Why does death scare us but non-existence doesn’t? :: The Future of the Internet

Why does death scare us but non-existence doesn’t?

September 9th, 2010 | by jz | Published in Future of the Internet | 5 Comments

Not exactly an Internet topic, I know, but I was struck by the Daily Dish’s call out to a post by Karl Smith:

Most people are afraid of death in a way that they are not afraid of non-existence. Thinking about the world just after your death tends to be at minimum unnerving. Thinking about the world billions of years after your death or years before you were born tends not to be so bad.

This indicates that people are concerned about the world in which they have died, not simply about the world in which they don’t exist. Indeed, most people are not troubled that they weren’t born 20 years earlier but would be saddened to know they were going to die 20 years sooner.

That sounds about right, and it’s confirmed by the fact that we can become drawn into well-fleshed-out fictional worlds like that of Avatar or Harry Potter or Middle Earth. Good storytelling can make the characters seem real, and withdrawal from the story’s world, even if the story has with a happy ending, can make people feel a sense of, well, loss. That might be why the least sad ending is the classic non-ending of “they all lived happily ever after.” Ever after suggests that the story goes on and the fictional world still “exists”; we’re just no longer receiving dispatches.

It reminds me of a story by Dan Simmons in which humans have teleportation technology using small, fixed portals, and it’s become so commonplace that a wealthy person’s “house” can actually comprise multiple rooms on multiple habitable planets — walking from the dining room to the living room of a logical house actually moves someone physically from one planet to another (two sunsets in one day!). (In the story, the plug is suddenly pulled on the whole system; suddenly Mom, who was in the kitchen making dinner, and her kids, who were watching TV in the next room, are now millions of light years away from each other, never to meet or communicate again.)

Perhaps it’s also why some can become more attached to virtual worlds rather than to the one they’re physically anchored to. I’m intrigued by this movie about Second Life, interviewing people for whom it has become central. With luck it’ll be in general release soon. Until then, I’m catching GET LAMP this weekend, about the much less immersive, but still fun, worlds of text adventures.

See, this post was about the Internet after all …

…JZ

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ML says:

September 9th, 2010 at 9:00 am (#)

Zittrain,

Second Life is irrelevant. It was never important, it will never be important. It is high time academics like us stop mentioning it.

If you want to take a look at how people immerse themselves in virtual worlds, check out World of Warcraft horror stories. Start out at http://www.wowdetox.com, where formers players present what happened to their lives because of online gaming addicition. Search for “WoW widows” to see the complaints of wives and husbands that “lost” their loved ones to the game. Other games have the same problems, of course, but WoW is the champion in that sad area.
Saqib Ali says:

September 9th, 2010 at 10:11 am (#)

timor mortis conturbat me
Larry Sanger says:

September 9th, 2010 at 10:13 am (#)

It’s really pretty simple, IMHO: we fear death because we fear not doing and experiencing everything that we could do, and being with those we love, if we were to continue living. If I don’t have a good book on tape or radio program to listen to, I hate being stuck in traffic jams: that’s some of my life not being lived well. We fear death because it basically means being in a traffic jam for the rest of the time we otherwise would expect to be alive and doing things. What a horrible waste.

This is also why prison and time-outs for kids are punishments.

Of course, 100 years or more hence, we don’t expect to be alive. So bare non-existence, at that time, doesn’t seem tragic.
seks izle says:

September 9th, 2010 at 2:43 pm (#)

Second Life is irrelevant. It was never important, it will never be important. It is high time academics like us stop mentioning it.
Jason Scott says:

September 10th, 2010 at 9:18 pm (#)

The most uplifting lead-in to a mention of my movie EVER!

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About Jonathan Zittrain

Jonathan Zittrain is Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School

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