I am sure you heard the old Jerry Seinfeld routine about people being more afraid of public speaking than they are afraid of dying.
There is a seemingly paradox, that we are trapped in we are to afraid to live our lives fully while simultaneously we are afraid to die.
I remember at a point in my life when my depression reached one of the lowest point and I was felling suicidal, the only thing that stopped me from killing myself was the fact that I was afraid to lose on new experiences. I was trapped between the miserable experience I was having at the time and my desire to live fully.
It is impossible to live your life fully until you don't make peace with all the negative aspects of life. The solution to fear of life is not immortality, because death is only one of the aspects that people resent, you would also have to be immune to failure etc. Life is not short almost a century is plenty enough, the problem is that most people don't extract the maximum value out of it.
If you wan't to live your life fully you have to embrace it as it is you can't afford to escape any of it. Any day without failure or without experiencing some of the emotions on the negative spectrum is a waste of your time. If that doesn't happen you are not pushing hard all the buttons you should push, it should be a priority to experience some negativity every day not to avoid it.
Sometimes people justify escapism, indulging in empty pleasure to excess, like yolo type of situations as way of living fully. Of course addicts are in denial they justify running away from life as a way of celebrating life. But how could indulging to the point of damaging yourself be a way of celebrating life. Like for example if you really like life you are not going to eat cheeseburgers until you give yourself a heart attack, if you really like life you are going to have a moderate diet that allows you to live the longest in order to enjoy the most life as possible.
Another way we deny death is by attempting to make ourselves indispensable and irreplaceable. We live with the anxiety that one day we are going to be obsolete and irrelevant. So we try really hard to offer so much value to other people that is going to make them want to build a statue of you.
The closest you can get to immortality is by leaving such a huge contribution behind you that others are going to keep using it long before you are dead. Even if the legacy that you live behind is going to be so great you are still going to die, and live behind an unlived life of an workaholic.
Becoming obsolete is nothing than a certainty, look at the old people right now with technology, that is going to happen to all of us to some degree and then death. The purpose of life is not to get ahead is to help the people around you, if obsolescence is a certainty why resist it. At the end of the day you know you did your job well enough when the people that you helped no longer need you.
