Follow the Proven Epicurean Pathway to Happiness by Adopting a Healthy Attitude toward Mortality

February 10, 2010 · Filed Under Epicurean Happiness Guidance

Do you fear dying? From the time we are children we hear warnings and admonitions about what happens to people after they die, especially if they have not led a “good” life. It’s no wonder so many of us have a fear of death.

Values are implanted in our brains at an early age, before we can think for ourselves. We’re taught to accept any of a variety of beliefs, depending on the cultural environment we happen to be raised in. For example:

“Your deeds will be judged after your death and you will be rewarded or punished

in heaven or hell,

but we can help you to get from the bad place to a better place.”
and you will be reborn as a low animal or a person of high social status.”
and your soul will stay at a sad place.”

The feeling resulting from these interpretations may vary according to the way they were communicated and to your personality but all are based on FEAR.

We are taught to abide by the laws of our community’s belief system and behavior patterns in order to avoid punishment in the afterlife by, for example:

paying the church tax
- helping the members of your community
- harming the members of communities presented by your parents or church leaders or other persons of authority as hostile
- performing all the rituals prescribed by your faith community

A good question to ask ourselves: “Who receives the most benefits of our performing these actions?” Why is fear of dying, and of the afterlife, instilled in us throughout our lives? Who benefits?

For Epicureans, death is as natural as blue eyes and blowing our noses, and it’s as inevitable as rain: “Against all other hazards it is possible for us to gain security for ourselves but so far as death is concerned all of us human beings inhabit a city without walls.”

The Epicureans’ basic attitude towards death is to accept the fact as an inevitable necessity: Since you cannot influence it, waste no time or energy for thoughts and feelings about it. The wise man does not deprecate life nor does he fear the cessation of life.

The immediate effect of this attitude is to invest the present with a pressing urgency and to demand the control of experience with respect to the past, the present, and the future. This amounts to the control our own thoughts. A choice of attitude is involved: The past is to be regarded as unalterable, the future as undependable, and the present alone as within our power.

The feeling resulting from the Epicurean attitude towards death is a liberating and invigorating acceptance and enjoyment of life lived without fear.

The actions resulting from the liberating feeling can be to live our life as long as we are alive (vivamus dum vivimus) and stop postponing it: “We are born once and we cannot be born twice but for all time must be no more; and you, thou fool, though not master of the morrow, postpone the hour and each and every one of us goes to death with excuses on his lips.” This is the unpleasant consequence of procrastination and misdirected activity.

Our precious life is not to be wasted with preparation for or administration of it: “Some men devote their lives to accumulating the wherewithal for living, failing to discern that the potion mixed for all of us at birth is a draught of death.”

To achieve happiness, we must act promptly and vigorously and live “in contemplation of mortality.” Living in contemplation of death is living more consciously, intensively and enjoyably. In Epicurus’s words: “Accustom yourself to believing that death is nothing to us, for good and evil imply the capacity for sensation, and death is the privation of all sentience; therefore a correct understanding that death is nothing to us makes the mortality of life enjoyable, not by adding to life a limitless time, but by taking away the yearning after immortality. For life has no terrors for him who has thoroughly understood that there are no terrors for him in ceasing to live.”

Are you afraid of dying because it might be painful? Sure, there’s a chance it might be, but the pain you’ve experienced from a migraine headache, a broken bone, a gunshot wound, or a hammer pounded on your head may have been worse. And if you suffer from a painful disease before you die, or you’re badly injured in a car accident, there are drugs to help alleviate the pain and keep you comfortable. We don’t have to bite on bullets anymore. In Epicurus’s words: “Foolish, therefore, is the man who says that he fears death, not because it will pain when it comes, but because it pains in the prospect. Whatever causes no annoyance when it is present, causes only a groundless pain in the expectation. Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not. It is nothing, then, either to the living or to the dead, for with the living it is not and the dead exist no longer.”

Are you afraid of dying because you’re worried about what will become of your children? Some of what happens to your children after your death is under your control, such as their living arrangements and legal guardianship; and some can be influenced by you in advance, for example by preparing them emotionally or helping to boost their self-confidence and independence. Besides, your staying alive is no guarantee that harm will never befall them.

Not the quantity but the quality of life is important: “And even as men choose of food not merely and simply the larger portion, but the more pleasant, so the wise seek to enjoy the time which is most pleasant and not merely that which is longest.”

What other elements of dying do you fear? If you can exert some control over them, make the decision to figure out how to take charge. If you can’t, worrying, or even thinking, about them won’t make a smidgeon of difference in how events finally play out. Fearing death makes you fear to live your life to the full. Are you sure you don’t really want to live your unique life to the full? So why not accept your mortality and put the fear behind you forever?

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