7 ms·

I honestly can't wrap my head around nonexistence, a brief 0-100 year existence, and then nonexistence again. I've lost days when I think about it too much and

I honestly can't wrap my head around nonexistence, a brief 0-100 year existence, and then nonexistence again. I've lost days when I think about it too much and start panicking. I want to exist dammit. I love existing. I love my life. People act like they're going to live forever too, but really life isn't that long, and you only live a portion of it in a young body capable of doing all of it.

bellerose 8y ago
You might live your life over and over. The universe could be expanding and retracting for infinity. Resulting in all the variables for your same exact life to repeat for infinity.
waivek 8y ago
Thank you for putting into words the thoughts that I have had for quite some time. The "panicking" I experience is also similar, more accurately described as horror-fueled panic.
sweetheart 8y ago
It really is the only thing that, when I catch myself thinking about it, requires me to forcibly do something else. As a nonreligious person, there is no answer to it other than "that's the way it is". Maybe it's something an older me can tackle. For now, it's a topic that leads to existential panic in a matter of minutes, ha!
- waivek 8y ago
  Completely agree with everything you are saying. I also immediately have to think about something else to avoid what I feel would be a mental collapse. One thing that has given me a bit of comfort was an answer I heard when somebody asked one of the great minds of the 21st century, Jennifer Lawrence, "what happens after we die?" https://youtu.be/5LoBGoQPUNc?t=371 https://youtu.be/5LoBGoQPUNc?t=371
- lm28469 8y ago
  > As a nonreligious person, there is no answer to it other than "that's the way it is" There are many non religious answers. Philosophy (as in framework for life, not the intellectual masturbation "philosophy") provides a lot of them. See my other reply.
lm28469 8y ago
Human have been thinking about that for as long as they were able to think. A lot of them put their ideas in books, you might find some interesting point of views in work from Seneca, or Alan Watts for example. No one talks about death in real life, we just kind of go with the flow of "death is bad" yadda yadda. If you deconstruct your view on death and looks at how other societies or cultures sees deaths it can be eye opening. It's only bad if you see it as a bad thing. "But tell me, do you consider it fairer that you should obey Nature, or that Nature should obey you? And what difference does it make how soon you depart from a place which you must depart from sooner or later? We should strive, not to live long, but to live rightly; for to achieve long life you have need of Fate only, but for right living you need the soul. A life is really long if it is a full life; but fullness is not attained until the soul has rendered to itself its proper Good, that is, until it has assumed control over itself. What benefit does this older man derive from the eighty years he has spent in idleness? A person like him has not lived; he has merely tarried awhile in life. Nor has he died late in life; he has simply been a long time dying. He has lived eighty years, has he? That depends upon the date from which you reckon his death! ... Nay, he has existed eighty years, unless perchance you mean by "he has lived" what we mean when we say that a tree "lives."" https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_letters_to_Lucilius https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_letters_to_Lucilius. (letters 4, 24, 26, 61, 82, 93) https://terebess.hu/english/AlanWatts-On%20The%20Taboo%20Against%20Knowing%20Who%20You%20Are.pdf https://terebess.hu/english/AlanWatts-On%20The%20Taboo%20Aga...
- bellerose 8y ago
  Every death is the natural death of the person. Unless you force the free will (illusion)/spiritual ideology upon everyone. All death comes without choices in a world where all experiences are factored from the preceding events. A person who dies by suicide didn't choose it. Similar to a person who dies from old age.
  - mindslight 8y ago
    The concept of free will does not inherently rely on the concept of a spirit. It may be in your philosophy, and I'm not arguing that. But it's not universal.
marsrover 8y ago
I actually keep a list of quotes about death because it fascinates me. Here are two that I really like. The nearer I approach death the more I feel like one who is in sight of land at last and is about to anchor in one's home port after a long voyage. -Cicero The fear of death is indeed the pretense of wisdom, and not real wisdom, being a pretense of knowing the unknown; and no one knows whether death, which people in their fear apprehend to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good. -Plato
