Why Don't You Grieve the Nonexistence Before Your Birth?

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For billions of years before your birth you did not exist, and that fact has never once troubled you. So why does the very same nonexistence, when it lies ahead, keep you awake at night? Perhaps what we fear is not death, but the life we have not yet lived.

One night, when sleep wouldn't come, did you ever think about your own death? Most of us have. When that thought arrives there's a small tightening inside the ribcage, the mind bolts somewhere else, you reach for your phone. Now perform the same mental movement in reverse: think of the year eighteen fifty. You weren't there. Think of sixteen fifty — again, you weren't there. While the pyramids were rising in Egypt, while armies faced each other at Manzikert, while Ottoman envoys made their way along the roads to Vienna, you did not exist. For billions of years a universe turned and turned without you. Now put your hand on your heart and be honest: this doesn't trouble you at all, not in the least. It hasn't cost you a single night's sleep.

And here stands one of the most provocative questions in the history of philosophy. If the nothingness after death fills you with dread, why doesn't the nothingness before birth do the same? Aren't they the same thing? Both of them are an infinite stretch of time in which you are not.

The first man to ask this question systematically was a philosopher born on the island of Samos who bought a garden in Athens. Epicurus lived between three hundred forty-one and two hundred seventy before the common era. In that garden he purchased outside the city walls, he founded the school that still bears his name. Women were admitted there, and so were slaves — something quite extraordinary for the period. What he taught was a kind of prescription for mental health: what unsettles a person is not the world itself, but their false beliefs about the world. And the most poisonous of all false beliefs was the fear of death.

In a letter to a student named Menoeceus, he builds his argument with an almost mathematical brevity. Whether something is good or bad for us depends on our being able to feel it. A toothache is bad because you feel it. Death, however, is the complete cessation of feeling. Therefore death is neither bad nor good; death is nothing. And from this comes that famous line: while we exist, death is not; when death comes, we are not. The two are never in the same room. You will never meet the thing you fear.

On paper this argument looks flawless, and in practice it comforts almost no one. People hear it, they nod, and then at night they feel the same tightening all over again. Epicurus's followers must have noticed this too, because two and a half centuries later a Roman poet rebuilt the same idea in a far more insidious form.

Lucretius lived roughly between ninety-nine and fifty-five before the common era, and he wrote a colossal poem in six books: De Rerum Natura, that is, On the Nature of Things. The third book of this poem is a reckoning with the fear of death from beginning to end. And there, in the pages of On the Nature of Things, he makes a move that is still argued over in philosophy classes today. He says: nature is holding a mirror up to you — look into it. You shudder when you think of the infinite time that follows your death. Well then, look at the infinite time before your birth. It was exactly the same. The example he chose was the kind to raise the hair on a Roman reader's neck: while Carthage and Rome were at war, while Hannibal crossed the Alps with elephants and ravaged Italy, while everyone wondered which empire would be left standing — you were not there. The world shook, cities burned, tens of thousands died. You feel no sorrow at having missed any of it. Because there was no you to miss it.

On the gravestones of Rome, a four-letter abbreviation of this very thought was even in circulation. It stood for: I was not, I was, I am not, I do not care. That must be the coolest-headed sentence a person could have carved onto their own tombstone.

This is the symmetry argument. Its structure is simple. The nothingness after death is the same kind of thing as the nothingness before birth. The nothingness before birth is not bad — you already prove this by the way you behave. Therefore the nothingness after death is not bad either. Your fear is a miscalculation, the product of habit rather than logic.

And you don't need a philosophy book to see how solid the ground beneath this is in everyday life. Open the old photo album at home. There's probably a picture of your mother or your father in their twenties, by the sea, hair in the wind, laughing. In that frame, you are absent. That summer happened, that laugh rang out, that evening ended, and you were nowhere to be found. What is it you feel looking at that photograph? Curiosity, perhaps a sweet kind of envy, perhaps tenderness. But not dread. Nobody looks at a photograph of their parent's youth and weeps, "I am devastated that I wasn't there."

So why doesn't an argument this clean convince any of us?

Vladimir Nabokov, in the very first pages of his autobiography Speak, Memory, tells of a young man he once knew. This young man had watched an amateur home movie shot in his family's house a few weeks before he was born. Everything in the footage is familiar: the same house, the same garden, the same people, the same staircase. His mother is waving from a window. Her belly is flat. And in one corner of the room stands a brand-new baby carriage, not yet used. The young man looks at that carriage and a chill runs through him, because an empty baby carriage strikes him, strangely, as a coffin.

What truly shakes him is this: the world is there, complete, working perfectly, and his absence disrupts nothing. Nobody is looking for him. Nobody's face carries the trace of something missing. Nabokov calls this feeling chronophobia — the fear of time. And it is precisely here that he places the most quoted image in Speak, Memory: common sense tells us that human life is a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. We generally fear the darkness ahead of us, not the one behind. And yet the two are twins.

