Our contemporary problem is that in the West we inflict great suffering in the months prior to death. Most fondly imagine a happy demise, surrounded by smiling loved ones as we slip painlessly away. In reality these days most people die alone, in pain, confused and afraid, in an anonymous hospital bed with various tubes and wires running from our bodies to machines that go “ping.” Death itself is, as you rightly note, nothing. What we need to invent is a quick and painless method of transitioning from one state (being alive) to the next (being nothing again). Sadly, contemporary society is obsessed instead with infantile fantasies about life extension, computer-based immortality, and other teen-boy scifi nonsense.

Add to this the complication that most people are still emotionally immature and trapped in mythological fantasies that promise happy-hunting-grounds in the Great Hereafter, which makes them even less capable of coming to terms with the termination of our brief and amazing existence.

Personally, as I age and am forced to watch the follies of history repeating themselves endlessly as our tiny-brained ape species blunders through life, I increasingly know that death will be a welcome end. The play was interesting for the first couple of acts, then became predictable, than devolved into the most atrociously bad farce. One ought always to know when to get up and leave the theater.