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The Fear of Death - That Will Never Go Away

An Opinion

By Iria Vasquez-PaezPublished 6 years ago 3 min read
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Nobody is sure what happens to people when they die, and that is because, despite religious teachings, we still aren’t sure. Movies like Flatliners (1990) attempt to decipher what happens when we die, as the medical students fiddle around with putting themselves close to death but reviving themselves when they manage to come back from the dead. Humans have a history of a fear of death back when we were hunter-gatherers. Life on this planet used to be very simple before agriculture was developed. As agriculture evolved, we messed up our soil leading to the soil degradation of today.

We humans have to keep ourselves fed, warm, and comfortable. We fear not having creature comforts as those who live on the streets do not have at all. Despite our wealth, the United States has 554,000 homeless people compared to 307,000 people in the UK.

Homeless people have nothing. Yes, we humans fear to have nothing. We let these people live in abject poverty while we have stuff. Even with our money, we cannot outrun death. Death stalks us when old age comes to claim us. Some people do seem to value a belief in the afterlife.

There is no proof an afterlife exists, however, and this means that near-death experiences do not mean much to people who have gone through this. Many believe in an afterlife as a common anthropological phenomenon found throughout the planet. People need to comfort themselves if something about death scares them. The fear of death keeps us from doing much with our lives. Constant fear of death means that people are worker bee drones who go to work every day, without thinking about other things besides work. Those of us with rich spiritual lives as well as normal lives have a work-life balance.

But many work themselves to death. In Japan, long hours are expected. A woman who died at work was the age of 31, and she died of heart failure. Japan has to work on its work-life balance because it isn’t very good. If you choose to work in Japan, innocent people die of heart attacks, strokes, and other conditions brought on by spending too much time at work. People in Japan log more than 80 hours of overtime each month, to us Americans, this is similar to how some companies expect 60 hours a week.

Death isn’t supposed to haunt people until old age, but apparently, 31-year-old broadcast media workers are expected to overdo. This is a harsh environment. Nobody should die because they work 100 hours a week. Lack of health for other reasons also requires we bring up the fact that in the United States, two weeks vacation is not enough. Death should not have many reasons to come to people, but all too often, it would seem that some would rather humans die off in large quantities if only because we are expected to outdo ourselves. Social pressures make us overdo. But then some people would like large numbers of the seven billion people on this planet to be wiped out through illness, for example. War doesn’t get to be as effective as they want us to believe it can be. So instead of letting stress create a huge fear of death or maybe a desire for death, stress can be treated by the use of psychological science. Humans who are very stressed want death but that is part of our death-fearing, death-embracing culture on this planet. Maybe people are also afraid to live, without fear haunting them, fear of anxiety, and fear of illness. The human race is doomed to live in fear if we let those who run this planet control our fear levels.

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About the Creator

Iria Vasquez-Paez

I have a B.A. in creative writing from San Francisco State. Can people please donate? I'm very low-income. I need to start an escape the Ferengi plan.

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