Is it scary that things end?

This is the one page in the library that every reader arrives at with an opinion already, and usually a private one.

Epicurus made the classic argument, and it is short. Death is not something you will experience. While you are here, it is not; when it comes, there is nobody there to mind it. So it cannot be bad for you — not in the way a toothache is, where something hurts. Lucretius added the symmetry: you do not spend your life grieving about the billions of years before you existed, and the nothing after is made of exactly the same material.

Most people find this clever and refuse it. What they refuse is the thought that a life has a value because it is limited rather than despite it, and that thought is genuinely difficult. Would you take an extra thousand years? Most people say yes immediately, then start to see problems: what would anything matter if there were always more time? What would you become? Why would you finish anything?

Which is why this page says nothing about what to conclude. It gives you the arguments that have lasted, from Epicurus to Montaigne, so you can try them out privately — and it takes the view that being spoken to honestly is better than being protected by a silence you can already feel. If someone in your life has died, that is a different conversation and a different kind of help, and it is worth having with a person, out loud, rather than a page.

Try it

Think about a very good afternoon that is over. Would you rather it had never happened, so that losing it did not hurt? Write down your answer and the reason.

What do you think?

Do you think there is a right answer to this question?

Talk about it

If you could live forever, would that be good?
Is it sad that a flower is over so quickly?
Should children be told the truth about death?

Yes, but… — the arguments people actually make

I don't want to think about it.
Nobody does. Notice that not thinking about it does not make it less true; it makes the thinking happen unexpectedly, at three in the morning, with no preparation.
Epicurus's argument is a trick.
It is a real argument and a strange one: it requires that you accept that a thing cannot be bad for you if there is nobody left to be harmed. Whether that is wisdom or a technicality is worth arguing.
It is too frightening a subject for children.
Children already think about it, usually alone, usually with wrong information. Being told the truth plainly and kindly is not the frightening option — silence is.

What other philosophers think

EpicurusArgued that death cannot be bad for you: while you exist, it is not here; when it comes, you are not there to mind.
SocratesTreated philosophy as practice for dying — learning to care less about the body and the day, and more about what does not come and go.
LucretiusPointed out that you do not lie awake worrying about the time before you were born. The time after should look the same.
Michel de MontaigneSaid that to study how to live is to study how to die, and that pretending otherwise leaves you surprised by the one thing guaranteed.

If you want to go further

Letter to Menoeceus — EpicurusThe argument that death is nothing to us, in about two pages.
On the Nature of Things — LucretiusThe symmetry argument, set out in verse.
Essays — Michel de MontaigneThe essay titled 'That to philosophise is to learn to die'.

Most of these were written for adults, which is why it is worth reading them with someone older.