question about passage from orwell's 1984?

Question

‘I am afraid of death…So long as human beings stay humans, death and life are the same thing.’ (Orwell, 136)

what exactly does this passage mean?

Answer 1

Here's the quote in context:

"She did not understand that there was no such things as happiness, that the only victory lay in the far future, long after you were dead, that from the moment of declaring war on the Party it was better to think of yourself as a corpse.
"We are the dead," he said.
"We are not the dead yet," said Julia prosaically.
"Not physically. Six months, a year—five years, conceivably. I am afraid of death. You are young so presumably you're more afraid of it than I am. Obviously we shall put it off as long as we can. But it makes little difference. So long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing."

"Oh, rubbish! Which would you sooner sleep with, me or a skeleton? Don't you enjoy being alive? Don't you like feeling: This is me, this is my hand, this is my leg, I'm real, I'm solid, I'm alive! Don't you like this?"

Winston is saying that, under Big Brother, there really is no life since there's no freedom. And by "declaring war on the Party" he had signed his own death warrant. So, by thinking of hmself as already dead, he hopes to make the terror of his inevitable dying less potent. The "humans" in 1984 aren't humans as we think of them; they are more like robots, controlled by the State. For such as those, there's really not much difference between living and oblivion. If you're not really alive, death's pretty much the same thing.

Answer 2

I think most humans are equally afraid of life and death. They are afraid to die and they are afraid to truly let go and LIVE their lives to the fullest. I believe that is what Orwell meant. We are afraid to step off the curb because we might get hit by a bus, but if we dont step off that curb, our lives don't move forward. It is a paradox isnt it?