Confronting Your Death

In Caitlin Doughty’s video Ask a Mortician- Confronting Your Death, she argues that as humans, we think death is scary because we don’t know what is going to happen after we die. When we die, our time on Earth ends. Because of this, there is no evidence of what happens after we die so we have no image on what will happen to us. This is one of the main reasons why we are so fearful of death, having that fear of the unknown. Doughty claims that by accepting we are going to die it will result in our death not being seen as an awful thing. She brings up Mark Twain to support this by quoting him saying that we didn’t care about our nonexistence before we were born therefore, we shouldn’t care about it after. I do not agree with Twain’s claim or think that it is correct because we didn’t experience life before we were born. Therefore, how can we miss something that we have never experienced? Also, when we are born our bodies are created as well as our mind and our souls. This shows that before we are born, we are nonexistent. Further proving that there is nothing to care about before birth because we hadn’t been created yet. I understand the goal that Doughty had when arguing that we need to confront death in order to accept it, but the evidence that she used to support it didn't help her claim. 

Comments

  1. Mary DrobnyApril 2, 2019 at 8:38 PM

    I agree with this post a lot. I think that it makes sense what she was attempting to convey but I don't think that she had the best types of evidence to support her claims. These are some good thoughts about this video!

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