Designed to decay and die but doomed dread death

It is highly likely that we, the living, will all be dead within less than a century. And yet we are programmed to fear death. What to make of the conflict between our drive to avoid death and our, often terrifying or saddening, belief that we are going to die? Here I transdisciplinarily review the evolutionary biological basis of longevity and death, the neuroscientific and psychological basis of fear of death, selfhood, and consciousness, and the state of the art of senescence science and life extension efforts. Then I argue that rather than shunning the though of death until its inevitable arrival, often on short notice and unleashing overwhelming shock and regret, we should preempt it. I suggest we can face or finesse the fear of death, via a “heroic/Stoic/Nietzschean way” of aligning ourselves with the forces of evolution; a “meaning-making” way of having faith in the existence of meaning; or a “selfless/Buddhist” way of noticing that our concept of self is a simplified, intermittent, and evolving model of our true physical self. Finally, I discuss implications, for the fear of death, of inhabiting a “storable” and “rerunnable” world.