Why Is Nobody Talking About Death?

Movies, work, food, sex, other people — there's no shortage of things we like to talk about. One thing that rarely makes our list of go-to topics is death. While this might not come as a surprise, it’s a little strange when you think about it. Of all the things we could avoid, why this one? The most certain thing in our lives, the one experience we all share without exception, and we can't bring ourselves to mention it over dinner. Everyone dies, but nobody talks about it. Why is that? And where does our silence around death really come from?

Death Is Scary

Let's start with the obvious. Death is scary. Like scary scary. It comes with a flood of difficult emotions: grief, fear, loneliness, anger, pain, uncertainty.

Now, there are plenty of scary things in life. Clowns, spiders, horror movies, the annual dentist visit. What makes death different from all of those is the unknown. That particular flavour of not knowing. Not just what happens, but when, and how, and what it feels like. There are no expert diers. Nobody you can call and ask "How was it for you?"

This goes against something deep in us. As humans, we love to be in control. We like to plan, to predict, to understand. We use calendars and to-do lists and carefully scheduled routines. Death takes that away from us. It reminds us that some things are beyond knowing and control, maybe even beyond what our rational human mind can comprehend. That can be frightening.

So we don't think about it, or at least we try not to.

Don’t get me wrong, a certain amount of fear around death is normal and healthy. But an extreme fear of dying (also known as Thanatophobia) can significantly impact our well-being and daily life. In a 2021 study, 31% of people who said they feared death reported that it had diminished their enjoyment of life. The thing they were trying to avoid had become a presence anyway, just a more anxious one.

We're Wired to Avoid It

The avoidance of death runs deeper than just personal fear. We’re wired and trained to avoid death — psychologically, biologically, and culturally.

In the 1970s, cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker published The Denial of Death, a book so unsettling it won the Pulitzer Prize. His central argument: almost everything humans do is, at some level, a response to the terror of knowing we'll die. We build legacies, chase status, and stay relentlessly busy — not necessarily because those things are meaningful, but because they keep the existential dread at bay. Ram Dass, a former Harvard psychology professor turned spiritual teacher, talks about this as well. He calls it “somebodyness”: our compulsive need to be(come) someone, to do something, to go somewhere, to matter, to leave a mark.

Psychologists later built on Becker's work to develop Terror Management Theory. The idea: when we're reminded of death, we instinctively reach for distraction and defence. We double down on our beliefs, throw ourselves into work, scroll our phones at night. Not because we're broken, but because our brains are doing exactly what evolution shaped them to do. The organisms that avoided death survived long enough to reproduce. We are their descendants. This avoidance isn't a character flaw but a very old inheritance.

So this isn't a modern problem, but the modern world has probably made it worse.

We Moved Death Out of Sight

For most of human history, death was simply part of everyday life. People died at home, surrounded by family. Children saw it. Communities gathered to prepare the body. Grief was public and shared, woven into ordinary existence.

Then medicine got extraordinarily good at keeping us alive, and quietly, without anyone making a conscious decision, death got outsourced. To hospitals and hospices and funeral homes. To professionals trained to handle it so the rest of us don't have to. Most people in the Western world today have never cared for someone who was dying, never seen a dead body, and never witnessed a final breath. This is not because death has stopped happening; it just happens somewhere else, behind closed doors.

When something disappears from daily life, it also disappears from conversation.

I notice this most at funerals. There's a particular atmosphere at almost every one I've been to. A kind of collective lostness. People standing around in dark clothes, all serious and sad, not quite knowing where to look or what to say. There’s a lot of grief and love, but there's something else too: discomfort. The feeling of being asked to perform an emotional task nobody prepared us for. It's a bit like sitting a final exam for a class you never attended. We all show up, but nobody studied.

Death Isn't Relevant, Until It Is

Death isn't something you think about a lot as a child, a teenager, or even a young adult. When are you supposed to think about it, anyway? Average life expectancy in much of the Western world is now well over 80 years, so there's this unspoken assumption that death is far away, something to worry about later. Most people don't think about it at all... until they do. Until death becomes unavoidable. Until it slaps them in the face: the sudden loss of a parent, a cancer diagnosis, a near-fatal accident. Bam. There it is. Death.

And because we rarely think about death until it's right in front of us, we're often completely unprepared when it actually shows up. It's like changing your diet only after getting sick, or quitting smoking the moment your doctor mentions lung cancer. We wait until we can't ignore it anymore. And by then, the conversation is often already overdue.

The Cost of Not Talking About It

Avoiding death doesn't protect us from it. We still die; it just means we face death less prepared.

When we don't talk about death, we are more likely to feel alone in our grief, less able to support other people in their pain, and less equipped to make sense of our own mortality.

And we miss something else entirely. Research shows that people who let themselves think about death, who actually sit with the reality of it rather than looking away, tend to live with more intention and more presence. The Stoics were onto this: memento mori, remember you will die. Not as a morbid exercise, but as a clarifying one. Held at the right distance, the awareness of death makes life better, more deliberate, more intentional, more awake, and, ironically, more alive.

Death and life aren't opposites. They're part of the same thing. And the conversation we keep postponing might be the one that changes how we live.