- jf 8y ago
  Have you read the book “On Death & Dying”? It’s a collection of interviews with terminally ill patients, with commentary from the author.
  - marsrover 8y ago
    I have not but sounds like I should check it out.
- lucidone 8y ago
  “Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation. Everything science has taught me, and continues to teach me, strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death.”
notdeadyetbut 8y ago
For me it depends on the day. I believe I want to live forever if it's forever in health and non-poverty and freedom. The fact that I will not live forever really effects my thinking and what I'm willing to do. As just one example, being older I know that I can't go dedicate 10 years to living in another country to learn a language or I could but I've only got at most 2 10yr chunks left, more like 1, before my ability to be free and healthy and non-poverty change. Or similarly to change my career or go back to school. I'm already in my mid-50s. Conversely I'm lost, isolated, and without direction, have no close friends, no partner, and find it exceedingly hard to fix and so the thought of just calling it quits does pop into my head.
- waivek 8y ago
  Parents and siblings?
- seibelj 8y ago
  I obviously do not know your situation. But have you tried something wildly different that is communal? Church, community theater, community choir, a group that goes on vacations together, etc.? It is never too late my friend.
dokem 8y ago
I have a hard time wrapping my head around loving life and existence. It's been so long since I've considered existence to be a pleasant experience I forget there are people out there actively enjoying themselves.
- ilovecaching 8y ago
  I’ve felt that way before, and it was kind of freeing. I actually went out and did more because my acceptable of risk was higher, and I didn’t worry so much because I was ready for it to all end anyway.
- imtringued 8y ago
  You're better off that way. The mental stress of actively not wanting to die is unimaginably high.
  - newsgremlin 8y ago
    It's the absurdity of fearing death and/or loathing life that is almost humorous when you think about it.
DyslexicAtheist 8y ago
it's easier and maybe normal to think about these topics when you're going through a horrible time. When you're on top of your game, maybe even responsible to look after life that you've brought into this world, it's much harder to wrap your head around death. Once people land on their ass (we all do every once in a while), maybe from sickness, bankruptcy, or death of a close person (or all of it combined, as is usually the case when things all come together at once), it feels much less morbid to think about these topics. From all the existentialists I've read Peter Wessel-Zapffe[1], a Norwegian philosopher (considered the comedian among philosophers) has helped me understand the importance of always facing the bleak side of life. As somebody who is no stranger to depression (and thoughts of suicide every couple of weeks) facing the reality of death and even seeking it out as a topic is the only way I'm able to be happy. Also worth reading is Denial of Death[2]. [1] The Last Messiah: https://philosophynow.org/issues/45/The_Last_Messiah https://philosophynow.org/issues/45/The_Last_Messiah [2] Ernest Becker "The denial of Death" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Denial_of_Death https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Denial_of_Death
skissane 8y ago
> I honestly can't wrap my head around nonexistence, a brief 0-100 year existence, and then nonexistence again Death might not be non-existence. Many religions, philosophies, spiritual teachings, say that it isn't. Of course, maybe they are all baloney–and a lot of them have to be mostly that–but there is at least a chance there is some truth in one or more of them. Maybe quantum immortality is true, and all of us live forever, but it is a lonely existence, cut off seemingly forever from family and friends. (I hope that isn't true, it sounds rather hellish.) Could we be living in a computer simulation? If we have no idea, shouldn't we assign a 50% probability? But, if we are in a computer simulation, our simulators might decide to provide an afterlife for us. And if we have no idea whether they would or not, shouldn't we assign a 50% probability to that? Which gives us 25% chance of a simulated afterlife – not the best odds, but far from the worst either. We could be physically resurrected into some paradise by various random processes (quantum tunnelling, quantum fluctuations, thermal fluctuations). The probability of that happening is immensely small but non-zero. No matter how small it is, if the future is infinite, then almost surely it will happen eventually. Most people who think death is non-existence accept a materialist position in the philosophy of mind, but often without giving any great thought to the alternative positions. If idealism is true–and we have no hard evidence it isn't–then death being the cessation of existence is far less likely. If idealism is true, then quite possibly minds are inherently immortal, in which case an afterlife would be metaphysically necessary.
