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People With University Degree Fear Death Less
An anonymous reader writes "People with a university degree fear death less than those at a lower literacy level. In addition, fear of death is more common among women than men, which affects their children's perception of death."
Grad studies are worse than any kind of death. I experienced both.
I think these are odd findings. Lower literacy also correlates to a higher belief in the supernatural and "life after death" (heaven, virgins, whatever), so you'd think lower literacy would correlate with a lower fear of death.
Could it be that being frightened correlates with mental problems, which in turn correlates with having a university degree?
When i failed completing my degree at time i felt it would be perfectly fine if i took a long walk of a short cliff...
My -1 Troll is actually a +1 funny. And my -1 flame is actually a +1 insightfull.
I became an engineer. I work in a cubicle. I bear a slight resemblance to Dilbert when in my work attire. This my friends, is worse than death. Therefore, I have no fear of death because I am beyond it.
Oh, the irony!
C'mon, it seems easy to me: People who are educated tend to be better off and have less to worry about (they're enjoying life, not worrying if life will end before it gets better).
Additionally, more educated people tend to be aware of risks more. For instance, a more educated person is more likely to know that the odds of getting into an accident where you are saved by a seat belt is far more likely than an accident where a seatbelt could trap you underwater. A well educated person is likely to know the odds of shark bites are in the millions and that you're more likely to die on your way to a theme park than you are on one of its rides.
But they fear typographical errors much more :-)
Bruce Perens.
Fear of eventually dying and fear of dying young are quite different things, but both get named "fear of death". I read TFA, and it's not clear what fear they're talking about.
IMHO, it's silly to fear the former but good to have some fear of the latter.
You can only die once, and I have been dead, so I will live forever now....
I think the University was worse than death anyway, pain goes away when you die, at the University the pain never went away...
I am male and have a university degree. I fear death more than anyone I've never met.
For anyone reading, by the way, Freud was very insightful on fear of death. My very poor summary is as follows... It's hard for us to conceive of nonexistence, because to do so requires us to exist and observe that nonexistence, which means that we would have to exist to have any thoughts on the matter. Pretty trippy stuff.
I also think of the scene from Annie Hall, where all of Woody Allen's books have death in the title. "It's a very important issue!", he says. I guess Allen's character is more neurotic than most, but when I think of fear of death I do picture this sort of thing: a nervous intellectual male who fears death. Such as Freud. I have a hard time thinking that it's just the uneducated that are worried about this.
I guess there is a slight tendency for the well-off in this world to act like they're immortal. If you've seen more unfairness you're probably thinking more of your death. Rich bastards don't think they'll ever die.
If we're talking about undergraduate degrees, and the average amount of debt involved, then yeah, if asked if I was afraid of dying right after graduation, I'd be like, "meh."
I just read the article and barely found any mention of the topic of the title... And frankly the whole thing left me confused about what their focus was.
People with a university degree tend to be (in b4 outliers) more conformist, walking in lockstep with society and less willing to question themselves or their surroundings. Like the old stereotype says, the easterner spends too much time in meditation staring into space, and the westerner spends too little time doing so.
Before anyone cries, "dropout!" and/or "education broadens your horizons, luddite!", only the components of my degree(s) containing philosophy really helped me contemplate mortality. And we're increasingly insulting about philosophy (even while, in the UK, many of the major players in government/civil service have been through PPE), and study it in an increasingly bookish manner rather than asking students to use it as a vehicle to contemplate for themselves.
What about the people in US Government?
Whatever doesn't kill me makes me stronger . . .
. . . unless it maims me.
The maiming sucks. I'd rather avoid it.
I'm sure this will make many atheists happy to here (despite the fact that this is coming from the University of Grenada...I mean, c'mon!?) but I can assure you, no matter what your education level, if you stand down the barrel of a gun at the hands of a killer you will fear death.
Breathing helps keep humans from dying.
death probably seems like a nice change of pace
Death is inevitable. I don't fear taxes, and I don't fear death.
What I do fear, however, since I live in the United States where suicide and assisted suicide are illegal, is becoming almost completely nonfunctional due to sudden paralysis, stroke, etc. The fear is that if I were locked in and could only communicate one character an hour, they'd still keep me alive for as long as they could, even if I had to lay there awake but bored and paralyzed for 16 hours a day.
A distant second is dying a horrible slow death, perhaps by starvation.
Death itself, though, I don't really fear.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
Well, now you're free from all those student loans!
Lisa: "Dear Mom, I no longer fear Hell, because I've been to Kamp Krusty."
So if we extrapolate for the hell of it (no pun intended), then PhD's are committing mass suicide?
Table-ized A.I.
Today is a good day to die!
Since those who fear death resort to religion to get over their fear while the intellect realizes that death is absolute for everything, including our universe. I fear of being dead but I put myself into situations where I could easily die, but the experience is priceless.
"Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones."
As a thought exercise, its un-nerving to say the least!
"I don't sleep. I hate those little slices of death."
I am quite sure I have been an insomniac for most of my life. I'll sleep enough when I'm dead.
Death wouldn't be so bad if it didn't have to involve every memory you ever had being erased from existence. Written word and other recordings are completely inadequate to compensate for everything that is lost when a person dies. Just because death is currently inevitable does not make fear of it irrational - fear focuses awareness, which is perfectly appropriate when it involves everything you are in the world ceasing to be, lost to everyone.
That's one of the reasons I've always been fascinated by computers and programming - it goes further down the path of being able to record experiences more and more completely as they advance, beyond the single narrative of previous recording technology.
