Published on July 10, 2025 7:12 PM GMT

I'm interested in a simple question: Why are people all so terrified of dying? And have people gotten more afraid? (Answer: probably yes!)

In some sense, this should be surprising: Surely people have always wanted to avoid dying? But it turns out the evidence that this preference has increased over time is quite robust.

It's an important phenomenon that has been going on for at least a century, it's relatively new, I think it underlies much of modern life, and yet pretty much nobody talks about it.

I tried to provide a evenhanded treatment of the question, with a "fox" rather than "hedgehog" outlook. In the post, I cover a range of evidence for why this might be true, including VSL, increased healthcare spending, covid lockdowns, parenting and other individual risk behaviors. Conditional upon it being true, I also consider why, drawing on evidence from economic models, evolutionary models, history, and decreased fertility. Due to time constraints, I decided not to cover countervailing evidence and alternative explanations for the same phenomenon, or long-term implications, but if there's enough interest that'd be a subject for the next post!