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Think of it this way: you don't have nearly as much to lose as you once thought. On the other hand, you'd better start living a good life now, because while you're alive is all you've got.

"The Wall" by Jean-Paul Sartre deals with these issues. I read it in some BS French Lit class, but "The Wall" was one that stuck with me. I'd recommend reading it (no long at all) as it gives a good depiction of what it's like facing death secularly.

Any happy living being will not find satisfaction in death. You just have to take the existential outlook that you may die or be immortal, in either case you have to define and strive for happiness. I remember as a child thinking "death will never happen to me." I also used to find refuge in belief, until I realized it was just a delusion.

I found that liberating, though. If life is here for a moment or forever, it is best not to let death define it. Just live.

Richard Carrier has a few essays on secular valuation of life; you might want to check those out. Keep striving...

My guess is that all people -- religious or not -- are completely terrified towards the end. But maybe religion can bring comfort to some, so that they are terrified to a lesser degree.

I think many people are not terrified, or even particularly afraid. I certainly don't want to die (like, ever), but I can understand those who "are ready" to die, now. Ten years ago, I couldn't even understand that. It was incomprehensible to me.

Generalizing improperly from my own experience and that of people I know, it seems to me that it gets easier to accept the idea of death for many people as they age. Hopefully we'll crack the aging thing ASAP, but I wonder how many will die of old age even after aging is more-or-less optional.

I don't think I would be terrified, nor you.

While I'm too young to say, I think at the time you are old, your brain would have changed (or degraded) sufficiently enough to handle it with relative ease. That's the only way it makes sense to me when I read about ailing people talking about seeing the exit, the final candle, or whatever.

That aside, I also consider "what happens after you die" to be the ultimate question. Because nobody alive, dumb or smart, knows the answer, and nobody has come back to tell us. It just depends on when you think you are ready to find the answer. Perhaps after you solve the unified field theory everything will converge.

While I'm too young to say, I think at the time you are old, your brain would have changed (or degraded) sufficiently enough to handle it with relative ease. That's the only way it makes sense to me when I read about ailing people talking about seeing the exit, the final candle, or whatever.

Even if true, not everyone would die after their brain has degraded in this way.

Sleep disorders are quite common in the elderly and I would guess that this is mostly due to a fear of death while asleep.

Having "happy" children is the best afterlife. Or, as people such as Alan Kay and Seymour Papert (who I believe are childless) have done, do something for everybody's children.

"Or that this reality is a computer simulation and we wake up in a bigger computer simulation where we get bored sometimes and choose to spend lifetimes during interesting periods of time."

"Either of these are much more likely than the eternal afterlife of a theistic god..."

What's the difference between these two?

someone tried to give you an answer here

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14926