Ryan Fenton
How much of the fear of death measured in this study has a basis in reality?
What I mean is, if someone has reason to fear death (because of circumstance, or illness, etc.) then they probably have bigger things to worry about than getting college degrees?
My page.
What is consciousness exactly? Matter organized in particular ways? Electric impulses? Information? Which of these really disappear when you kick the bucket? According to cosmology, even if you are sucked into a black hole someone could later observe every photon it emits as it evaporates due to quantum effects and reconstruct you atom by atom. For more practical solutions, you could upload important parts of your persona to cloud computing (write books, raise children, etc) and they will happily keep running after your passing.
We don't REALLY know what makes us self aware. We know about neurons, axons, and neurotransmitters but that has nothing to do with why some being fired feels good, bad or whatever. We simply don't have (and probably will never have) enough information to know weather to fear death, look forward to death or just be indifferent. For all I know rocks or skeletons are having one big great party. I simply can not speculate on self awareness, intelligence or feelings of the rest of the universe from my single fixed point of reference. People who throw around either science or religion to obscure a fundamentally unsolvable problem fear death primarily because trying to understand it exposes the ignorance of their small minds. Educated people naturally approach ignorance as an exciting challenge.
Nobody chooses to be born. Fear of death shouldn't be a worry. There is no doubt that you will die some day, so why worry about that. Worry about living.
Have you ever seen people smile or laugh in developing countries, or third world countries? Even though they might not have a clean sanitation or water system, they still find a way to enjoy life, for however long that may be. Worry about losing that joy for life.
There is a good lyric in a Kid Cudi song "Pursuit of Happiness" that goes:
If I fall, if I die, I'll know I lived it till the fullest
If I fall, if I die, I'll know I lived and missed some bullets
It's only because we've already seen death, and it looked kinda funny.
Good job quoting out-of-context to support your contrarian post. I'm sure a good proportion of readers here won't have read the rest of that sentence in the article and won't know that you're trolling until they get to the third or fourth line in your post.
I fear being forgotten. We strive to be remembered; some do this though writing stories, other though research. Some do it though gaining popularity, or by changing history as it happens. Those who take refuge with God, they hope that He will remember them for all their hard work. For everyone else, there is facebook.
I would not want to. I subscribe to the theory that too much of ANYTHING is bad. Imagine having to roam this planet for hundreds of millions of years... it would get so very boring. I don't even think I could be happy in a "heaven" for eternity, because again... too much of anything is bad, even if I get whatever I want all of the time. My idea of a heaven would be not knowing that I died and for my entire consciousness to just be completely gone.
It eventually sinks in that most men finishing college means they will be stuck working a job they don't really like until either they drop dead or they become too decrepit to work anymore, usually through age but possibly through irreparable injury.
Then add in the responsibility of maintaining a house, a car, paying bills and managing finances, emotionally supporting your wife and maybe needy friends or parents etc etc etc. Then possibly having responsibility for raising children that men haven't had throughout human history except for the last few decades.
So yeah compared to the rest of your life how bad could death really be?
Seems like there's a long list of benefits in education. Not only will you be less religulous, but you will also not fear death as much and hopefully get a more fullfilling job.
Educating women is even better, they have fewer children and a better health. And they tend to see education as something important for their children.
Have a look at Hans Roslings excellent talk about the miracle in Pakistan for what education has done, and especially education of women.
Long live education, which should be free and availible.
You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. -- Harlan Ellison
And I am not frightened of dying, any time will do, I
don't mind. Why should I be frightened of dying?
There's no reason for it, you've gotta go sometime.
I never said I was frightened of dying
hahahahahahahaahahahahhaahhahahaahO...imdead !!
From the article:
at present, the education system does not have any formal and systematic method to deal with death in class. If death were introduced in the education system, children would have a more real and intense approach to life, and many of the problems derived from the mourning process in the adulthood would be prevented.
I hope they mean the topic of death rather than death itself. I don't really want our teachers killing anybody as an object lesson.
#DeleteChrome
We're told since early youth that death is something that happens to us all and we shouldn't fear it - for some of us, this kind of nonsense is also supported by threats to accept this lest we come into conflict with a loving god that somehow condemned every human to death. What would happen if people were suddenly to realise aging is but a disease, prevalent and persistent but ultimately treatable or maybe even curable? Why is it such a taboo to discuss aging treatments? Why aren't there "IT ISN'T NATURAL! YOU SHOULDN'T BE TREATING THIS!" trolls when any other disease is cured, yet they seem to be in the majority when human senescence is being discussed? I don't care if it's natural. Aging is as natural as smallpox and AIDS, using this argument to make people accept it is flawed.
Let's see.. Imagine person sitting in a comfy classroom learning about finance, science, etc. Not very scary. Now imagine a person living in an unsafe locale learning how to avoid warlords, disease, cold, hunger, etc. Pretty scary. I'm thinking the lack of fear of death among the educated has less to do with the education, and more to do with the fact that most educated people are from safer places.
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
Well, I have a healthy fear of death (or perhaps unhealthy depending on your perspective). I have a university degree and I am an atheist. I have not cheery notion that there is something beyond this existence - just nothingness. Rationally, I understand that to fear oblivion is probably irrational, but personally I blame evolution. After all, the human race would not have survived this far without a healthy fear of death. But frankly I am terrified. And I am terrified about just the prospect of something as inevitable death - never mind all the various aspects that may accompany death (illness, injury, suffering, etc.).
