"Death doesn't affect the living because it has not happened yet. Death doesn't concern the dead because they have ceased to exist"

W. Somerset Maugham’s reflection on death invites readers to reconsider common anxieties surrounding mortality. Often, the concept of death casts a looming shadow over the living, becoming a source of existential dread and worry. Yet, Maugham suggests this fear is somewhat misplaced. Death remains perpetually in the future for those still alive; it is only a hypothetical, never a current reality for the living. The living engage with death only through anticipation, imagination, or the loss of others, not through direct, personal experience. As it stands, life is experienced only while it persists, while death, when it finally comes, marks the cessation of experience entirely.

For those who have already died, death is not a state to be endured or suffered. The dead, no longer conscious, are beyond pain or fear, memory or anticipation. Worry ceases with the end of personal awareness, rendering death nothing to be endured from the perspective of the deceased. Maugham’s words point toward the illogical nature of fearing death: it exists only in abstraction for the living, and as the absence of all things, including fear, for the dead.

This interpretation underlines the futility of allowing the thought of death to poison our present lives. Since suffering about death is only ever possible during life, it might be wiser to focus on living meaningfully rather than dwelling on the inevitable end. Maugham’s position mirrors philosophical traditions stretching from Epicurus to existentialism, which argue that death is nothing to us because, where we are, death is not, and where death is, we are not. Emphasizing this boundary between living and dying, he calls into question the utility or wisdom of death anxiety and gently directs attention back to the possibilities of being alive. Maugham highlights the paradox: death never truly happens to us while we exist, so it might be more liberating to live in the present.