Experience has further taught me this, that we ruin ourselves by impatience.

There is no essential self that lies pure as a vein of gold under the chaos of experience and chemistry. Anything can be changed, and we must understand the human organism as a sequence of selves that succumb to or choose one another.

Mimetic desire gives significance to things because of the other people who want those things. When the model of desire is gone, so does our interest in the thing. It’s people we care about most, not things. If you can identify how much significance you place on something merely because of someone else’s relationship to it, you can begin to free yourself from its hold.

Social media is a mimetic machine. What we typically call ‘social media’ is really social mediation – the mediation of desires. All day, every day, desires are being modelled to us through people we barely know. Mimetic desire is the hidden engine of these platforms. Getting off social media completely might be admirable, but it’s not realistic for most people. One thing you can do, though, is be extremely careful – and intentional – about whom you ‘follow’. Make an honest assessment of what kinds of desires the people you follow are cultivating in you. Ask yourself: Is this person I am following actually leading me to develop any positive desires, to aspire to greater things? Or are they causing me more anxiety? At the same time, realise that everything you say or do is a model of desire for someone else.

Desire (as opposed to need) is an intellectual appetite for things that you perceive to be good, but that you have no physical, instinctual basis for wanting – and that’s true whether those things are actually good or not. Your intellectual appetites might include knowing the answer to a mathematics problem; the satisfaction of receiving a text from someone you have a crush on; or getting a coveted job offer. These things won’t necessarily cause physical pleasure. They might spill over into physical enjoyment, but they are not dependent on it. Rather, the pleasure is primarily intellectual.

“Staving off death is a thing that you have to work at. Left to itself—and that is what it is when it dies—the body tends to revert to a state of equilibrium with its environment. If you measure some quantity such as the temperature, the acidity, the water content or the electrical potential in a living body, you will typically find that it is markedly different from the corresponding measure in the surroundings… More generally, if living things didn’t work actively to prevent it, they would eventually merge into their surroundings, and cease to exist as autonomous beings. That is what happens when they die.”

In the poem, Lucretius proposes an idea, later termed the ‘Symmetry Argument’, that hints at the second thing you should do to overcome the fear of death: try to recall what it was like before you were born. Not how the world was, which is the task of historical imagination, but what it was like to be you – before you were created. You’ll discover that prenatal existence isn’t something that can be thought about, much less experienced. The symmetrical part of the argument, of course, is that you have the very same difficulty in imagining what it is like to be dead. Indeed, according to Lucretius, you-pre-existence is the same thing as death or post-existence: both involve the absence of you. No doubt you don’t fear your prenatal existence and logically speaking, given their equivalence, it follows that you should fear death the exact same amount, as in not at all. (As the novelist Vladimir Nabokov put it in his memoirs: ‘common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.’)

According to this tradition, the first thing to do to overcome the fear of death is to try to articulate to yourself what it would be like to be dead. Imagine yourself, but rather than alive – dead. (Remember, we’ve cast aside the afterlife.) As you’ll swiftly appreciate, there is an intractable contradiction right at the centre of this first actionable item. You cannot imagine what it would be like to be dead, because death is an absence of existence. There is, literally, nothing to imagine – because nothingness itself cannot be imagined. There is no perspective, no view from nothingness, nothing to which it can be approximated. So that is the first recommendation: realise that being dead isn’t an experience. Death itself isn’t really a thing at all. In Epicurus’ words: ‘Death is nothing to us.

The Way of the Samurai is, morning after morning, the practice of death, considering whether it will be here or be there, imagining the most sightly way of dying, and putting one's mind firmly in death. Although this may be a most difficult thing, if one will do it, it can be done. There is nothing that one should suppose cannot be done.

Inevitably, though, there are moments when the reality of our eventual death strikes us in a new, chillier light. A close call demonstrates the tenuousness of life, or the death of a loved one reminds us that no one is exempt from humanity’s ultimate destination. Even talking about death, as we are now, can be enough to bring on a ruminative contemplation of the end, and with it a shudder of fear about one’s own extinguishment. In these moments, when your pending dissipation presents itself afresh, the fact of death is experienced in a new way. Rather than merely being ‘known’ like one more quotidian statement about the world – ‘The sky is blue. I will die’ – the sense of one’s ending is felt more deeply and more immediately. In these moods, the terror of death seeps into your awareness of yourself as a person; its awesome inevitability and finality makes you feel small and powerless. This is the fear of death at an existential level, brought on by the almost unthinkable notion that there is and only ever will be one of you – and sooner or later it will flicker out of existence, leaving little more than memories in other soon-to-be-gone beings. The fear of death as I’m discussing it here is not about the practical worry of who will pay off your credit card debt after you’re gone: it’s about the unsettling fact that the person who earned that debt in the first place is but a fleeting speck of an event in the infinite history of the Universe.