Death is nothing to us — so why fear it

Epicurus argued that while we exist, death is not present, and once death arrives, we no longer exist to experience it — the two never actually meet. Fearing death, on this view, means fearing a state you will never be around to suffer. A life freed from that fear, he thought, was the real cure for anxiety about mortality.

— Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus — c. 300 BCE, preserved in Diogenes Laërtius's Lives of the Philosophers