As I move on in my life, I realize much more about the very things we accept without question. As a child, I’ve always been taught the importance of having God in our lives (not that this sort of preaching has stopped by now), and what punishments would encounter should we choose to omit him altogether. But this was a guard, a sort of protection against what was the bigger picture: we’re all fucking afraid of death. But why? It’s a funny dilemma: out of all the thousand possible chances of life, you came to being. You were born. And yet, you’re so entitled to this life that was granted you that you’re so afraid to go back to the dust you came from. How stubborn. Richard Dawkins put it best: “We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia.” Death is a funny thing. It surrounds us. It encompasses us and embraces us. I suggest instead of running from it, we embrace it. And, as much as I’d hate to say this myself, we should look forward to it. Not in a sort of defeating, self-hate kind of way. But more of coming to terms with it. It’s not that we don’t need hope, nor religion, nor love, nor faith, nor any of the things that keep us alive. It’s that in order to understand their power, we must understand the problem they help solve. Mark Manson goes into great detail on thing in his book Everything is Fucked: A Book About Hope. Once you see all the things that are trying to kill you (not actively, of course, but by the very nature of entropy, chaos, and disorder), you begin to appreciate life a little more. You realize that there isn’t really a point in being so attached to anything in this life because, in the grand scheme of things, they … don’t really matter.