Well, this was certainly fun... Thanks for the pick-me-up!
...at least as per Horace Mann's saying: "be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity."
Death of the individual is compulsory, the fear of which you can consequently escape. However, your actions can be immortal in their consequence.
imagine building a computer as a kid and having it run a very very long program. it runs that program for 20, 30, 50, 80 years! its getting real close to some kind of conclusion or answer, too.
then, someone yanks the power out and you had no time to sync to disk. all your data and all those 80 years of accumulated processing is gone as the power supply runs to zero and your ram loses refresh.
it makes NO SENSE when you think of life this way. I don't see how your 'data' (life experience) is at all saved and it seems extremely RUDE to pull the plug out like that and have all the computes just fall on the floor.
this is why I cannot believe in a deity. the absurdity of life, itself, means no god worth anything could have created such a silly thing as our existence.
how would you view someone who lets a program run for so long only to yank the plug out and dump the data to the bit bucket? I'd say that was a cruel, sick bastard.
there can't be a god. life makes too little sense for there to be any 'master' of it.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
and it was about fear of Death, you know, fear of THE Death. So the less educated could not look past the scythe and the bony construction, but more educated and wiser people see much more. Ok, it is a bit annoying that he uses all-caps, but he has shown compassion at a number of times and loves cats.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
by Armstrong.
MENSA pushes the
~INTELLECT is the whole of INTELLIGENCE~
B.S.
People who've moved-on beyond that shallow prejudice,
who've actually earned some of the other kinds of intelligence,
know that their scheme is so profoundly distortive of worth
as to be diseased propaganda.
As for whether I've the right to such opinion:
according to their tests, I outclass most of MENSA.
They don't measure genius,
they measure their-scheme-skill: intellect-mechanism.
Only.
Brought up to idolize their prejudice,
I pity it & hold it in distaste, now,
and am healthier for it.
Work-through ( rather than merely reading )
"The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" ( Betty Edwards, Ph.D )
to do the exercises that get one into a kind of knowing IQ doesn't & can't even know.
( it's called right-brain dominance for a reason:
get a mic preamp, some silver/silver-chloride electrodes, some wire-glue,
and MacGuyver up a 2-channel EEG,
and you'll be able to see shifts in your brain's overall function,
with your own eyes )
Read "7 Kinds of Smart, 2nd edition" by Armstrong, ... MENSA! )
for the understanding that there are multiple fundamentally-different intelligences,
and pretending that only 1 counts, could possibly be valid, is ignorant prejudice.
( how could Michelangelo be considered "genius"??? he wasn't
Read "The Alphabet Versus The Goddess" by Leonard Schlain ( M.D.? ),
to see how words-centric prejudice is consistently followed by holocausting
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Deuteronomy%2020:16-17&version=AMP
for the first recorded holocaust, that we know about...
A Russian pointed out that it's partly a defect in the English language:
"genius" has been hijacked by the MENSA committee, so it no longer means creative, or wholistic.
They've separate words for "talent" and "genius", and use them accordingly,
but our allowing the IQ twits to redefine "genius" FROM creative TO intellect,
is like us geeks allowing Microsoft to redefine "PC" to mean MS-Windows.
Incompetent accommodation.
Cheers.
Seems like there's a long list of benefits in education. Not only will you be less religulous, but you will also not fear death as much and hopefully get a more fullfilling job.
An equally valid conclusion is that absence of fear is good, as it enables people to succeed in education.
This conclusion is preferable to that most people are talking about here, as there is a plausible mechanism for it - education usually involves prolonged suffering.
-- open source? sounds like the real book --
"I can see you are a swordsman. Therefore you are educated. If you are educated, you must know you are Mortal! CLEARLY you would put the poison furthest away from YOU!"
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Those who have experienced the torture of Powerpoint in lecture halls - welcome death!
It also trumps torture.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
fear of death is most common among women than men, which affects their children's perception of death.
Except for the men children. So mother's perceptions only affect their daughter's perceptions. Or women are just different than men (I've examined Ken and Barbie dolls closely, and can discern no difference but for their stature.) Or men are naturally impervious to empathetic learning. Also, are we talking about self-death, or death in general? I think I'm going to try to break this vicious cycle by making my young daughters empty the mousetraps.
So did they break it down by faculty I wonder? :)
But this is in some way similar to the result that people with better numeracy skills are less likely to get into desperate financial difficulties. People with a goal or something they have a passion to pursue are less likely to feel that their life is passing them by. I'm not surprised to find that there is a correlation there, but I doubt that graduates are the only subset of the people surveyed who have a less than average fear of death.
-- What do you need?
-- Gnus. Lots of Gnus.
Well, looky-here boys, we got us a PSYCH MAJOR. Ain't he got a pretty mouth? Hey, Russell, what say you hold him down and we'll see if we can't make him squeal like a pig? Wouldja like that Mr "Big City - "Alphabet Versus The Goddess" - Now Bitter Because You're Working at the Nerd Herd - Psych Major"? Wouldja like us to make you squeal like a pig?
I'll give you some "incompetent accommodation"...
You are welcome on my lawn.
There is also no reason to worry about people who write books about Narnia and don't seem to know what the word facetious means ;-)
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
I'm a man, mid-20's, some college, atheist. There was a time earlier this year where I had convinced myself that I was going to die. I didn't cry, panic, or anything like that. I also didn't start praying; the thought of an afterlife never crossed my mind. The only thing that I was concerned about was hiding the medical records on my computer.