This single example shows why the symmetry argument fails on an emotional level: the man does not refute the logic, he simply feels the same shudder when he looks backward too. So the symmetry is there, but our feeling is not symmetrical.

Now, is this emotional asymmetry merely a flaw, or is there a reason behind it? One of the clearest minds of the twentieth century attempted an answer. Thomas Nagel, in a short essay published in nineteen seventy and later collected in his book Mortal Questions, rethought the question of why death is bad.

Nagel's answer is this: death is not bad because it hurts. It is bad because it deprives you of something. This is called the deprivation account. To die is to have a life not yet lived taken out of your hands. The tragedy of someone who dies in an accident at twenty is not that the person suffers — very often there is no suffering at all. The tragedy lies in letters that will never be written, in a home that will never be built, in a craft that will never be learned, in children who will never be born, in people who will never be met. The loss is not inside experience; it is in the absence of experience.

Nagel does not stop there, and he comes straight to our question. If death is a deprivation, then shouldn't the nothingness before birth be a deprivation as well? His answer is subtle. He says it is easy to imagine a person having lived longer. The same person, the same memories, the same bonds, just a few more years. But imagining a person having been born much earlier is not the same thing. Had you been born a hundred years earlier, that person would not have been you. Out of another body, another era, another language, an entirely different human being would have emerged. So the time after death is time that can be taken from you. The time before birth was time that could never, under any circumstances, have been yours.

Is that convincing? It is still debated. But there is another layer to the matter, and the person who opened it was Derek Parfit. Parfit's nineteen eighty-four book Reasons and Persons contains a thought experiment showing that human beings are not neutral with respect to time.

It goes like this: you wake up in a hospital. The last day of your memory has been erased with a drug — a standard procedure. You ask the nurse. She says there are two kinds of patient in this ward. Some of them underwent a horrific procedure yesterday that lasted ten hours with no painkillers; but they do not remember it. The others will undergo the same kind of procedure this afternoon, but it will last only one hour. To find out which one you are, she has to go and check your file.

While the nurse goes off to the file, what is running through your mind? Almost everyone wants the same thing: please let it be yesterday's. Ten hours of horror is preferable to one hour of horror, as long as it is already behind you. And yet, in terms of the total quantity of pain, this is completely irrational. Parfit calls it bias toward the future. We are not creatures spread evenly through time; we live facing forward, and we treat the past like a debt already paid.

And here, perhaps, is the real reason we do not grieve over the nothingness before our birth. Not a triumph of logic, but a habit of psychology. We do not grieve for the nothingness in the past because it is finished; we fear the nothingness in the future because it is still on its way. And that produces a conclusion with a certain chill to it: Lucretius may be right, but being right is not enough. Because fear is not uprooted by an argument. It is uprooted only by a way of living.

At this point it is worth turning to an entirely different geography and an entirely different method. Because while at one end of the Mediterranean the advice was to tear the thought of death out of the mind, in the east the advice was exactly the opposite: to place death at the very centre of the mind.

Al-Ghazali was born in ten fifty-eight in Tus, in what is now Iran, and died there in eleven eleven. He was the most brilliant teacher at the Nizamiyya Madrasa in Baghdad; in his thirties he occupied the most prestigious chair in the Islamic world. Then one day he left it all behind — the teaching and the title — and wandered for years, passing through a kind of spiritual crisis, and when he returned he wrote a colossal work: the Ihya Ulum al-Din, The Revival of the Religious Sciences.

This book has forty chapters. And the very last chapter of The Revival of the Religious Sciences, the fortieth, is devoted from beginning to end to death and what comes after it. There, al-Ghazali recommends to his reader a habit that may strike them as strange: remember death often. Remember it several times a day. Go to funerals, go to graveyards, and stand there a long while.

At first glance this looks like a method of torture. But al-Ghazali's reasoning runs like this: what rivets a person to this world is the silent assumption that death will never come. Once that assumption is broken, the weight of the things you have accumulated grows lighter, your resentments shrink, and you struggle to remember who it was you were angry with. Remembering death is not meant to darken life, but to sift out which part of life truly matters.

Now set the two prescriptions side by side. One says: do not think about death, because it is nothing. The other says: think about death constantly, because it is a threshold. The methods are diametrically opposed, yet the place they arrive at is strikingly similar: taking life back out of the hands of fear.

The question of non-existence before birth appears in this tradition too, in an entirely different key. In the Quran, the twenty-eighth verse of the chapter of the Cow addresses the human being like this: you were dead, and He gave you life. That is, your starting point was already non-existence; your existing right now is not a rule that must be preserved, but something given. The first verse of the chapter of Man looks into that same emptiness even more directly, and asks: has there not passed over the human being a long stretch of time when they were not yet a thing worth mentioning? This sentence is the very emptiness Lucretius was looking into. The same infinite darkness. But the tone of voice is entirely different; it is spoken not with a shudder, but with serenity. There, non-existence is not a catastrophe but a reminder: you are not necessary, you are on loan.