- ilovecaching 8y ago
  For me, a lot of that seems like wishful thinking. We didn’t exist before birth, and we think nothing of it. More than likely, that’s where we are headed. We just have a really hard time excepting something that is so fundamentally against our current state of existing.
  - presscast 8y ago
    >We didn’t exist before birth At the risk of sounding all "woo-woo", this statement bears some qualification. How do you define existence, here? Are you equating it with consciousness? Surely your constituent parts (atoms, molecules, particles, etc) existed before your consciousness, and continue to do so afterwards. I think you'll also agree that the arrangement of matter and energy you call "your life" is regulated by natural processes. In principle, it's possible for the thing you call "your life" to be a brief window within some larger process (a meta-life, if you will) of which you have no recollection. I don't know if I believe any of this to be true, but metaphysically speaking, it's not at all obvious that we "didn't exist before birth".
cs02rm0 8y ago
Likewise. It's frustrating not even understanding consciousness. And since having kids I find permanent nonexistence even more painful to contemplate.
mcguire 8y ago
Epicurus' four-fold cure: 1. Don't worry about the gods; they're too busy being gods to bother you. 2. Don't get anxious about death; you didn't exist before you were born, and I don't recall that being unpleasant. 3. What is good is easy to get; friendship, wisdom, bad jokes. 4. What is bad is easy to endure; if it gets too bad, you'll die (see #2).
sbov 8y ago
I can't wrap my head around it either, but I don't worry about it because I won't be around to care.
methodover 8y ago
When I was younger, around 19 or so, I contemplated death for the first time. I grew up religious, Catholic, and always believed that you go on after death. This was the first time I imagined the truth. It stunned me. I couldn’t sleep. I could NOT imagine non-existence. It terrofied me. In the next few years I learned more about the world and grew far more comfortable with my place in it. I don’t feel nearly as puzzled about nonexistence as I used to. For me, I see myself as a cell in a greater body — humanity — and I see humanity as part of an even greater whole, the universe. Does a single cell worry about its fate after death? No. It merely does what it is supposed to do, does it well if it can, and then ends gracefully when its time has come. I feel the same way about my own life. I am part of a whole, humanity at one level, the universe itself at another. I do my best with the limited time I have; I do my duty; and then I die. I have grown quite comfortable with this view of life and death over the years. It gives nonexistence found at the end of life its appropriate meaning. It is the natural end of a temporal life.
ZeroFries 8y ago
Consider Open-Individualism. It's actually very difficult to make a philosophical case for Closed-Individualism (the common sense belief your post seems to espouse). You have to show why subjects would be particular to a group of atoms which are constantly changing. If not, the subject of all experiences is the same across space and time, and it's only the experiences which are different and constantly changing. If so, existence is eternal, which is what relativity suggests. http://www.atheismandthecity.com/2016/02/does-special-relativity-entail.html?m=1 http://www.atheismandthecity.com/2016/02/does-special-relati...
scandox 8y ago
I like existing but I dislike the idea of it continuing indefinitely. Once you accept it will have some limit it might as well be 80 or what have you. The idea of any afterlife in which my personal identity is still coherent fills me with dread, frankly.
gowld 8y ago
The trick is, that barring accidental death (including accidentally falling victim to someone elses intentional killing of you), you will stop wanting to live before you die. So take care of yourself, preserve your health, and enjoy your life -- by the time it's over, you won't want it anymore. So don't fear death; only fear harm in your life. Also, remember that when you're gone, it won't hurt, and you won't miss anything. Everything in your life, from the worst torture to the most minor itch, hurts more than being dead.
zifnab06 8y ago
I am in the same boat. All I've ever known is existence, and the thought of not existing anymore is terrifying.