Overall, I'm very happy with how I handled the situation.
...fear having its hard drive wiped? What about having its original hard drive wiped, after it had been imaged to another drive on a different system?
I think any entity which has a survival instinct will have a fear of death. But at some level of sentience you cross the line from a hard-wired instinctual "Don't get yourself killed!" reflexive fear to the more thoughtful "What is death like, and is there anything afterward?" realm.
I'm not a member of any organized religion, though I do not consider myself to be an atheist either. If pressed, I'd classify my beliefs as being closest to Deism; but if I don't feel like explaining what Deism is I just tell people I'm agnostic to save time! I don't believe in the supernatural; IMO all the stuff people ascribe to supernatural causes have a logical explanation, or are just our minds "playing tricks" on us.
My wife was brought up Catholic, but (possibly as a reaction to that strict upbringing) is actually fairly anti-Catholic now, and considers herself to be agnostic. She does believe in the supernatural (ghosts and such) though, which I find somewhat odd.
Personally, I'd say I fear the moment of death (as in, "How will I die and will it hurt?") a lot more than what might come afterwards. I don't believe there is an afterwards; death is the biological equivalent of having my hard drive wiped.
It's about what people say about fear of death.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
it's because (statistically) the more educated, the less religious. While one would think that the religious person, hoping for life after death, would fear it less, I think the opposite is true. The atheist can take comfort in believing that everything just stops when you die, that is you just cease to exist - no pain, no awareness, no anything. A religious person who believes in the after life has to worry about whether they're going to heaven or hell, will it hurt when I'm dead and (for some) maybe even a little fear about the cracks in their faith (i.e. could I be wrong?)..
Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an oncoming train.
Read a fascinating (and funny) book called "Sympathy for the Devil" by Holly Lisle. It's available for free from the Baen Books Free Library. (baen.com) (Baen is a large SF publisher specializing in fantasy and military SF, not a religious books place, so fear not that I'm trying to convert you...) I believe Holly Lisle is a Fantasy author, although I have not read her other work.
In the book a young nurse asks the very same question of God after a rough day at work and offers up her very soul to stop it. She gets a very interesting (and funny) response from God. No bible quotes, no Jesus, no proselytizing of any sort... (I promise.) It covers Damnation, Satan, Fallen Angels, the lack of competent IT Techs in Hell, and the demonically-designed highway system of Charlotte, North Carolina.
Is it theologically sound? Does it conform in any way with scripture? This agnostic is the wrong person to ask... But it's a short, quick, read, and will waste no more than a few hours of your time if you don't like it... (Feel free to flame me afterwards.)
I mean one of the symptoms of clinical depression is willingness to consider suicide. (Which I would think would mean that you feel death less.) Isn't depression more common among people with degrees? (Isn't it also more prevalent among those with higher IQ's as well?)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
I'm up for my third security clearance investigations. What makes somebody with security clearance different from a member of the general population?
- The fortitude to spend about five hours filling out the never-to-be-sufficiently-damned SF-86 form.
- A guaranteed mostly-clean criminal record.
- Not in dire financial straits
- A U.S. Citizen
- Not currently suffering from major mental illness, nor on any more than negligible doses of tranquilizers or opioid painkillers. (They do pull your health records.)
- You don't spend time hanging out with the local terrorist cell
- A sense of humor to answer questions like: "Are you planning to overthrow the US govt.? Are you a terrorist? Are you a drug dealer?, etc." without busting out laughing that they even ask. (If you answer "no" to any of those questions and they find out you were lying, I don't think the "negative employment consequences" they warn you about when filling out the form will matter a whole lot..)
In other words, probably about 90%+ of U.S. citizens are perfectly eligible for security clearance; it isn't that hard.
Those who go to college tend to look forward to the future, and when you see the difficulties in life ahead of time, you will tend to be focused on THAT more than death. The more you have, the less you want it to be taken away as well, so many will pay attention to avoiding losing what they have. Those who have very little overall will tend to be more attached to just staying alive.
From TFA: "In fact, 76% of children that report fear of death is due to their mothers avoiding the topic. Additionally, more of these children fear early death and adopt unsuitable approaches when it comes to deal with death." I'd be interested to know exactly what questions they asked on this survey and whom they asked. I assume the 288 children were all from the same country? Did they look at religious affiliation? I'm a woman and not particularly afraid of death, but if I had children, I'm pretty sure I would be terrified that they might die. I might also avoid the topic with them because I wouldn't know how to explain to a four-year-old that IMHO, when you die you're just gone, but that's not something to be scared of. If I entered into my real feelings about it (why death is necessary, good, whatever) I'm afraid my kids might be a bit blase about things like crossing the street, playing with kitchen knives, etc. Or what if my teenage children decide death is better than living because of the conversations I had with them? Honestly, I WANT my kids to be a little afraid of death. I feel like this study is glossing over the real problems parents face when discussing death with their children (and I'm guessing this job falls to mothers more often than fathers). "Women are afraid of death and therefore their children are afraid of death and therefor we should let the state teach children about death instead of letting their parents do it" just doesn't ring true for me.
When I laugh really hard, it turns into a coughing fit. Plus my vagus nerve is sensitive to coughing. If I laugh-cough too long, my heart slows down (possibly stops) and I pass out. The experience is very close to what you describe.
It sucks to think, but Harold and Kumar 2 nearly killed me. Coroners report: killed by sequel movie.
