Part of our fear of death is the idea of being forgotten.

We try to build meaningful lives so something of us stays behind.

Most people won’t be widely remembered, but they still shape the world.

Our lives are structured to pursue meaning, even if we don’t consciously think about it that way. We make goals and align our interests, passions, and strengths with impactful paths. We worry about whether our efforts are recognized and whether our time is being spent well. Who are we? Do we matter? Are we able to distinguish ourselves from the 8-plus billion others on this planet?

Cultivating purpose takes work and patience; sometimes it sustains us, and other times it’s burdensome. Still, we labor on because stopping feels unsettling—like we’d leave something essential unfinished.

At the same time, we fear death. Not always in a way that’s at the forefront of our minds, but in a way that’s on the back burner, through avoidance. We don’t like to talk about it, linger on it, or let it interfere too much with the way we organize our lives. We know, abstractly, that we will die, but we treat that awareness as something to be acknowledged briefly and then set aside (if and when possible), so it doesn’t destabilize the structures we rely on to keep going. We avoid “D” words like death, dying, and dead in favor of more palatable substitutes like “passed away” and “in a better place.”

What’s not always on our radar is just how closely these seemingly opposite ends of the spectrum are linked. Our drive to live fully and our fear of death are not separate terrains, but more like the yin and yang of the same piece of property. We pursue life-affirming experiences—like setting goals and cultivating our identities—for many reasons: pleasure, belonging, self-discovery, helping others, and fulfilling expectations. Yet beneath these motives is a fear that’s harder to pinpoint: being forgotten.

Likewise, there are the obvious reasons we avoid death, but tucked underneath the pain, loss, and uncertainty, we are confronted with the same dreaded threat: total erasure. In other words, if we spend a lifetime building, creating, feeling, and connecting, only to vanish the next day, what remains? Will our efforts live on, or will they eventually fade along with us?

Psychology describes the tension between our awareness of mortality and our desire to feel like our lives matter through frameworks such as Terror Management Theory, or TMT. Terror Management Theory suggests that the way people cope with the knowledge of death is to invest in acts that feel significant and enduring—such as cultural values, personal accomplishments, and relationships that will last beyond our physical existence, and to maintain a sense of self-esteem that affirms we are valuable contributors within those systems. Another concept, symbolic immortality, is the belief that people’s memory, influence, and contributions live on after death through actions, ideas, and relationships, all of which leave signs of our existence on Earth.

Empirical work lends support to this idea. In a large multi-sample study, Lifshin and colleagues (2021) found that people with higher self-esteem were more likely to believe they would be remembered and have an impact after they die. This belief—feeling that one’s life will leave a lasting imprint—was associated with lower loneliness, reduced existential isolation, fewer death-related thoughts, and lower levels of depression. In other words, believing that our lives will matter beyond our own lifespan was associated with lower levels of psychological distress related to mortality.

At first glance, that fear can sound like vanity—a desire for recognition, applause, or legacy in its most public forms. But for most people, the fear has less to do with fame and more to do with a fear of being forgotten. What we worry about is not simply that no one will praise us. It is that our lives might pass through the world without leaving a trace—that everything we built, felt, or contributed could eventually disappear as if it had never happened.

And existentially speaking, we grapple with questions like, “What is the meaning of life?” Is life merely a biological process—sustaining ourselves for a period of time before eventually dying—or is there something grander, more significant, and more enduring? Human beings know that their lives are finite, yet they continue to invest, care, and commit themselves to projects and relationships. This suggests a deeply rooted desire to participate in something more purposeful than mere survival.

This helps explain why the fear of being forgotten can emerge in unexpected moments—after the joyful frenzy of a major accomplishment recedes, during quiet plateaus when life feels suspended between transitions, or in the slower “in-between” periods when momentum temporarily disappears. When the noisy and commanding parts of life settle down, meaningful and existentially based questions might start rising to the surface. Without the structure of goals, deadlines, or achievements, people may suddenly wonder: Am I relevant? Do I matter? What happens when I am no longer here at all? These moments can feel unsettling because they pull back the curtain on what usually stays hidden in the background: whether our lives leave any lasting mark.

In the end, the fear of being forgotten is about connection and the reassurance that our lives made an impact—that we were here, that we mattered, and that our contributions changed the world in some small way. Most people’s lives will not go down in history, but they are carried forward in small ripples that make a difference, potentially even invisible or insignificant, like metaphorical footprints we leave in someone’s heart that carry on.

Think of it this way: Pennies become nickels, then dimes, then quarters, and eventually dollars. A hundred years from now, we may not remember the pennies of today. Do you know the names of most people who lived a century ago but never appeared in history books? Probably not. Still, their contributions impacted the world we inherited and will eventually pass on. So, in a hundred years, when there are no more pennies, know that your penny did its job—it became part of tomorrow’s treasures.

Lifshin, U., Horner, D. E., Helm, P. J., Solomon, S., & Greenberg, J. (2021). Self-esteem and immortality: Evidence regarding the terror management hypothesis that high self-esteem is associated with a stronger sense of symbolic immortality. Personality and Individual Differences, 175, 110712.

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