And when this thought turns into poetry in Anatolia, it takes on its most human form. Yunus Emre lived in the second half of the thirteenth century and the beginning of the fourteenth, and he wrote the plainest lines about death that still circulate in Turkish today. Yunus does not fear death; he separates the body from the soul, and says bodies die but souls do not. Yet the same man also says there is one thing he cannot bear. One thing in this world burns him inside: those who die while still in their prime, like a field of grain cut down while it is still green.

Those two lines are, in truth, Nagel's deprivation account written as poetry seven centuries earlier. Yunus is not objecting to death itself; he is objecting to being harvested before ripening. Grain cut in the field while it is still green. It shows exactly where the loss lies: not in any pain the dead person feels, but in what was never lived.

And here there is a quiet observation about everyday life. Until a century ago, people died at home. Children saw the funeral, went to pay their condolences; the women of the neighbourhood washed the body; for three days the whole street revolved around that house. Death was inside life, somewhere between the kitchen and the bedroom. Today death mostly takes place at the end of a hospital corridor, in a room we do not know, in the hands of specialists. We have removed it from our lives. But with this strange result: the more invisible we have made death, the more we have come to fear it. Perhaps this is what al-Ghazali sensed. What you refuse to look at grows.

So let us turn the question around, because that is where the real yield is. If death is bad and life is good, then living forever ought to be best of all. Is that really so?

The British philosopher Bernard Williams approached this question in nineteen seventy-three by way of a work of literature. He discusses Elina Makropulos, the heroine of the play Věc Makropulos, The Makropulos Case, written by Karel Čapek and turned into an opera by Leoš Janáček. Elina's father is physician to an emperor, and he prepares an elixir that extends life; the elixir is first tested on his own daughter. The girl sees that it works. For more than three hundred years she has been forty-two years old.

And what The Makropulos Case shows us is this: the woman is not happy. She is bored. She has seen everything, lived every love, known every betrayal, listened to every piece of music. People have become, for her, repeating types. Nothing promises her anything any more, because everything that could be promised has already happened and already worn out. In the end she refuses to renew the elixir.

Williams draws a harsh conclusion from this. Our wanting to go on living depends, in fact, on particular desires. Finishing a book, seeing a child grow up, completing a piece of work, being reunited with someone, seeing a certain place. He calls these categorical desires: the things that get you out of bed tomorrow morning. In an endless life, all of these desires sooner or later run dry. Then two options remain. Either you stay the same person and life turns into an unending repetition, which is unbearable. Or you change so much over the centuries that the being who exists three hundred years from now is no longer you; this would not be the immortality of the you of today, but the life of a stranger who has taken your place. In neither case is there a winner.

Now bring this back to your own life, because that is where the real question lies. If you knew you were going to live forever, what would you do today? For most of us, the honest answer is: nothing. You would put it off. You could write the book tomorrow just as easily, you could call your father next year, you could see that city a hundred years from now, you could drag the quarrel out for another century, you could save the apology for the next thousand years. Infinite time makes no choice meaningful, because no choice means giving anything up. Where choosing something costs you nothing, there is no such thing as a choice at all.

An eighty-year life is about twenty-nine thousand days. Today is one of those days, and it is being spent right now, never to return. That sentence can be read as a threat, but it says exactly the opposite. The weight of everything you do comes precisely from this. The afternoon you give to someone is a gift, because you stole it from something else. The three months you spend keeping your anger alive are subtracted from a finite number of days. Being mortal is the very condition that makes life valuable.

And now we can return to where we began, to that darkness before birth that never once costs you any sleep. Perhaps the symmetry argument teaches us nothing about death. Perhaps what it teaches us is how extraordinary it is to exist at all. Behind you lie billions of years that passed without you; ahead of you lie billions of years that will pass without you. Between these two immense stretches of darkness, an interval has opened up for reasons no one can fully explain, and inside that interval you are breathing, you are following these sentences, you love certain people, you are planning something for tomorrow. The real lesson of not grieving the nothingness before your birth is not that you should stop fearing death. It is this: the situation you find yourself in is not the rule, it is the exception.

Epicurus did not leave this as a theory. According to Diogenes Laertius, on his deathbed, racked by unbearable stomach pain and the agony of kidney stones, he wrote a short letter to a friend named Idomeneus. He knew he was in the last day of his life. He wrote, too, that the pain in his body was at its very peak; he did not hide it. But against that he set the joy he took in the memory of the philosophical conversations they had shared, and he said the scales were balanced. He asked that his students be looked after, and he died that way.

This is not the abolition of fear. It is fear balanced by memory and by friendship. And perhaps that is the most realistic answer we have. You do not grieve the nothingness before your birth, because there was no you there to be lost. The same will be true of what comes after death. The difference between them lies right now, in your hands. One darkness has passed, the other is coming, and in the interval of light between the two there is a great deal of work to be done.

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