Despite flirting with it every few months (and 3 university degrees), I fear death. It's real and it sucks. To not fear it seems like denial or acting irrational.
Facebook taught us that 99.999% of our lives are redundant anyways. We're all living the same life as millions of other people, tweaked ever so slightly, doing all the same things but in slightly different proportions. Moreover, the vast (vast!) majority of what you've ever perceived or known, you have already forgotten anyways.
Have a nice day! :)
This reminds me of an old joke. Why do married men usually die before their wives? Because they want to.
Correlation is not causation. One could argue that education does help in some direct ways (e.g., understanding enough about statistics to realize that you're probably not going to die from terrorism). However, there may be other factors at play, too. Compared with staying near home and picking up a job immediately, higher education carries some risk. It frequently involves moving far away from support networks, and taking on a considerable amount of debt, all for the chance of very delayed gratification. It could simply be that the minds of those seeking higher education are more finely tuned to accept a bit of risk in the search for rewards.
Let's hear from an overeducated university student back home to visit his family:
To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd.
Somebody get that kid some Prozac.
You can't really change anything. Someday you will die. The whole bible had some quote about the living being conscious that they will die and that is true. But we all gotta die sometime. And in the grand scheme of things a couple years doesn't make a difference. Whether it is a car accident tomorrow, lightning strike or something else, or old age in 50 or 60 years.....And anyway it could also be a motorcycle accident :P I had one of those already, probably it is most likely that the bike will be the death of me :-P Oh well. Look at what happens when you go crazy fearing death like those cowards who give up all their rights due to the remote possibility of terrorism. I'm not saying that the government doesn't need to shape up its intelligence gathering abilities. Even now the agencies are so dysfunctional. But wiretapping the whole internet, giving secret letters that cannot be challenged, locking people in gitmo, giving invasive pat downs or dangerous ionizing radiation, it all seems a bit excessive. Plus a lot of the measures don't really make anyone safer, and are just theatre. Really the truth is that people being more aware is good enough too.
Anyway I wouldn't mind dying at 50 or 60 before dementia and all sorts of muscle/bone ailments and pain starts setting in....
Google up on magnesium and heart attacks. The literature varies a bit, but a reasonable estimate might be that around 33% of heart attacks are linked with a magnesium deficiency in the heart cells. Here, for example, is a New York Times article about one test in Oxford
http://www.nytimes.com/1992/06/28/world/a-study-finds-magnesium-cut-deaths-by-heart-attack.html
It's very bizarre that magnesiums role in heart issues has been well known in the medical literature since at least the late 80s (judging by published articles in medical journals), but virtually unknown by practitioner.
Also, if you get you levels checked, make sure it is either a load test or the one offered by Intra Cellular diagnostics
http://www.exatest.com/ (mineral levels via emission spectrum -- yes there website looks like hell, but they are genuine)
as another well known fact in the literature, but not by the practitioners, is that blood levels have nearly 0% correlation with cellular levels.
i used to fear death prior to going to my university. i think my fear dealt more with the idea of not having any possibility of thought or that the identity that i have come to experience as myself no longer would exist in any form. also, i would fear for the things that i cared about in my life. what would happen to them when i'm gone?
however, a friend of mine at the university once told me, "When you're gone, the pain stops." That whole notion really comforted me. Especially when you look at all the BS that you have to deal with these days. as you get older, you would hope that the quality of your life improves along with the advancement of civilization. Instead, you start to realize that the world sucks for the most part because of the design where everyone is out for themselves for the most part and that we deal with things like limited resources. Only by chance if you're in that rare percentile where you don't have to worry about the daily grind, then you can probably enjoy yourself for the most part. However, for an average joe like myself, you just see more bureaucracy and show stoppers that exist to squash your dreams.
A while back my father was in a nursing home after suffering a horrible stroke that left him half paralyzed and unable to speak. I pitied him that he could not potentially ever again enjoy things. I was hoping that if I worked hard enough and he could survive that somehow I could help him and provide him with something that would help recover him from his condition. That never came to be. Later, I kinda envied him in some ways in that he wasn't alive having to deal with all the garbage in the world. Maybe in some perverse way, he was the lucky one. When he was in the hospital, I would see him crying constantly. I heard that happened with patients. I wasn't certain if that was physically being wrought or emotionally wrought. But if it were emotional as a result of him fearing for his life, I would've told him that he's not really missing anything these days.
Anyway, my saying these days is simply: "I no longer fear death. Just inconvenience."
Are they really "more afraid" or are they generally "more aware" of death because, on average, they are confronted with their physical mortality on a more regular basis? They description in the study isn't very detailed and there is a significant difference between "more afraid" and "on their mind more".
Generally (always, always exceptions. we're talking distributions here), those without a degree tend to work in more physical labor with more risk of injury and less access to good medical care. They know they can only move luggage, lift sheetrock, etc for so long. They know their buddy Fred was just seriously injured or died while climbing that ladder, tower, or piece of equipment on the job. Further, those with degrees (again, distributions) tend to be wealthier. They generally do not need to fear that those they leave behind will suffer. The non-degree primary breadwinner and his/her non-degree spouse have more to fear. Their children have more to fear. Legitimate fears regarding the consequences of death.
"Additionally, more of these children fear early death and adopt unsuitable approaches when it comes to deal with death." Unsuitable according to who? I mean, it wouldn't be surprising as many decisions based on immediate fears often have negative long-term consequences, but when you may wind up out on the street, starving, and unprotected, that fear is definately legitimate. Need to take a look at where (country and area), the actual consequences of death there, and how the study was conducted.