bellerose 8y ago

You might live your life over and over. The universe could be expanding and retracting for infinity. Resulting in all the variables for your same exact life to repeat for infinity.

waivek 8y ago

Thank you for putting into words the thoughts that I have had for quite some time. The "panicking" I experience is also similar, more accurately described as horror-fueled panic.

sweetheart 8y ago

It really is the only thing that, when I catch myself thinking about it, requires me to forcibly do something else. As a nonreligious person, there is no answer to it other than "that's the way it is". Maybe it's something an older me can tackle. For now, it's a topic that leads to existential panic in a matter of minutes, ha!

waivek 8y ago
Completely agree with everything you are saying. I also immediately have to think about something else to avoid what I feel would be a mental collapse. One thing that has given me a bit of comfort was an answer I heard when somebody asked one of the great minds of the 21st century, Jennifer Lawrence, "what happens after we die?" https://youtu.be/5LoBGoQPUNc?t=371 https://youtu.be/5LoBGoQPUNc?t=371
lm28469 8y ago
> As a nonreligious person, there is no answer to it other than "that's the way it is" There are many non religious answers. Philosophy (as in framework for life, not the intellectual masturbation "philosophy") provides a lot of them. See my other reply.

lm28469 8y ago

Human have been thinking about that for as long as they were able to think. A lot of them put their ideas in books, you might find some interesting point of views in work from Seneca, or Alan Watts for example. No one talks about death in real life, we just kind of go with the flow of "death is bad" yadda yadda. If you deconstruct your view on death and looks at how other societies or cultures sees deaths it can be eye opening. It's only bad if you see it as a bad thing. "But tell me, do you consider it fairer that you should obey Nature, or that Nature should obey you? And what difference does it make how soon you depart from a place which you must depart from sooner or later? We should strive, not to live long, but to live rightly; for to achieve long life you have need of Fate only, but for right living you need the soul. A life is really long if it is a full life; but fullness is not attained until the soul has rendered to itself its proper Good, that is, until it has assumed control over itself. What benefit does this older man derive from the eighty years he has spent in idleness? A person like him has not lived; he has merely tarried awhile in life. Nor has he died late in life; he has simply been a long time dying. He has lived eighty years, has he? That depends upon the date from which you reckon his death! ... Nay, he has existed eighty years, unless perchance you mean by "he has lived" what we mean when we say that a tree "lives."" https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_letters_to_Lucilius https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_letters_to_Lucilius. (letters 4, 24, 26, 61, 82, 93) https://terebess.hu/english/AlanWatts-On%20The%20Taboo%20Against%20Knowing%20Who%20You%20Are.pdf https://terebess.hu/english/AlanWatts-On%20The%20Taboo%20Aga...

bellerose 8y ago
Every death is the natural death of the person. Unless you force the free will (illusion)/spiritual ideology upon everyone. All death comes without choices in a world where all experiences are factored from the preceding events. A person who dies by suicide didn't choose it. Similar to a person who dies from old age.
- mindslight 8y ago
  The concept of free will does not inherently rely on the concept of a spirit. It may be in your philosophy, and I'm not arguing that. But it's not universal.

marsrover 8y ago

I actually keep a list of quotes about death because it fascinates me. Here are two that I really like. The nearer I approach death the more I feel like one who is in sight of land at last and is about to anchor in one's home port after a long voyage. -Cicero The fear of death is indeed the pretense of wisdom, and not real wisdom, being a pretense of knowing the unknown; and no one knows whether death, which people in their fear apprehend to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good. -Plato

jf 8y ago
Have you read the book “On Death & Dying”? It’s a collection of interviews with terminally ill patients, with commentary from the author.
- marsrover 8y ago
  I have not but sounds like I should check it out.
lucidone 8y ago
“Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation. Everything science has taught me, and continues to teach me, strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death.”

notdeadyetbut 8y ago

For me it depends on the day. I believe I want to live forever if it's forever in health and non-poverty and freedom. The fact that I will not live forever really effects my thinking and what I'm willing to do. As just one example, being older I know that I can't go dedicate 10 years to living in another country to learn a language or I could but I've only got at most 2 10yr chunks left, more like 1, before my ability to be free and healthy and non-poverty change. Or similarly to change my career or go back to school. I'm already in my mid-50s. Conversely I'm lost, isolated, and without direction, have no close friends, no partner, and find it exceedingly hard to fix and so the thought of just calling it quits does pop into my head.

waivek 8y ago
Parents and siblings?
seibelj 8y ago
I obviously do not know your situation. But have you tried something wildly different that is communal? Church, community theater, community choir, a group that goes on vacations together, etc.? It is never too late my friend.

dokem 8y ago

I have a hard time wrapping my head around loving life and existence. It's been so long since I've considered existence to be a pleasant experience I forget there are people out there actively enjoying themselves.

ilovecaching 8y ago
I’ve felt that way before, and it was kind of freeing. I actually went out and did more because my acceptable of risk was higher, and I didn’t worry so much because I was ready for it to all end anyway.
imtringued 8y ago
You're better off that way. The mental stress of actively not wanting to die is unimaginably high.
- newsgremlin 8y ago
  It's the absurdity of fearing death and/or loathing life that is almost humorous when you think about it.

