Nah, it’s natalists who live in fear of death, feeling like they’re dying constantly if their children are imperfect. I’ve found that living on the edge of society has equipped me uniquely to long to live forever. The people in the middle of everything pretty much all hate someone with blind, stupid rage, and often they hate whole classes of people. The kind of hatred that occurs in the middle of society is extraordinary. Ostensibly well-adjusted people form unyielding partisanships and menace everyone who doesn’t comply with their dictates about who sucks on high. It’d be funny if I didn’t have to share a world with the robotically hateful warrior people.
Humanity owes a lot to the existence of a fringe of people who can move about without being crippled by bigotries. The socially successful robots who never shake their programming just chase around in circles forever; they can’t hear what doesn’t support their holy causes. Well, sometimes they can be tricked, turned, or just made to remember their own good, haha, and science advances despite all the ever-warring happy people energies who don’t seem all that happy at all when observed from afar.
We live in the most beautiful known world to be alienated in.
/<->
The study itself is pure academic trash. It’s reporting on cultural factors as though they were scientific. Our culture mixes death and loneliness metaphors freely. Do you know who drives that..? People who aren’t lonely, haha! Culture isn’t driven from the edges (or is it?), so what this really demonstrates is that the people who do drive culture conflate the idea of having any state of mind other than their own with “dying”.
Which is to say, they’re robots. The idea that they should have any values other than their own feels existentially threatening. The article points this out too, by pointing out that reminders of death reinforce people’s cultural attachments. The obsession with death is therefore on the basis of this data something that is archetypally conservative. Death-related thinking reflects not loneliness, but an unwillingness to reconsider ideas.