Why is it silly to fear the former?
Because it's inevitable.
I'm all for trying to delay it, but since it will happen, I don't see why I should waste my limited time fearing it when I have better things to do.
someone please submit a better story.
"We are just a war away from Amerikastan. When god vs god the undoing of man." Dave Mustaine
I'm invincible now! Yeah!
Swedish plasma phys. PhD student; MSc EE; knows maths, programming, electronics; finance interest; seeks opportunities
It's not death I fear so much as anything that's boundless, endless. When I was a child, I scared the shit out of myself when I tried to really understand what it meant for something to go on forever; I had a reaction similar to the robot from Lost in Space: "Does not compute". Which was the reason why I never found consolation in religion. So, for me, whether it's everlasting life in heaven, eternal torture in a lake of fire, or an infinity fucking Helen of Troy, it's all hell.
My suspicion is that a higher education would lessen the fear of death by introducing a person to the thoughts and arguments of the great minds.
Do non-liberal arts majors get enough of this by electives ( classes they are forced to take )?
So your main reason for not believing in God is that you don't want to live in a world governed by someone who is rude?
fear of death is more common among women than men.
This part of the research is flawed, the reason for men not fearing death is having been married they now look forward to death.
The further up you go in the ivory tower, the more out of touch with reality you are.
There is an interesting video course on philosophy of death from Yale.
http://academicearth.org/courses/death
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1891254&cid=34413838 TheEndOfDays likes stalking and trolling others (as well as starting it up as shown right there)? I like how he was put into his rightful place here in the end http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1891254&cid=34418274 where TheEndOfDays ran like the trolling little coward he really is, unable to back up his trolling and stalking crap. The *divine folks* may be weird to you, but whoever said you are smart enough to understand them in the first place? Especially after your poor showing in trolling and stalking others as you did above, and you ran like the little trolling coward you are. Thanks for exposing yourself to the rest of us.
Its true that Science can't prove, in the mathematical sense, the non-existence of God simply because you can't mathematically prove a negative. But that's true of everything in Science, including crazy ideas such as Gravity, Electromagnetism and Kepler's laws of planetary motion.
The old trope, "Absence of proof is not proof of absence" misses the point. Absence of Evidence IS Evidence of absence.
So, it makes perfect sense to me that people with a higher level of education ( people with more evidence ) would see less need for God or a prescriptive religion.
-S
Fear death? Why? It's just fading away into nothing, or afterlife, or whatever there is. No matter what, why fear it?
What I do fear is the method by which I die. Will it be a slow and painful colon or pancreatic cancer from eating the typical American processed food diet? Will it be liver failure from a food intolerance? Will I burn to death trapped in a car after a mishap in a sanctioned "Open Road Race?" Or, will it be a nice painless hypoxia in a small aircraft? It's the pain and suffering I fear, not death itself. After I die. why would I care? How would I care?
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
While all you people are harping about educated people being less religious, had it occurred to you that educated people grow up in an environment much less likely to be touched or haunted by death?
I was driving around one day and found myself hungry and wanting something to eat and I thought to myself, "Taco Bell! I haven't eaten at a Taco Bell in years!" I drove to the nearest Taco Bell and got a taco, a tostada, and an Enchirito(tm), my old favorite. Man, was I disappointed. "That's why I never eat at Taco Bell!"
So a couple years later I'm driving and thinking how I'm kinda' hungry and I see a Taco Bell. "Taco Bell! I haven't eaten there in years!" I go in and order up my favorite meal and end up thinking, "Geez, that was awful! So that's why I never eat a Taco Bell!
So a couple years later I'm driving and thinking how I'm kinda' hungry and I see a Taco Bell. "Taco Bell! I haven't eaten there in -- wait, I hate Taco Bell!"
I've found this applies to many things in life and have thus dubbed it the Taco Bell Syndrome.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
A few points from the original research article (in Spanish). One link I found: http://digibug.ugr.es/bitstream/10481/4858/1/18616252.pdf
Perhaps someone with better Spanish skills might like to look at it.
They interviewed 288 kids from 11 schools in the city of Ronda, Málaga province. Rather a small group and only in one city.
They did appear to use some sensible question criteria and evaluation techniques. However, I saw nothing in the paper (I freely admit I skimmed, so it might be there), anything to indicate that any other factors were considered. In addition to University Degrees, economic factors, personal experiences, any number of other things might enter into this.
It's a long way from a definitive research. At best, I'd say it's a possible starting point for more rigorous research on a -much- wider broader base of respondents.
Anyone with better Spanish skills who would like to follow up, please do so.
How to find you Ms. "Anonymous Coward"?
-- Linux user #369862
I don't recall anything during the billions of years prior to being born. I suspect after I die it will be similar. Just nothing, and no consciousness to experience it.
Being alive is really quite a trip and a rare gift. I plan on making the best of it. Life is for the living.
A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous, got me?
A TS security clearance (what I have) takes about six months to process, and the organization requesting it is billed about $20-$25k for the investigation process. The first time, your fingerprints are run, and you get drug tests. Every time, an investigator is dispatched to talk personally to your boss, your friends, your co-workers, and you. Your doctor is called, and your medical records scrutinized. Your travel history is examined. If there are any flags anywhere, the investigation takes even longer. (Foreign birth, foreign-born parents, old minor drug arrests, extensive travel to suspicious-looking places, etc. None of those things bar you from a clearance, they just make it take longer.)
