Life in 2025: The Counterintuitive Cure for Fear that No Therapist I've Ever Known Will Tell You

How “dying before you die” rewires your brain and frees your life

Life in 2025: The Counterintuitive Cure for Fear that No Therapist I’ve Ever Known Will Tell You

How “dying before you die” rewires your brain and frees your life

The Jack Hopkins Now Newsletter #612: Wednesday, October 22nd, 2025.

The Issue That Will Blow the Ceiling Off Your Fear

Let me warn you up front:
This issue of Jack Hopkins Now isn’t just another “mindset tweak.”

It’s a psychological jailbreak.

If you’ve ever wrestled with anxiety…dread…or that low-grade hum of fear that seems to ride shotgun no matter how well things are going…what you’re about to read will hit you like a defibrillator.

You’ll feel it in your nervous system before your brain can explain it.
Because this one doesn’t argue fear away…it erases its authority.

This is the first issue I’ve ever written where people I’ve shared this with personally have written back saying things like:

“Jack, this rewired me. I can’t even feel the same kind of fear anymore.”
“My anxiety evaporated in 20 minutes.”

That’s not hype. That’s what happens when you do something that’s equal parts heretical and scientific…
…you stop trying to outrun death…and you start living like it already happened.

It sounds insane. Until it works.

And when it does… you’ll never think about courage…calm…or freedom the same way again.

So buckle in.
By the time you finish this issue…you’ll understand why every monk, warrior, and survivor who ever touched real peace…did it by dying before they died.

Let’s begin.

Waking Into Fear

You ever wake up in the middle of the night…and for half a second forget where you are…then remember: Oh right. I’m still here.

That small relief… is proof of how much we fear leaving.
Even when life’s hard…we cling to it like a dog on a bone.

For most people…death is a shadow in the corner of the room…always near…never acknowledged.

They push it away with distractions: another scroll…another pill…another plan.
But the more you deny it…the bigger it grows.

I learned that the hard way.

Somewhere in my twenties…the fear crept closer. I had been around a lot of death. I could feel time tightening its grip.
It wasn’t drama…it was math. The number of summers left had a ceiling.
And I hated the feeling that life was now about defending what little was left.

So one day, I made a decision that would sound insane to most people:
I decided to live like a corpse.

Not morbid. Not suicidal.
Just already dead.

That mental shift…saying, “I’m gone, but somehow still moving”…snapped something loose inside me.
The fear of death dissolved…like fog burned off by sunlight.
And for the first time in decades…I could feel real freedom.

The Universal Panic We Pretend Isn’t There

There’s an entire field built around this called Terror Management Theory…the study of how humans do mental gymnastics to avoid thinking about death.

From money to politics to religion…most of what we call “culture” is a series of distractions designed to protect us from realizing we’re temporary.

We chase relevance. We worship youth. We hoard security.
All to hide from the truth that the clock never stops.

But pretending death isn’t real doesn’t stop it.
It just makes your subconscious sprint faster.
You can’t relax when you’re at war with reality.

That’s why anxiety keeps skyrocketing…even in the richest countries on earth.
We’re not living badly…we’re dying badly.

The Corpse Mind: My Reversal

So I did the opposite of what every motivational guru teaches.

Instead of chanting affirmations about endless tomorrows…I buried myself mentally and asked,

“Okay, what if I’m already gone? What if this is borrowed time?”

That single question rewired my brain.

Because if I’m already dead…
– I can’t lose anything.
– I can’t fear pain…corpses don’t feel pain.
– I can’t fear rejection…corpses don’t have reputations.
– I can’t be anxious about the future…corpses don’t have calendars.

And here’s the punchline:

Without all that baggage…living becomes lighter.
Every simple pleasure…sun on your face…music through headphones…a laugh from someone you love…hits ten times harder.

By killing the illusion of “one day,” I brought every joy into today.

Why It Works: The Science Beneath the Madness

We call this exposure therapy…facing the thing that terrifies you until it loses power.

By imagining death as already done…the nervous system stops treating it as an imminent threat.
The amygdala…the brain’s alarm center…quiets down.

Neuroscientists have found that deep acceptance meditations deactivate the Default Mode Network…the brain’s self-referential loop.

When that circuit powers down, the ego…our narrative of “me” struggling to survive…softens.

You stop identifying with the part of you that fears…and start noticing the part of you that simply is.

Zen monks call this shikantaza…just sitting.
Stoics called it memento mori…remember you must die.
I just call it Corpse Mind…a blunt American way of saying, “I’m done negotiating with fear.”

