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The fact is, we are taught to fear death. In itself, it has no significance. Nor does life, for that matter, except to manifest the inexplicable wonder and power and intricacy of existence.
We do not fear what we were before birth; why should we fear what we will be after death? Leaving aside the fairy tales of religion, death is simply the end of our personal existence. No matter what experiences and objects we greedily cling to, when we have breathed our last, they are all as if they had never been.
Of course, our lives can affect the lives of those who come after us, but that obviously does not concern us much, considering how nonchalantly we are bequeathing a world of ecological catastrophe to our posterity.
Our deaths, and our lives, are of utter insignificance, here on a grain of dust amid the rapidly cooling embers of the Big Bang.
Some people say that they do not fear death, but the pain of dying.
Pain is indeed the normal concomitant of our dissolution, which we make more fearsome by denying it and refusing to look at it. No matter how horrid our pain, it will end, one way or another. Moreover, it rarely, if ever, equals the sum total of the pain we endure in life. A stoic acceptance of what life brings us is most appropriate to such transient creatures of air and dew as we are.
Is life worth living? As Samuel Butler wrote, that is a question for an embryo, not for a man (or a woman).
When I have been low, I have considered with what struggle and pain I have achieved the minimal level of awareness I now possess. My untimely disappearance would mean that some other poor creature would need to go through a similar struggle to reach an equivalent awareness. It is best to endure life and see if my awareness has any use, deficient and incomplete as that awareness is. As unlikely as it is that my life and awareness have any significance, there are those whose existences have some meaning, brief as that meaning may be. Moreover, only the long unrolling of the ages can determine the ultimate meaning of our lives. The lives of the dinosaurs are often judged to be without meaning, but their existence shaped the evolution of our distant ancestors, and their disappearance permitted us to exist.
For those who do not find contemplation of the long sweep of the ages to be congenial, I would say this:
Life is like a camping trip. If you want to be comfortable, you should have stayed home by the fire. Yet, people do go on camping trips. ---

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