Unfurnished

Cover image: Akashi Gidayū’s Death Poem, woodblock print by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, 1890.

The discussion of death has long been a taboo in our society.

When I was a child, I was completely forbidden from saying the word “die”. Even when I used as an exaggeration—“I’m laughing to death.” The grown-ups would immediately tell me to shut my mouth.

My uncle was relatively more open-minded. Once, he asked the five-year-old me,

“Do you even know what death is?”

“Yes, of course,” I said. But lacking the ability to put the thoughts into clear words, I could only say, “Dying is basically when you disappear.” 

“Aren’t you afraid of death?” he asked.

“No. Death is just disappearing—there’s nothing to be afraid of. I’m only afraid of pain.”

He didn’t continue the conversation.

Only much later did I come to realize that most people in our society have profound fear of death. Jungian psychology describes such fear as the dissolution of the ego—the disappearance of the self.

As a child, death did not appear to me as something forbidden or unspeakable. It felt more like a transition from existence to non-existence—it’s completely neutral. When the fear existed, it was directed at pain, not at disappearance.

Much later, I realized how unusual this stance was.

Death as an immoral choice

Historically, many cultures, from Buddhism to various Indigenous traditions, have treated death as a part of life’s structure rather than a rupture from it. In Buddhism, death is not an absolute end, but part of a continuing cycle shaped by impermanence and reincarnation.

By contrast, modern societies no longer treat death as an inevitable life event; instead, they resist it and often morally condemn it. Medical systems work to prevent death, society discourages open discussion of it, and public discourse frames suicide as weakness or tragedy.

Although euthanasia has gained greater acceptance in recent years, society offers it almost exclusively to those with terminal illness—those whose suffering the medical system can verify and publicly justify. Society audits the choice to ensure it fits within an accepted framework.

When Life Becomes Maintenance

To this day, I still remember the scene when my aunt took me to visit her mother—my great-aunt, an eighty-year-old woman who had lived with diabetes and depression for more than two decades. She sat in her wheelchair all day. Crying was what she did most of the time.

“I want to die,” she would say, several times a day. Yet she could not even stand up from the wheelchair on her own.

My aunt would bluntly tell her to stop saying that. She had long since lost patience with taking care of her. The conversations they had showed no signs of family connection—only the physical maintenance to keep a body alive. After her passing, my aunt once said to me, “I feel bad, but honestly, I’m relieved that she finally died.”

For many people like my great aunt, society never allowed a genuine question—one that asks whether mere continuation of life is still meaningful when the owner of the body no longer experiences it as living.

Authority over one’s own life

For a long time, one question has troubled me: we never had the choice to say no when we entered this life—why, then, is the question of exiting life treated as equally non-negotiable?

Some argue that if death were openly discussed and normalized, societies would invest less effort in addressing poverty or medical care. That is not the argument I am making here. What concerns me is the question of autonomy—whether society ever recognizes an individual as having authority over their own existence. Regardless of one’s living condition, the choice of life and death is one’s own. No society can “protect” someone from their own choice. 

Thomas Szasz, a Hungarian-American psychiatrist and academic, believed that it is problematic that modern society has framed one’s desire to die exclusively as a medical condition. In his view, labeling such desires as “mental illness” takes away a person’s humanity and dignity as the individual is no longer deemed as someone capable of conscious decision-making, but as a problem to be managed.

Szasz once argued that psychiatry often functions less as a science of healing than as a mechanism of social control. Whether one agrees with him or not, his critique raises an uncomfortable question: when one’s desire to exit life is immediately translated into a diagnosis, what happens to personal responsibility and moral agency? 

In a society that treats life itself as non-negotiable, it becomes difficult not to ask whose interests are truly being served.