8 Scientific Theories About Death

5. The Fear Of Death Appears To Decline With Age

You would think that, the closer one gets to death, the more one would fear it. However, some studies have found that older people tend to express much less death anxiety than younger people.

Fear of death seems to peak during a person's 20s, and then goes into a steady decline - apart from a slight bump around the time of the mid-life crisis - until they reach around 60 at which it plateaus into and almost zen like acceptance.

This said, the studies were studying different people at different stages in their lives, as opposed to studying the same people at different stages, so we can't be 100% sure that the effect isn't caused by generational differences as opposed to age. Only time will really tell, when we see if this current generation of anxious twentysomethings grows up into a generation of anxious pensioners.