Reddit reviews The Denial of Death

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Denial-Death-Ernest-Becker/dp/0285638971

Death is nothing like an endless void since death/nothingness isn't real at all. Another perspective from Wittgenstein:

> Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limits.


Beyond death there are many other existential facts and uncertainties you could despair over. For example, you could fear the opposite of death, eternal life: not being able to die. You could become anxious over literally anything if you are creative enough and find a way to perceive it as a threat. Then to think your way out of the fear and see how it could be based on a misperception, you have to get even more creative! Academic philosophers, who handle these kinds of thoughts at the distance of the intellect, are very good at this. Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, often held up as the most important philosophical work of the 20th century, could go a long way toward curing you of your existential anxieties.

Fortunately or unfortunately, uncertainty lies beneath everything. You can't consciously ground yourself in that uncertainty; it would be like drowning in an endless ocean with nothing to hold onto. The Buddhist solution is to relinquish attachments (to the world, to self/ego - everything): to learn to float and stop grasping after permanence and substance, and to embrace emptiness (which is held as the essential nature of existence).

Without non-attachment, ignorance, evasion or denial, I think the only way to "get over" it was described by Kierkegaard, the originator of existentialism (who IMO has not been surpassed and who Wittgenstein declared the most profound author of the 19th century). He explores it from a Christian perspective in The Sickness Unto Death, and his remedy is faith:

> The formula that describes the state of the self when despair is completely rooted out is this: in relating itself to itself and in willing to be oneself, the self rests transparently in the power that established it.