Few people ever describe themselves as feeling morbid. Rather, to be labeled morbid is usually a judgmental assessment of our emotions that comes from others.
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines morbid feelings as those that are abnormally gloomy or unwholesome. The Cambridge Dictionary says that morbid people are “too interested in unpleasant subjects, especially death“. The idea is that morbid emotion takes attention to darkness farther than it should go, the implication being that it’s all well and good to acknowledge that there are bleak and somber aspects to life, but that it’s unacceptable to linger on these feelings.
The consistent admonitions against morbid feelings hint at a taboo against focusing on the negative aspects of life… especially death. Perhaps the problem with morbid fixations on mortality and decay doesn’t lie with the people who feel them, but with the people who can’t stand to watch other people grapple with the looming terror that is the shadow side of life.
Unlike people suffering from thanatophobia, the morbid aren’t necessarily afraid of death. They approach death. They look at it in the eye. They marinate in gloomy subjects that other people pretend not to notice.
Morbid feelings can be helpful to people work through the predicament of living under the constant threat of annihilation. There are some traditions that purposefully lead people into morbid reflections, under the philosophy of memento mori, keeping death constantly in mind so as to enable appreciation of life, not as a glib habit, but in deeper recognition of its ephemeral nature.