The Emotional Reboot

You see colors sharper.
You listen better.
You forgive faster.
You stop hoarding time because you finally realize…you never owned it anyway.

When you’ve already accepted death…nothing else really qualifies as catastrophic.

The Freedom That Comes From Burial

A soldier who has already accepted his death fights cleaner…moves sharper…and wastes no energy on hesitation.

A person who has already accepted mortality lives with the same precision.
Every word counts. Every moment lands.

Fear feeds on “later.”
When you eliminate “later,” fear starves.

What People Get Wrong About This Practice

Some call it nihilism.
They think, “If I pretend I’m dead, why do anything?”

Here’s the difference:

Nihilism says nothing matters.
Corpse Mind says everything matters differently.

When you already lost everything…gratitude isn’t a discipline…it’s the only logical state.

How to Train the Corpse Mind

Step 1: The Burial Visualization

Picture yourself dead and at peace. Then imagine one extra breath. That’s your bonus round.

Step 2: Collapse the Timeline

When fear starts forecasting, whisper: “The dead don’t have futures.”

Step 3: Use Mortality as a Filter

Ask: If I were already gone, would this matter?
Eighty percent of what stresses you won’t make the cut.

Step 4: Practice “Bonus Time Awareness.”

When something good happens…a laugh…a breeze say, “A gift for the dead.”

The Misunderstood Power of Death

Every spiritual tradition that lasted…Stoicism…Zen…Christianity…indigenous rituals…found the same cheat code:

When you embrace death, life becomes unbreakable.

The modern world scrubbed that truth out of its operating system.
We try to buy comfort instead of courage.
But fear of death isn’t solved by extending life…it’s solved by releasing it.

When you live as though the end already happened…the need to control everything collapses.

And what rushes in?

Peace.

And not the Hallmark kind…real peace…the kind soldiers feel after surviving what should’ve killed them.

The Side Effect: Bravery Without Effort

A firefighter who’s already accepted death doesn’t need courage…he needs clarity.
When you accept you’re already dead…nothing can threaten you.
Every other strength…discipline…patience…generosity…flows from that one shift.

BONUS: “But There Are Things Worse Than Death!” - No, There Aren’t.

Every time I write or talk about this mindset, someone says:

“Well… yeah… but there are things worse than death.”

No. That statement is proof they’ve missed the point.

“Worse than death” only exists if you still think death is coming later.
In the Corpse Mind…there’s no later. Only now.
And in now…pain…loss…even despair are experiences…not enemies.

Fear needs leverage.

It invents “things worse than death” to keep you obedient.
It says: Behave, conform, comply…or something worse will happen.

That’s how tyrants…cults…and marketers control people.
They sell “protection from worse.”

But when you’ve already accepted death…you’re unsellable.
You can’t scare a corpse with hell…headlines…or hospital bills.
You’re not buying protection…you’ve already paid the final price…and you’re still here.

That’s freedom.

Even if agony or loss comes…they’re weather systems passing over a still landscape.
They don’t define you because the “you” that fears them has already been buried.

Once you stop categorizing experiences as “worse than death,” you stop categorizing yourself as a victim of life.

You become what the Stoics called invictus…unconquered.
Everything else is noise.

There is nothing worse than death… if you’ve already died.
Because once you bury fear…there’s nothing left but choice.

So…Remember

I’m not preaching detachment. I’m preaching presence.
When I buried myself in imagination…I stopped being buried by fear.
Death isn’t the opposite of life.
Fear is.
And the fastest way to kill fear… is to die…before you die.

I’ll be back soon…even though…I’m already gone….

-Jack

P.S. This weekend, for paid subscribers, I’ll drop “The Corpse Meditation”…a 10-minute “mind wiring” audio and transcript that walks you through the visualization I use daily.

It’s the most powerful psychological anchor I’ve ever created.
Join the Inner Circle to get it the moment it drops.

Is this an ethical bribe?
Damn right it is.

This newsletter needs to be seen and read by more people…a hell of a lot more. That’s what subscribers like you…have told me.

And the way Substack promotes content is brutally simple: the writers who convert free readers into paid subscribers rise to the top. It’s how their algorithm works.

That means it would actually be immoral and unethical of me not to keep asking you to upgrade.

Because every new paid subscriber doesn’t just support me…they push these ideas further into the bloodstream of the public conversation.
If that’s not ethical persuasion…I don’t know what is.