@вебмастер,
Yes, there’ll be a continuation. As soon as I get another three Facebook Notes of a similar nature.

Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction and to rot;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice;
To be imprison’d in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendant world; or to be worse than worst
Of those that lawless and incertain thoughts
Imagine howling: ’tis too horrible!
The weariest and most loathed worldly life
That age, ache, penury and imprisonment
Can lay on nature is a paradise
To what we fear of death.

Of course, if I am interpreting it correctly, that passage assumes that there is an afterlife, and therefore something concrete to fear. Perhaps one would not have such fears if one were convinced that there is no afterlife, that death is simply nothingness? Even then, that is a scary thought to me.

Fear of death is instinctive, but the old, having done most of the business of life and now living on into functional uselessness, can safely leave instinct behind.

I would therefore expect the fear of death, at least partly, to be more marked in a society with a younger demographic.

1. Dying is often very painful and protracted. It is entirely natural to be afraid of pain.

2. People we love will (hopefully!) be very sad when we die and they survive us. It is entirely natural to want our loved ones to avoid protracted sadness. If extreme sadness is also a form of pain, then we are afraid of our loved ones being in protracted pain as a result of our death.

Apart from the above, I don’t really know any other reasons for fearing our death that is not somehow bound up in our own egotism at not existing any longer.

I enjoyed reading your thoughts here.

Nietzsche’s abyss is profound, his effort to transcend it, in the end, I believe failed. Those who inherit his insight would do well to understand his limits and his failure. He was right to desire the conquest of nihilism, yet his aesthetic methodology for accomplishing this failed because it was ultimately inhuman.

While man may wish to transcend himself, and may one day if we reach the so-called singularity, however, until then, his transcendence can and must be ethereal. Should the singularity not be reached, that ethereal transcendence will, by necessity, be eternal. Indeed, that may be the only place where the truly sublime resides.