What are some of your fears?

I never had a fear of this, and not too many years ago I had a strong urge to do this one one of my "big" birthdays. Then life got in the way and the moment passed.

No, I think that would just be masking it. Exposure therapy is the magic bullet for phobias, in my opinion and experience. Took a class in it which helped some, gave one full talk in real life (on Charles Dickens, and several times I said Charles Darwin).

Getting everything I want and still not being happy.

I do not fear death but I do fear dying.

I think at least half of the people who say they don’t fear death are lying.

This is projection.

Mayhaps.

I just think folks realize that wise people say they don’t fear death, and most people want to appear wise.

Additionally, most of those refuting fear haven’t actually come face to face with death (yet).

not really...
it is quantifiable because you can actually ask someone this question before they die and record that data.

The first half is reasonable, and we can certainly speculate that there must be some people who claim they don't fear death, because they hear wise people say it, and they want to be or feel or be seen as wise, and perhaps they think that if they say it to themselves enough, they'll succeed.

But you can't realistically claim (I know, you said 'think', so fine) that more than half are doing so, absent some reliable data that somehow gets past the problem of self-reporting.

WRT the second half, yes, exposure to death is helpful. Buddhist monks, during their training, are sometimes instructed to go to the forest and find the rotting carcass of an animal and sit in contemplation with it. In stoic terms, it's called 'premeditation of evils'. I actively imagine my own death, and that of my dog, because that makes me value life more, appreciate what I have while I have it, and prepare me for the eventuality my dog dies before I do.

In my case, having spent my entire life battling fairly severe depression and experiencing suicidal ideation, this is all a lot easier for me. There is no functional difference for me between the time before I was born and the time after I die. I don't like the idea of a painful, uncomfortable death (watched both my parents die of cancer) but death itself is just whatever.

The difference is not at all semantic. If you were offered a painless death tomorrow or a painful death in 50 years time, what would you choose? When people talk about fear of death, I don't take them to mean 'fear of pain', but the absence of life. That's a very different thing. The fact that dying leads to death does not mean they are one and the same.

When I was a kid I was so freaked out by the thought of dying. Starting around age 14 I started considering killing myself on a regular basis, so the fear totally vanished. Nowadays my fears are generally about world war 3 and how horrible it will be. Hopefully I'll have a relatively painless death sometime before it happens, but the way things are going it looks like its coming soon.

There are kind of two things when it comes to fear of death that are quite different and distinct: death anxiety and concerns/fears/stresses about mortality.

Death anxiety is kind of a phobia about death, and often appears in childhood when overly exposed to traumatic deaths which can't really be understood or processed and are like the boogey man coming and robbing us of life. And you freak, repress it, and it becomes subconscious. A phobia can easily develop around this. It isn't about mortality but about the boogey man.

This thing got me in childhood big time. My mother died, many pets died including several on the first day we got them (fish and rabbits, notorious for not doing well in captivity), the horrific serial killer/mass killer phenomenon was exploding in the media (Charles Whitman, Manson, Speck, Zodiac, the Boston Strangler, Bundy, Gacy, Berkowitz, Jeffery MacDonald, Gary Gilmore), and the carnage of the Vietnam War was displayed every night on TV with the body counts by Walter Cronkite. I remember particularly the slaughter nature with the Manson thing, reacting with, "Jeezus, they killed their barber too. WTF!!!" (Their barber Jay Sebring was visiting them.) Anyway, it was terror, freak out thing for me at that age.

As an adult, stresses about mortality are much more considered, rational, natural if we don't resist too much. Man was meant to face mortality as he ages, he was not "meant" to be traumatized by death in childhood. For anyone who lives to a ripe old age, there are many, many signs that it doesn't go on forever. There are whole levels to that. As you move through them, the specter of death, as one saying says and is not just BS ... "death at the end of a long fully lived life is as natural as sleep at the end of a long full day." It's a friend in the end, not an enemy. If it wasn't for death, we'd be facing trillions of centuries with dementia and bed-ridden. The youthful protest against death is completely ignorant of the realities of aging.

Death phobia and mortality concerns are two different things.

to clarify, in your context is death a
[ ] noun
[ ] verb
[ ] adjective

check all that apply

edit: very thoughtful post Fella, plenty to think about

What...

ha - you got there first.

It goes

Snakes
Spiders
Sharks

for me, albeit Spiders should prob be #1. Do you live in Qld? Not sure I could handle the snake situation up there

Read the post. In the same way that a morbid phobia of spiders is not the same thing as being concerned about a poisonous spider, and likewise a snake ... a panic about death is not the same thing as concerns about mortality.

I'm going with death is ... a state, a non-state, a gateway? A verb.

The worst snake I have seen was a red belly black and nearly stood on it but this was like 15 years ago

I remember during a skate session LATE at night back in the 1970's, at an abandoned Mansion high up on a Desert hill we called 'the Nude Bowl' in palms springs area.

We encountered a swarm of Desert Tarantulas.
It must have been mating season or something because in the pitch blackness of nighttime, the Tarantulas were literally everywhere... every 5-6 feet there was another Tarantula trying to get his groove on.

it was like walking thru a mine field of creepy crawly giant Spiders.

would frequently find nests of rattlers when i was a kid, also water moccasins every now and again

Forgetting my 2p2 password.

My big fear is being buried alive…like in a coffin or something. Horrific

There was a (true story) movie when I was a kid about a girl who was kidnapped and put under ground in a coffin and given enough air and water etc for a week and that **** has stayed with me ever since

an adroitly topical arachtillian arrangement

One time I went into a bush out in the country after a wild football toss, and in reaching down in there I realized there were a swarm of mantisses all in the bush. Freaked me a bit. I came away with a phobia of mantisses. I later learned they were solitary insects. So what the heck were a thousand of them doing in there? Maybe it was the mating time thing.