Homosexuals are not excluded from a civilian clearance (they don't even ask, and it's not part of the investigation.) I don't know how it's handled for military clearances.
I hope that answers why there aren't more clearances. (It's too expensive, time-consuming and some might blanch at the intense scrutinizing of their private lives.) If you work for a contractor, they have to pay you during processing, which makes it even more expensive.
I don't get it.
Death answers a lot of the big "life" questions (sorry for the pun).
Like what happens after you die? Are any of the religions correct?
See, when I'm dead, I'm dead. I don't give a fuck about any bills, any family, or even my cat. Why? Because I will be dead. Chances are, I won't be feeling anything, or even aware of what I'm leaving behind. You can bury me, burn my corpse, fuck my corpse, I don't/won't care.
I don't believe in religions. Why? Because Man has a history of making shit up to sound better then it is. And a history of lying. And controlling, and being, well, ignorant about what's really going on. That in itself makes it so it's very hard to trust any written texts, mainly texts claiming to be "word of god" or such.
Man with power, abuses the power. It's the story of mankind's life. Man is greedy. Man mostly only cares about him/herself.
And if I'm wrong? Let's say God exists, just like the modern day christians say, according to the church I had to go to back when. I would rather be burning in a lake of fire, then spend eternity around those people. Do you understand what I'm saying? I would gladly jump into the lake of fire to avoid those people.
But it's a moot point, because, based on Man's history, there is no way the modern christians are following anything that wasn't made by man to manipulate people. It's not how man operates.
I'm looking forward to dying. Just because it will answer questions. Will I be aware of those questions being answered? I have no idea, can't tell you if it does, and honestly I don't care enough to come back and tell you. Not that you would believe me anyways.
Be seeing you...
At the risk of feeding an obvious troll, no, C.S. Lewis simply didn't feel like defending Christianity against straw man arguments, hyperbole, or ignorance.
When you don't feel like doing something, do you go around and tell it to anyone willing to listen or do you simply not do that thing?
Had he ANY intention to simply avoid conflict the correct answer would be "Screw 'em".
Or, since we are talking about old-school gentlemen writer here "That is their problem.". Period. End of discussion.
Aaah, but that doesn't fulfill the ego quite as much as insinuating that anyone not agreeing with his particular fairytale (Bible, not Narnia) is a "fucking illiterate moron who should keep his fucking mouth shut".
Then again, he may have just been particularly bad at trying to promote his latest Narnia book to at the time yet untapped market of those who "cannot understand books written for grown-up".
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I've often wondered if there were any studies along these lines, but with the x-axis as intensity of religious convictions. Do atheists fear death more or less than the devout?
Who do I talk to to get a gov't grant for this sort of thing?
Before you design for reuse, make sure to design it for use.
Another finding was that a high educational level prevents negative attitudes, as fear of death and avoiding the topic.
While probably true, one must also consider positive attitudes catalysts for higher education. Of course all of this comes from personal experience, I've seen guys with IQ's of over 150 continuously do far worse in school than complete douchebags, all due to mindset. also, yay first post!
Before I start, yes, your basic premise is correct. Recent studies show that religion does correlate with a higher fear of death. The more religious some people are, the more they'll demand any medical procedure, any woowoo, any bullshit homeopathic pills, to keep them alive, long after being told that it won't help any more. The same people preaching that X is with Jesus now, and praying to Jesus will help Y, and so on, all their lives, are scared shitless of meeting Jesus when their time is almost up.
BUT, IMHO, the explanation seems to actually be simpler. False hope seems to actually be a source of stress, because it introduces an uncertainty and delays just accepting reality. In another study, people who hoped that something will be cured sooner or later with a transplant, were actually more miserable than people who had accepted their condition as it is. Granted, the condition wasn't death, but same general idea. The ones who just accepted that they have some condition and they better get used to it, just moved on with their lives and learned to live with that condition. The ones hoping to reverse it, were keeping thinking about it and being insecure about when or if they'll be cured.
Seems to me like the same could apply to mortality. The sooner you accept that yes, it will happen, and even your cells are pre-programmed to eventually let you die (see, telomeres), the sooner you stop keeping thinking about it, and the insecurity of whether the comforting fairy tale is actually true, and everything.
Basically my take is that you could make a religion without any hell whatsoever. (See the ancient Egyptian religions, for example.) Promise people just a heaven. And IMHO it will still just serve to get people more stressed about death, via the simple insecurity and doubt about that fairy tale.
Plus, really, when I look at religion and at least some religious people, it seems to me like a recipe to keep thinking about death all the time and stressing oneself with it. For some people, before they even fully realize what death is, as children, they start having to do some "if I die before I wake" prayer before bed. Every effing day. Go to church, hear some more about death. Talk to some fundie neighbours, hear some more about death. Hear about some preacher's latest idiocy, chances are, death will be in there somehow. Etc.
I mean, seriously, if someone devoted the same amount of thinking and talking and bargaining with imaginary entities about the possibility of getting laid off or some other misfortune, you can probably see how it wouldn't do much to improve their mood. And how it would just serve as a feedback loop to make them even more worried about a possible layoff. It's like a constant reminder to worry about that some more.
I can't see why it would be any different for death: if someone dedicates their life to regularly worrying about it, yep, I would very much expect them to be more worried about it.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
"I can see you are a swordsman. Therefore you are educated. If you are educated, you must know you are Mortal! CLEARLY you would put the poison furthest away from YOU!"
