that’s we’ve established that repressing the idea of your own death leads to a meaningless life and to a waste of your precious time on Earth, the only other alternative available is to accept the fatality of your death, overcome your fear of dying, and frame it in a way that helps you live a rich and fulfilling life.
Here are 3 steps on how to do just that.
1. Feel Your Death & Embrace It
We’ve been taught all too much that Death is a sad, depressing or even morbid topic, and therefore, we should avoid talking or thinking about it. That’s the kind of conventional wisdom we get from society.
Let’s just do the opposite.
See, we are all going to die one day, you, everyone you know, and everything you ever experienced will just disappear into the void at some point.
There is no escape from this: there will come one day when you will have your last cup of coffee, when you will hug your partner for the last time, when you’ll feel the breeze on your skin for the last time, when you will enjoy your last meal, when you’ll enjoy a good night of sleep for the last time, and when you’ll have your last breath.
Your time on Earth is finite, there is a start, the moment where you are born, and there is an end, the moment you go back to the void. In between these two moments, you get to choose what you do, and you get to choose the road that you will take, but you don’t get to choose the final destination of any road you are taking: Your ultimate Death.
Kind of depressing, isn’t? But wait, there is more.
Some people think that if they can create or build something with a great impact on the world, then they will achieve immortality through their work, even though they will be dead.
This is just another escape strategy to avoid dealing with the fatality of our own mortality: We cannot stand the fact we will die one day and that there is an end to everything that is us, so we attempt to cheat the system and find immortality through other means.
But this a bad idea for two reasons:
- Can you imagine yourself dedicating your entire life, the only life you’ve got to some cause just to avoid facing your own mortality? Spending your entire precious time on earth working hard at something just because it helps you deal with your fear of death?
I believe this to be a terrible way of dealing with the fatality of your own death, giving out your entire life just to deal with your fears. Basically, it means that you are letting one fear/emotion control and dictate how you live your entire life. In economical terms, you are making the worst deal of the century.
You don’t have to sacrifice the most valuable thing you have (i.e your life) to feel okay with your death, you can just learn to accept it instead.
In fact, if you had accepted it and no longer feared your death, do you think you would you spend your entire time on Earth doing what you were doing? If not, what will you be doing instead?
- There is no such thing as immortality: Everything changes, impermanence is the rule of our universe, and whatever impact you end up making, it will not last forever. It will be transformed or forgotten, if not by this generation, the one after it, or 3 or 4 generations down the line. If it’s not forgotten, a nuclear world war could start anytime and erase this entire civilization, including the impact you have made. An asteroid could hit the earth and everything ends.
Don’t get me wrong, making an impact on the world is a noble value in and of itself, but if you are just looking to have an impact in order to achieve a sense of immortality, then you are doing it for the wrong reasons, because immortality is nothing but a fantasy.
So stop running away from this ultimate fatality: You are going to die, there is an end to your story, and there is nothing you can do about it.
Let that sink in for a moment, feel the fear you have been repressing all along, the existential anxiety, the absurdity of everything we do. Let yourself release and experience all these intense emotions about your death. Sit with the idea of your Death, Say Hello to it, play with it, embrace it, welcome it, dance with it.
Your goal at this stage is to simply become more comfortable and accepting of the fatality of your own death and decrease your emotional attachment to it.
Once you are no longer running away from the fatality of your own death, it’s time to reframe it to live your best life.
2. Overcome Your Fear of Life & Follow your Dreams
The fear of Death is, at its core, a Fear Of Life.
When you are not living the life that your soul truly wants, when you are totally disconnected from who you are and following a wrong path, when you fear truly living, then thinking about the fatality of your own death means bringing to your awareness that all of this show called life is going to end one day, and instead of choosing the character you want to play on this stage, you’ve let the world make this choice for you, steal from you your one and only performance before the closing curtain.
What a waste!
Needless to say, thinking about your death when living an unauthentic life generates extreme levels of fear and existential anxiety that most of us just choose to not think about and ignore.
Damn right we repress it.
It’s a very depressive realization to make, and we don’t have the right tools to cope with it by default.
So we throw the baby out with the bathwater: We continue living sub-optimum lives and distract ourselves from thinking about our death.
But how about we address the root problem instead, listen to our souls, and be brave enough to truly live?
Granted, knowing yourself is hard, doing the inner work of self-knowledge and getting clear on what you truly value in this life is hard, let alone actually going for it, following what you soul desires the most, going through the struggle of opposing other’s people opinions, standing still in the midst of chaos, and daring to ask for what you really want.
But you know what is even harder? To go through life as if you’ve never lived.
Or as Henry D.T puts it:
“When it’s time to die, let us not discover that we have never lived”
Henry David Thoreau
So when you live authentically, when you follow your dreams, when you are working towards valuable goals aligned with what you truly care about in this world, you will then be ready to die at anytime: you will no longer fear Death, because you no longer fear Life.
3. Find What You Want To Die For
What Do You Want To Die For?
Overcoming the Fear of Death happens when you are able to find a meaning to your ultimate end.
And the only way to give meaning to your Death is to give it a reason for happening, to be able to answer the question: Why would I die? Or, for What would I die?
In fact, once you are able to assign a meaning to your own death, once you can frame your death as a mean to an end that’s valuable to you, you would make sense of the incomprehensible, your death would no longer be an absurd event that you fear and cannot comprehend, but your death would be at the service of something you believe in and truly value.
Your Death would have an explanation, a legitimate personally valuable reason for happening. That’s when you will fully embrace it, and that’s when you will be ready to die at any time.
Now, you don’t have to go and actually die tomorrow for what you believe in.
You can simply live for what you believe in instead.
Because if you live for what you believe in, then by definition, and because death comes as the closing event of your life, you will also die for what you believe in.
So, to sum up, moving past your fear of death can be achieved through finding a purpose for your death, and finding a purpose for your death is equivalent to finding a purpose for your life.
Hence, the question becomes: What Do You Want To Live For?
You fear Death, so you avoid thinking about it. But only by reminding yourself of your ultimate Death will you be able to cut through the bullshit of everything around you and pursue instead only what’s truly personally meaningful to you.
And only by doing that, being brave enough to pursue your valued goals, your dreams, what your soul demands of you, and find what you are willing to die for will you be able to overcome your fear of Death.
Did you notice the fear loop you should avoid being stuck in? If you haven’t, here’s a graph that might better illustrate this point.
In other words, only by facing up to your fear of death and consequently being pushed to live a meaningful life will you be able to overcome the same fear.
The antidote to the poison is found in the poison, and the only way out is through.
It’s said that when it’s time for you to go, your entire life from your birth to your last breath, everything you lived, all of the choices & decisions you made, your experiences will flash before your eyes.Make sure it’s worth watching.