I fear death.

I think we all do in one sense or another and we come up with many ways to resolve our anxieties, be it making stories in religion or believing anti-ageing drugs, stem cells or science will cure us one day. We all know that these stories are just that... stories. In the realm of possibility but not certainty even if you believe you are certain. It is these stories that we cling to.

But I fear death.

And I shouldn't, I am an atheist so I don't believe in an afterlife but what I believe comes after death is something that everyone has at one stage experienced, the feeling of non-existence, the feeling before birth. It's paradoxical to call it a feeling seeing as it is actually the absence of feeling altogether but death under my belief is simply the end. A state in which you don't know you are dead or were alive, a state where you don't know anything and where the concept of you doesn't even exist. The information stored in your brain has gone the way of the second law of thermodynamics which is to say eroded by the ever increasing entropy within the universe. Like a computer chip that has been burned in a fire the software on that chip no longer exists, it is not hidden away into some meta-dimension and it is not recoverable it is simply gone, what does a program experience as it is melted away?

But I fear death.

It's the certainty of it all, the absolute certainty of it all that one day I am going to die. With such little certainty in this universe and with so many questions with unfulfilling answers why does this question have to be the only one I am certain of? Why in a world where knowledge cannot absolutely exist do I know without a shadow of a doubt that I will die, that it will be soon and not necessarily soon like in the next week or year but in a cosmological sense I will exist for but a blink of the universe. My life and experiences hidden away by an infinite cosmos never to be heard from or spoken of, I might as well have never lived at all.

But I still fear death.

Because my importance is not measured on some rock in some part of space a million light years away, no my importance is known by the only meaningful metric in this universe, others. I am tangled in a web of other people's lives and perceptions that I exist as simply a side character in thousands and thousands of different stories of varying importance. My impact measured by my impact in those people's lives and the ripple in space and time that I have on them. No matter how small given enough time I will change the very nature of their universe but perhaps they will never know and most definitely I will never know, for I will die.

And I will still fear death.

Because the only one I am a true protagonist too, the only reference frame I exist as is in my own world, my own perception. When I die I lose my protagonist status, I lose the only part that makes me truly important. Sure people will say that I am important to them, my family, my loved ones and my friends but in truth I am still their side character, I am still a player in their stage but in my world I am the stage and the single most important thing in this universe. When I die I lose that, but why do I care? Who cares how important you are in your own reference frame when that reference frame no longer exists.

So why do I fear death?

The feeling is unreachable to be dead, it is unknowable even when we have experienced such a feeling before. Before birth, after death, what is it that I felt? It didn't matter what the nature of non-existence was because at the end of it all I suddenly existed and I was whole. But now once I die there will be no moment of existence and there will be no end. All I can interpret from my billions of years of non-existence that I have experienced before is my reflection on it once I existed but I will not have a chance to reflect once I die. That scares me. I can't comprehend it and the certainty of it. That scares me.

So I fear death.

My millions of stories and ideas, my words, my pictures, MY PASSION. It will be lost as well as anything and everything important to me and when all this happens I won't even care. So I fear death. Why were we born to such a cruel universe.