Woody Allen once said, “Eternity is a very long time, especially toward the end!” Eternity sounds great on the surface, but actually experiencing it may be an entirely different matter. For some people, the very notion of infinity sends chills up the spine. In fact, for many who suffer from “apeirophobia”—a term for the fear of eternity—the thought of an existence that goes on forever amounts to torture. [...]
Despite all this discussion, there is so little research on apeirophobia that it lacks its own Wikipedia entry. It is not explicitly recognized by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the American Psychiatric Association’s standard reference for psychiatry, but it does meet their criteria for a “specific phobia,” which is classified as an anxiety disorder. It is included on many sites with informal phobia lists, but it is absent from the websites of the Mayo Clinic and the National Institute of Mental Health, as well as WebMD. A Google Scholar search doesn’t yield a single quantitative study on the phobia. [...]
Martin Wiener, a former colleague of mine at George Mason University who researches the neural underpinnings of time perception, notes that the brain region hypothesized to control long-term planning, the frontal lobe, is one of the last to develop in humans as they grow. “In adolescence, there is a dawning realization that occurs where one realizes they will become an adult,” Wiener says. “I suspect that, in apeirophobia, one comes to the ‘realization’ that after death you will live forever (if you believe this), and in simulating that experience in your mind, one realizes that there is no way to project ahead to ‘forever’—and that experience is, inherently, anxiety-provoking. As such, the anxiety that these folks are feeling may not be much different than the fear of growing up, getting old, or death.” [...]
“Terror Management Theory, which is derived from Ernest Becker’s 1973 Pulitzer Prize-winning work of philosophy and psychology The Denial of Death, essentially says people in modern civilization are all walking around in denial of our mortality—and that culture, religion, and entertainment all exist for the purpose of distraction,” Wiener explains. “The idea is that these things keep us from thinking about our own deaths, and that systematically, people are repressing this fear. The fear of eternity could just be that same fear manifesting itself in a different way.”
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