So am I. Sounds overly romanticized. I always like to take a more practical approach first to answering these kinds of question, and if it seems warranted afterwards, then go deep. On the question of death, for example, seems a pretty open and shut case that we fear it due to naturally endowed instincts to fear it. Those who didn’t fear death, well, died. Those who did, didn’t. We don’t need a deep philosophical understanding of the fear of death to explain it. It’s quite simply explained by classical stimulus/response neurology. A large cliff looms in front of you, thoughts of falling to your death rush in, and that stimulates the fear centers in your brain. You take a step back and feel a bit safer. Someone arrests you for a crime of treason or some such, and you learn you’ll be taken to the death squads, a sudden feeling of panic overtakes you. This is an instinct. Your brain learns of your impending death, and right away the fear centers are triggered. It’s all just hard wiring. This is why very few of us actually fear death by old age. It’s not a threat of life being cut short by an accident or some malicious intent, but what must happen to us all inevitably. There is no point, no survival advantage, in fear a death we cannot avoid, and so we slowly approach it as we grow older with calm and serenity (or at least not constantly fretting about it).
Now the question of why we philosophize… that’s a much deeper one. I agree with Iambig that it seems silly to say we are preparing to die–it presupposes a tall order–that it’s being driven by unconscious forces, and almost depends on some overly speculative psychodynamics. I think there’s many reasons we philosophize; off the top of my head, I can think of the fact that we like to think period. We like to figure things out. It tends to help maneuvering through the world. And so what if our thinking gets abstract sometimes, or deep and profound–our brains weren’t built with sign posts that warn us not to venture too far into abstraction or depth. If we’re trying to figure something out, and our thoughts happen to lead into the abstract and profound, why stop there? Abstraction and profundity are just ways of saying generalities–that is, thought structures and concepts that applies to a whole range of more concrete scenarios–the more abstract, the more general (as a hard and fast rule)–and so there can be utility in going into the abstract and the profound–that is, so long as we also bring those thoughts back into the realm of the concrete and the specific (they have to have an application to be of any use).
As an example which concurs with what Karpel Tunnel was saying–some of the most useful philosophies turned out to have such powerful application in the real world that they ceased to be philosophy–they were so useful, in other words, that they were no longer recognized as philosophy–I’m talking about branches of thought like science, like politics, like mathematics; everyone here knows that science was once called “natural philosophy”, right? Well, that was the birth of a new discipline. Same with many of our political systems today–democracy, republicanism, and even some of the completely unpalatable ones like Marxism–that started off as philosophy too. This tendency of philosophical thought to yield new disciplines which cease to be recognized as philosophy is perhaps one of the greatest reasons philosophy is seen by some to be useless–if all the really useful stuff inevitably becomes a whole different branch cut off from philosophy proper, then of course what’s left isn’t going to seem all that useful. It’s like saying all students are dumb because all the smart ones graduate and therefore cease to be students.