For Heidegger that is part of the problem. We have created a technological world (his idea) where the everydayness of a busy life of necessary distraction prevents us from realizing what is important.
Of course you could be saying that most people "in the realw orld" don't think about their own death (though H didn't, in fact, restrict his insistence on the importance of mortality to one's own death,a false assumption you make), and they're right because that is what real people think. Of course people in the real world think socialism is a crock and believe a lot of other stuff we think is wrong.
What's depressing is others' mortality:
> people we love -- or
> worse, people we wanted to love but couldn't really
> -- die and leave
> us behind.
Who said that Heidegger thought that recognition of mortality was supposed to be depressing?
And what we fear in our own cases is not
> death per se but
> pain that may attend the last moments of our lives,
Or fearful? As opposed to creating Angst, which he did think.
But your Lucretianism here misses H's point. He's really not interested in why people fear death, nor is his (or anyone's, according to him, and he's right) concern about death alleviated by the thought that where death is there, I am not; and where I am, death is not. He's interested in the effect of mortality (and ignoring it) on the way we live.
> the pain that may
> be unalleviated due to lack of money, the "war on
> drugs" (cf.
>
<http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20060206/031174.html>),
> etc. A while ago, Jim Devine posted: "A 65-year-old
> couple retiring
> today will need on average a tidy $200,000 set aside
> to pay for
> medical costs in retirement, according to an annual
> Fidelity
> Investment study released this week" (Robert Powell,
> "Paying for
> Health Care in Retirement," 9 March 2006,
>
<http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20060306/033498.html>).
> $200,000! I felt like killing myself on reading
> that. :-0
Yeah, well, that sucks, and he's not a Marxist or even a social democrat. Valid criticisms, but you take people for what they have to offer.
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