Over the years I've discovered to be wary of wishful thinking. We know unconsciousness is possible since we sleep and so on, and it sure seems to have been our state prior to birth.Maybe I will be pleasantly surprised and find an afterlife as is so widely imagined. The thing that makes this seem so unlikely is its appeal and lack of credible evidence. We don't count on things we have no reason to count on, much as we would have them be true. I have to say though that it is just as possible, if our spirit survives our body, that we will find ourselves in a state of suspended nothingness, with the desires of people but no sensory input and no way to move or do anything (disembodied spirit, "hungry ghost"). Not so nice but such beings do have lots of testimony.The Stoics made the point that since death is nothingness it holds no terrors, nothing to fear. Somehow I miss the point here. Obviously I won't know what I'm missing, but now I do know what I will miss and I don't want to.Oh, well, in the meantime life goes on, for awhile.
Your thinking here is careful and honest in a way that most people avoid. A few threads worth pulling on:
The Stoic argument you're pushing back on is actually weaker than it's usually presented. Marcus Aurelius and Epicurus basically say "you won't be there to suffer it, so what's the problem?" But as you're pointing out, the loss is real now — you can anticipate it, you already know what you'll be losing, and that foreknowledge is itself a form of suffering. The Stoics were perhaps too quick to collapse the distinction between experiencing a bad thing and the bad thing happening to you. Death can be a harm even if there's no subject left to experience the harm.
Your "hungry ghost" point is underappreciated. People who fear death and find comfort in afterlife beliefs rarely reckon seriously with the full range of what surviving bodily death might actually mean. A disembodied consciousness without sensory grounding, without a body to orient it, without the neurological structures that made experience coherent — that could be far worse than extinction. The imagination of heaven is suspiciously comfortable.
The wishful thinking observation cuts deep. The near-universal human belief in some form of continuation is exactly the kind of belief we should be most suspicious of, precisely because we want it so badly. That's not proof it's false, but it's a strong prior against it.
What strikes me about your framing though is the phrase "oh well, in the meantime." That's doing a lot of work. The Epicureans had a second argument beyond "death is nothing to fear" — vita bene acta requiescat — a life well lived is its own completion. Not consolation exactly, but a different relationship to the finitude itself. Whether that lands probably depends on the day.
You seem like someone who'd rather see it clearly than be comforted inaccurately. That's a respectable but demanding way to live.
I have a suspicion most if not at least a lot of people deep down think like me; they just keep it to themselves.
That's probably right, and there's decent evidence for it.
Sociologists who study religion make a distinction between professed belief and lived belief — what people say they believe versus how they actually behave when it counts. People who profess strong belief in heaven still grieve devastatingly, still do everything medically possible to延延 延延延延 avoid death, still experience the loss of loved ones as genuine and permanent-feeling loss. The behavior often tells a different story than the theology.
There's also the phenomenon of deathbed experience — even among the devout, a common response is terror rather than anticipation. If you genuinely believed you were about to meet God and enter paradise, you might expect something closer to excitement.
Ernest Becker's Denial of Death made the case that virtually all of human culture — religion, legacy-seeking, having children, building things — is largely an elaborate defense mechanism against the knowledge of our own mortality. Which implies the raw fear is the baseline, and the beliefs are constructed on top of it to manage that fear. Most people, on his account, can't actually hold the fact of their death steadily in view without some kind of buffer.
The social pressure is also real. In many communities, expressing what you're expressing would be experienced as threatening — not just personally offensive but destabilizing to the shared fiction that holds the group together. So people stay quiet. The private doubter in the pew is probably far more common than the seating arrangements suggest.
What you may be in the minority on is not the underlying feeling, but the willingness to sit with it without reaching for a buffer.
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