Why Death Positivity Is Getting Toxic

Last week I was reading through my monthly stack of subscribed articles and came across a piece that is becoming all too common in the death positive movement. It was written by the kind of person who clearly missed the beginning of the meeting.

The argument was that everyone, regardless of who you are, where you come from, or what you believe, should be adopting human composting. And that if you don’t, you are an immoral person who doesn’t care about the environment or the children. It was not subtle. It was poorly argued. And unfortunately, it was not a one-off.

It shows up in all progressive movements where certain people try to take over and make a cause their entire identity. Environmentalism. Veganism. Wellness. Every single one of these started as a genuinely important set of ideas. And every single one of them, at some point, attracted a crowd more interested in moral rank than actual outcomes. The death positive movement is no different.

How the Movement Built Real Change

Let’s be clear from the start. The death positive movement produced real, meaningful change. It still does. It pushed back against a funeral industry that had spent decades commercialising grief. It pushed back on the medical field over medicalising death. It encouraged people to talk openly about death instead of treating it like a failure.

It created and pushed for genuine alternatives to traditional burial: natural burial, alkaline hydrolysis, human composting, home funerals. These are good options. The people who built this movement did important work and continue to do so. Full stop. But movements don’t stay still. They grow. And sometimes what grows in is not what anyone intended.

The Rise of the Performance Crowd

At some point, a particular type of person discovered the death positive movement and decided it was exactly what they’d been looking for. Not because they were processing grief or working in end-of-life care, but because it offered a moral identity with visible markers of compliance.

You can spot them by a few reliable tells. They don’t just prefer natural burial. They imply, with great warmth and very little subtlety, that anyone who doesn’t prefer it is failing their family, failing the environment, or failing to have properly confronted their own mortality.

They’ve developed an aesthetic vocabulary that functions as a kind of ideological passport. “Meaningful.” “Intentional.” “Connected.” “Returning to the earth.” If you’re using these words, you’re in.

If you’re arranging a conventional funeral because that’s what your Catholic mother wanted, because it’s what your Vietnamese family has always done, or because you are already drowning in grief and you don’t have the bandwidth to investigate composting options right now — you are, apparently, doing death wrong.

The Problem with Making Grief a Performance Review

Here’s what this newer crowd completely ignores: the original advocates weren’t claiming to have invented natural burial. They were saying: we broke something that most of the world never broke, and we should try to get it back.

Billions of people have been doing exactly this for centuries. Indigenous burial practices. Muslim funeral rites. Hindu cremation traditions. Jewish burial customs that prohibit embalming and require simple shrouds. These communities didn’t lose the thread. Their relationship with death was never severed. They don’t need to rediscover what they never lost.

The newer, morally righteous wing of the movement doesn’t seem to know this. And so you get the strange spectacle of people talking about what, for much of the world, is just a Tuesday, as some sort of revolutionary concept.

When a Cause Becomes an Identity

Once a cause becomes an identity, it loses the ability to examine itself. Critique from outside gets dismissed as bad faith. Critique from inside gets treated as betrayal.

The death positive movement’s original goal was access. Accessible information. Accessible options. Accessible conversations. The energy was supposed to go toward changing laws, building infrastructure, reducing costs, and normalising conversations that our culture had made needlessly taboo.

A significant portion of the movement’s energy now goes toward performing correct death attitudes in front of other people who are performing correct death attitudes. This is not changing anything. This is not helping the grieving family who can’t afford the funeral home’s pricing.

Practical Death Literacy Tools

Download guides designed to kickstart the conversation with your family or team.

The Real Work vs. Saying the Right Words

If you are advocating and it feels like work, it is a hard slog. If you are just yapping and telling people they are doing things wrong, you aren’t advocating. Here’s the simplest test: If someone makes a different choice than you about how to bury their dead, what’s your response? If it’s curiosity, genuine interest, or basic respect—that’s advocacy. If it’s a slight internal flinch and a quiet judgment—that’s performance.

If you genuinely care about access, the energy should go toward infrastructure. It looks like showing up to a local council meeting when a natural burial ground hits zoning opposition. It looks like writing a submission to a government inquiry, or donating to the organisations doing the actual legal and policy heavy lifting rather than the ones with the nicest Instagram aesthetic.

And here’s one that doesn’t cost anything: know when to shut up. Not every conversation about death is an invitation to share your views on disposal methods. The cause is bigger than your relationship to it, and making it your entire identity makes you insufferable and useless to be around.

Better options for how we handle death are worth fighting for. But every movement that wants to remain useful has to be willing to examine its own worst tendencies. The least we can do is approach death with a bit more humility and a bit less virtue signalling.