The Epicurean on Death

"Where death is, I am not. Where I am, death is not." This deceptively simple argument is Epicurus's most famous answer to the fear of death. If death is the end of consciousness, there is no experience of being dead. You will never encounter your own death, because the moment it arrives, you are no longer there to feel it.

The argument does not address the fear of dying, which involves pain and the loss of a future. But it targets the dread of nonexistence directly: the time before your birth was also nonexistence, and that never troubles you at all.