You know, this is the intertubes. You can use the googles to find the exact quote, instead of just paraphrasing it.
When you die, biology and chemistry takes care of your body. Desperate, huh? People realized this, therefore created "there has to be something beyond", afterlife, energy beings, heaven, hell, etc. to make it more bearable. Then built whole system around it, based on "what you do during your life ... and here you have religion :-)
There is no light without darkness.
Could it in fact be the case that people without degrees are poorer and, for instance, living in more dangerous locales than people with degrees? I'd surely fear death much more if I lived a mile north of where I currently live, and it would be well-warranted. The same could be said in regard to access to healthcare, etc.
Individuals with degrees argue with researchers about the nature of death and the variety of fears one can have towards death. Annoyed researchers check "no."
People with degrees know that the ONLY way out of student loan payments is death. Maybe after dealing with student lenders death doesn't seem so bad anymore.
Not really a huge surprise that people who are smarter and better educated have a more healthy outlook towards the one thing that will happen to us all, without exception.
I'd imagine that if you believed that there was a coin toss chance that you would not actually die, but rather spend an eternity in agonizing torment, death may be a little more worrying.
In the vast majority of cases, higher education = less of a chance that you're frightened by the myths of bronze aged, goat herding, middle-eastern desert nomads.
No, thanks. I prefer poultry to cat meat.
A meta study shows that the more you're educated, the less prone to religious beliefs you are, see how Richard Dawkins in the The God Delusion explains this.
A meta study is a qualitative compilation of different studies about a similar subject.
This new research result reinforces the conclusion of the meta-study, since religion mitigates the fear of death.
For a post on SlashDot, I would have expected a citation to the original survey data, methodology, questions, maybe which university degrees and differences between them, etc., also definitions, significance, etc. Since different people would exhibit different changes in respiratory or heart rate, skin conductivity, etc., how would you get accurate, measurable, and comparable calibrations of the level of fear of death or of anything else? Most of the answers address neither the subject, the fear of death, any real analysis of why the survey might show those with university degrees fear death less, etc. A couple of responders did note, aptly, that there could be a number of factors involved including university graduates possibly facing fewer consciously immediate life-threatening situations than slum dwellers, those in war zones, etc. This one reminds me of the old psych department joke about the experiment with the male rat given a choice between food and a female rat, various adjustments in electric shocks, etc., and some student raises the question: Did anybody ever try testing the results after changing female rats? Fear of death in the abstract where the odds approximate the life insurers’ mortality tables is one thing. Too many teenagers, some of whom are in college, and some other people, in our culture, have somehow convinced themselves that death will not actually happen to them, at least for a long, long time until after they get old, and thus too many lose their lives or are severely injured young because they take foolish, useless risks, seek thrills by so doing, etc. I have known some young recent university and professional school graduates to take risks they should be smart enough and know to avoid and die, in one-car accidents, etc., as a result. Actually facing, or having good reason to believe that you are, or likely are, facing imminent death is something quite different, and I doubt that many of the survey respondents were actually in such a life-threatening situation at the time they responded. What percentage of those in each group had ever actually faced their own imminent death, not as an intellectual exercise but a stark physical reality, as children, or as graduates or at comparable ages? I have some expertise as a child and adult with very credible, serious, imminent threats of murder, etc., and some other momentarily frightening situations ranging from near drowning to violent accidents, before and after acquiring bachelor’s and an earned juris doctor in law. I don’t believe that education had that much effect upon such fears from events before and after graduation. The fear from two armed robberies in which the robbers told me that they were there and intended to kill me in any event did not really get hard to control until the next day, but these were not my first real threats or fears of imminent death, or worse. Maybe the survey should have covered college and university graduates compared to those without degrees in similar battlefield situations etc. Professionally in my law practice, and in other parts of my life, I have known and dealt with a significant number of people suffering with expertly diagnosed Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder before and after treatment,. I don’t think the specific fear of imminent death would check out as being that much more a factor than other traumatic experiences they have dealt with including seeing buddies killed, being wounded, and a lot I have known in privileged and confidential relationships who had suffered mostly incestuous child sexual abuse, or rape at older ages. I have not tested this, but in significant privileged communications with a lot of survivors of various such traumas, I have not found any particular reason to believe that education would prove to be a significant variable either in frequency of such events or resulting PTSD, etc. I have also had some limited samples of multiple contacts with child and adult patients, of varying ages, the latter with and without degrees, facing imminent death
Okay, to know that Pepsico has mod shills here makes me sad.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
This is just a corollary of humans apparent inability to understand abstract concepts they cannot readily define. Humans define things with boundaries. Heck by the very meaning of "define" it is to explain by limitation, the reduction to the point of understanding. In fact that is why we have arguments that make no sense with absolutes, as while we may have created an abstract concept of absolute values (never, forever, infinity, largest, smallest, etc...) humans have trouble using them logically. This is "why" Good needs Evil. Because these concepts are absolute values we cannot define without boundaries, which are provided by using another absolute value to try and make it make sense.
Cyclic logic and all that. Absolute power cannot pick up an infinitely heavy rock. The universe is expanding, but into what? Nothingness? We are obsessed with encapsulating stuff, we need fences and walls and boundaries. I am not sure if it has to do with how we think, our language or what, or even if we will able to ever overcome it due to how we exist.
"I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain."
But, you've also bested my Spaniard, which means you must have studied, and in studying you must have learned that man is mortal, so you would have put the poison as far from yourself as possible, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of me.