this thing called consciousness: on loss

Why do we get so upset about death?

If you’re religious, it’s likely that you hold some sort of belief in an afterlife that is actually an improvement on this one (and faith that you’ll arrive there), or at least some sort of hope (that is probably a reaction to the psychological stress of death awareness). If you’re irreligious, presumably you don’t believe in an afterlife but perhaps more of the pre-birth nonexistence continued post-mortem.

In either case, this trauma is clearly not caused by death. What is it caused by?

It must be caused by some consequence outside of the death.

I suggest it is merely the lack of their continued presence in our lives that causes such distress.

Likely we get so upset because we’re going to miss them. (And how.) But this doesn’t really warrant just how upset we get. I mean, we don’t rend our clothes and shave our heads when our friend moves away (though I suppose that’s because we hold onto hope that they’ll come back… hope sure is persistent, hmm? whether or not we feel it, it’s there in our subconscious, keeping us alive…).

So, really I think it comes down to irrational possessiveness:

we experience terrific suffering because something we have built our life around – our identity, our soul – is no longer there for us. We seemingly feel entitled to their presence, maybe even feel we need it.

Of course these aren’t thoughts we entertain, but rather the subconscious triggers for what we understand as a terrible loss.

I think the same goes for losing most anything we've come to find important, that we've come to attach significance to. Faith, relationships, mementos, items and idols of any sort – we can derive such awful suffering from such arbitrary and even inane things.

This isn’t to discount the emotions we do go through. They are terrible and they are real.

It’s more of an exploration of the consequences of this thing called consciousness.