Humankind may be hard-wired for its preservation or perhaps natural selection over countless generations resulted in the survival of those with innate caution about indulging in life-threatening behavior.
But death is unavoidable and no amount of caution can prevent it. For many and perhaps most of us that situation is unsettling at best and creates immense fear at worst. Quite naturally we fear death or perhaps it's that we fear dying - they're not necessarily the same thing.
Those who know about survival beyond corporeal death likely do not have any fear about what they'll find when they have passed over. But that hard wiring I mentioned earlier - or natural selection of certain characteristics - may still leave them with fear of, or distress about, the sometimes protracted process of actually dying.
Quite naturally we may fear the possibility of extreme and chronic pain before death and/or the loss of our faculties, becoming frail and dependent on others, for example. You could say those too may partly explain our fear of death.
The various reasons must heighten the fears some have concerning death but we also should factor in that folk may also fear that their death will mean their obliteration, a total disappearance of everything they were as individuals.
Let's not be mealy-mouthed - on the face of it death can appear to be the end of things, the "When yer dead, yer dead." situation beyond which there is nothing, zero, zilch, nada, nichts.....
We who know differently about that last situation are immensely blessed.
