Although less known than his most famous work The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker’s Escape From Evil, is highly recommended (and in my opinion even more interesting and relevant in relation to antinatalism).
I have referred to both books in the text about the harms of death , but naturally, some great quotes had to be left out.
Already in the first two pages there are a couple of passages which hold more wisdom, reason and truth than most books have in them altogether.

So here they are:

“At its most elemental level the human organism, like crawling life, has a mouth, digestive tract, and anus, a skin to keep it intact, and appendages with which to acquire food. Existence, for all organismic life, is a constant struggle to feed-a struggle to incorporate whatever other organisms they can fit into their mouths and press down their gullets without choking. Seen in these stark terms, life on this planet is a gory spectacle, a science-fiction nightmare in which digestive tracts fitted with teeth at one end are tearing away at whatever flesh they can reach, and at the other end are piling up the fuming waste excrement as they move along in search of more flesh. I think this is why the epoch of the dinosaurs exerts such a strange fascination on us: it is an epic food orgy with king-size actors who convey unmistakably what organisms are dedicated to. Sensitive souls have reacted with shock to the elemental drama of life on this planet, and one of the reasons that Darwin so shocked his time-and still bothers ours-is that he showed this bone crushing, blood-drinking drama in all its elementality and necessity: Life cannot go on without the mutual devouring of organisms. If at the end of each person’s life he were to be presented with the living spectacle of all that he had organismically incorporated in order to stay alive, he might well feel horrified by the living energy he had ingested. The horizon of a gourmet, or even the average person, would be taken up with hundreds of chickens, flocks of lambs and sheep, a small herd of steers, sties full of pigs, and rivers of fish. The din alone would be deafening. To paraphrase Elias Canetti, each organism raises its head over a field of corpses, smiles into the sun, and declares life good.” (Escape From Evil Page 1)

“Beyond the toothsome joy of consuming other organisms is the warm contentment of simply continuing to exist-continuing to experience physical stimuli, to sense one’s inner pulsations and musculature, to delight in the pleasures that nerves transmit. Once the organism is satiated, this becomes its frantic all-consuming task, to hold onto life at any cost-and the costs can be catastrophic in the case of man. This absolute dedication to Eros, to perseverance, is universal among organisms and is the essence of life on this earth, and because we are mystified by it we call it the instinct for self-preservation.” (Escape From Evil Page 2)