Here are some notes derived from recent thoughts reflecting a few sources. Denial of Death, by Ernest Becker, and the recent documentary, Flight from Death, The Quest for Immortality.

A few solutions to the fear of death.
 
Diversion.  This is a broad category. It includes pretty much all of life. When you get down to it, we distract ourselves from reality in order to cope with the anxiety of it. Most thoughts lead to this.

• Science – Science is an arena where one can get lost in focused thought and problem solving. Science enables a method for which a brain can attack specific problems and solve them. The harder the problem, the more (temporarily) satisfying the answer.


• Culture. - This is HUGE. Culture allows us to invent ourselves in complicated ways to distract ourselves.


• Comedy, music, entertainment. – Here most will readily admit to distracting themselves on purpose from the stresses of every day life. However, this is like a level on top of culture. We do tend to build our distraction mechanisms layer upon layer. This is interesting because most people will readily admit to it.


• Media. - The media plays a huge part in sculpting out ideas of status, complicated images to aspire to, etc. Then we can distract ourselves by trying to attain those ideals. However, Media is a temporary one in that the ideal body is so fragile. This aspect of the media distraction cannot live on much longer


• Sports.- Give us a socially acceptable way to compete with other people. Winning is a way to deny other people, in a sense, their humanity. But losing OR winning is better.


• Love – The pursuit of an adequate partner can give us years and years of distraction, and then allow two people to construct a complicated strengthened distraction mechanism together. The loss of love can be a devastating jolt to the temporary reality created.  

Religion.

• Religion, I believe, falls under the category of a 'diversion', but it is so pervasive that I feel it needs its own category. This was Becker's conclusion in the book, The Denial of Death, although it MUST be tongue and cheek to some degree. Becker said that "Only by embracing a religious perspective could individuals overcome and transcend the crippling fear of death."


• Religion is a powerful social force, strong through numbers, which opens its arms to everyone, trying to hug and love the fear away. The problem, though, is that the ideas must be so strong that they cannot be compromised by criticism. The ideas and symbols become so holy that religions and religious people become intolerant, especially when other people have other gods and belief systems. All wars are fundamentally ideological.  

Suicide.

• It could be said that by facing it right now with courage and getting it over is a technique, and so it cannot be ignored. However, I am mainly looking to explore methods which allow the mind to trick itself into continuing to live, yet without the fear of death.  

Insanity.

• I think this is a romantic notion for many. It is similar to the relief I have towards the idea of Alzheimer's. It almost seems a gift to slowly lose one's grip with reality, so that the true moment of exit will never be known. The idea of losing one's mind is not so terrifying, because it would happen slowly. There may be moments of terror, but it would always seem as if there were something.


• It can also be appealing because some of the methods that can lead to insanity sound quite interesting, and there is always the flicker of hope that the 'mind will overcome reality' somehow. Methods for inducing insanity usually consist of large amounts of hallucinogenic drug use, sensory deprivation experiments, and others.

Sleep.

• Sleep is actually a lot like death. We really have no idea who we are during sleep. The ‘real’ world is not real, and so, in a sense, we die every night. If we can get it through our minds the similarity of death and sleep, perhaps it will be easier to swallow.

Which one(s) will you choose?