How to Fear Death Less 🤔⚰️

Added: 2026-05-18

[00:00:02]Context essentially is that to make your life go well, you need to remove sources of displeasure, sources of anxiety, things that bring you down.

[00:00:14]And one of those obviously is death. So, he wanted to give an argument that you shouldn't uh be preoccupied about death. You shouldn't think of death. You shouldn't dwell on death because death is not a harm for you.

[00:00:28]As Epicurus puts it, "When death is, you are not. When you are, death is not."

[00:00:35]Death cannot be bad for you. Why?

[00:00:37]Because death cannot cause you pain.

[00:00:40]Why can't death cause you pain? Because you can't feel when you don't exist. And according to hedonism, the only good or bad is involved with feeling because pleasure and pain are obviously things that you feel.

[00:00:55]So, if you don't exist, uh you cannot feel. And if you cannot feel, then nothing good or bad can happen to you.

[00:01:03]So, just don't care about it.

[00:01:08]You're when you're when you don't exist, uh nothing good or bad can happen to you.

[00:01:15]He says So, Epicurus said uh the trouble with the re- Epicurus believed that one of the reasons that people fear death is that they had this um idea that somehow they would be suffering down in hell or or the um Hades as it would have been at the time.

[00:01:32]Uh and he said, "No, no, no. You don't You just don't exist."

[00:01:37]Now, Epicurus was a Greek philosopher.

[00:01:41]He had a later Roman uh follower, a a somebody who discovered his work and was convinced by this uh this Roman writer called Lucretius. And Lucretius added to this Epicurean point with uh a famous little argument of themselves, which is sort of the mirror argument. And Lucretius said, "Look, look at the time before you were born or before you came into existence if you think that you started existence when you're conceived. But at least before you start to exist.

[00:02:16]That goes off to infinity. Do you care about it? Do you say, "Oh, no, look at this Look at me non-existing. Isn't that terrible? This is awful. There's no me here." He said, "No, you don't care about it. You never give that a second thought." And he says, "Well, you should think exactly the same about the time after you've stopped existing.

[00:02:35]It's just the same. One is a mirror of the other. You don't exist here, you don't exist here."