We Should Fear Death

Some say there is nothing to fear in death. It is the natural conclusion to life, an inevitability we all face sooner or later. Every fractal instance of every model, from tree to fruit, to animal, to microorganism, to humans, to cities, to empires, to planets, to stars—everything we know has a beginning and end. Why fear the inevitable?

Death creates value. It generates importance, prioritization. It marks a literal deadline to the activities of our lives. If there were no end in sight, there would be no urgency.

Urgency is the key word for me that makes me fear death. It is a conditional fear of death, not a ubiquitous one. Fear of death is warranted when we do not live our lives in accordance with our highest values given our capacities and circumstances in life. If we are not doing our work—our personal work, what is conscious and aligned with how we want to live our lives—we rightfully fear death because our time is short. We do not have infinite space or leisure to shed our light in the world.

This urgency is something that Marcus Aurelius touches on in his Meditations. ["No more wandering,"]("No more wandering,") he reiterates over and over, in a work written not for publication but for himself. There is no time for wandering when there is work to be done. Not corporate drudgery, not mindless asset accumulation, but work that is aligned with purpose and service.

But what is this work? It is more than just productivity or material gain. Service to our fellow man is an expansion of ourselves. It is an increase in our scope, our frame of reference, and our identity. When we orient our mind to serve others, to contribute meaningfully beyond ourselves and beyond a primary incentive of self-preservation, self-aggrandization, or wealth building, we are realizing our oneness with a greater collective. We are participating in the larger union, the greater unity of all things.

This expansion of ourselves, this realization of our truer identity with the Whole, is our natural blossoming. We can live our lives unflowered, unbudded, never opening our petals and spreading our pollen. I don't mean in a procreative sense, no, but in the sense that sharing ourselves with the world plays a key role in the larger ecosystem we participate in.

And yet, there is an urgency to blossom because the season passes quickly. Our moments are short. Death may come for us before we have a chance to fully open ourselves through service, through the duty and dharma that each of us carries to fully live our lives.

As I write this, I am conscious of the fact that so much of what I am stating is general, perhaps platitudinal. I'll admit my faculties for capturing this notion more succinctly may be limited. I recognize too that circumstances surrounding many of our lives might nullify this admonition to treat our lives urgently—perhaps a life grown in poverty, war, or other dire circumstances may only have the capacity to reach a certain level of fruition.

However, I believe that the blossoming of a life is not measured in absolute terms. It is relative to our capacity and our circumstances. A Stanford-educated startup founder with a multi-million-dollar exit at age 23 may attract the approbation and praise of all in a community, while the humble life of an impoverished farmer in Nepal may go unnoticed by all but a few. The delta of circumstance and the required effort to live a modest life may outweigh all the difficulties and challenges of the former, despite the outsized external praise.

We only have the cards we're dealt, of course, and yet the urgency to live feels universal to me. The urgency is to live our lives in accordance with our values, to our truth, and in service to our communities. The work of life is to unify with the greater collective, to become one with Source.

There is no need to fear death when we are doing this work.