DyslexicAtheist 8y ago

it's easier and maybe normal to think about these topics when you're going through a horrible time. When you're on top of your game, maybe even responsible to look after life that you've brought into this world, it's much harder to wrap your head around death. Once people land on their ass (we all do every once in a while), maybe from sickness, bankruptcy, or death of a close person (or all of it combined, as is usually the case when things all come together at once), it feels much less morbid to think about these topics. From all the existentialists I've read Peter Wessel-Zapffe[1], a Norwegian philosopher (considered the comedian among philosophers) has helped me understand the importance of always facing the bleak side of life. As somebody who is no stranger to depression (and thoughts of suicide every couple of weeks) facing the reality of death and even seeking it out as a topic is the only way I'm able to be happy. Also worth reading is Denial of Death[2]. [1] The Last Messiah: https://philosophynow.org/issues/45/The_Last_Messiah https://philosophynow.org/issues/45/The_Last_Messiah [2] Ernest Becker "The denial of Death" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Denial_of_Death https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Denial_of_Death

skissane 8y ago

> I honestly can't wrap my head around nonexistence, a brief 0-100 year existence, and then nonexistence again Death might not be non-existence. Many religions, philosophies, spiritual teachings, say that it isn't. Of course, maybe they are all baloney–and a lot of them have to be mostly that–but there is at least a chance there is some truth in one or more of them. Maybe quantum immortality is true, and all of us live forever, but it is a lonely existence, cut off seemingly forever from family and friends. (I hope that isn't true, it sounds rather hellish.) Could we be living in a computer simulation? If we have no idea, shouldn't we assign a 50% probability? But, if we are in a computer simulation, our simulators might decide to provide an afterlife for us. And if we have no idea whether they would or not, shouldn't we assign a 50% probability to that? Which gives us 25% chance of a simulated afterlife – not the best odds, but far from the worst either. We could be physically resurrected into some paradise by various random processes (quantum tunnelling, quantum fluctuations, thermal fluctuations). The probability of that happening is immensely small but non-zero. No matter how small it is, if the future is infinite, then almost surely it will happen eventually. Most people who think death is non-existence accept a materialist position in the philosophy of mind, but often without giving any great thought to the alternative positions. If idealism is true–and we have no hard evidence it isn't–then death being the cessation of existence is far less likely. If idealism is true, then quite possibly minds are inherently immortal, in which case an afterlife would be metaphysically necessary.

ilovecaching 8y ago
For me, a lot of that seems like wishful thinking. We didn’t exist before birth, and we think nothing of it. More than likely, that’s where we are headed. We just have a really hard time excepting something that is so fundamentally against our current state of existing.
- presscast 8y ago
  >We didn’t exist before birth At the risk of sounding all "woo-woo", this statement bears some qualification. How do you define existence, here? Are you equating it with consciousness? Surely your constituent parts (atoms, molecules, particles, etc) existed before your consciousness, and continue to do so afterwards. I think you'll also agree that the arrangement of matter and energy you call "your life" is regulated by natural processes. In principle, it's possible for the thing you call "your life" to be a brief window within some larger process (a meta-life, if you will) of which you have no recollection. I don't know if I believe any of this to be true, but metaphysically speaking, it's not at all obvious that we "didn't exist before birth".

cs02rm0 8y ago

Likewise. It's frustrating not even understanding consciousness. And since having kids I find permanent nonexistence even more painful to contemplate.

mcguire 8y ago

Epicurus' four-fold cure: 1. Don't worry about the gods; they're too busy being gods to bother you. 2. Don't get anxious about death; you didn't exist before you were born, and I don't recall that being unpleasant. 3. What is good is easy to get; friendship, wisdom, bad jokes. 4. What is bad is easy to endure; if it gets too bad, you'll die (see #2).

sbov 8y ago

I can't wrap my head around it either, but I don't worry about it because I won't be around to care.

methodover 8y ago

When I was younger, around 19 or so, I contemplated death for the first time. I grew up religious, Catholic, and always believed that you go on after death. This was the first time I imagined the truth. It stunned me. I couldn’t sleep. I could NOT imagine non-existence. It terrofied me. In the next few years I learned more about the world and grew far more comfortable with my place in it. I don’t feel nearly as puzzled about nonexistence as I used to. For me, I see myself as a cell in a greater body — humanity — and I see humanity as part of an even greater whole, the universe. Does a single cell worry about its fate after death? No. It merely does what it is supposed to do, does it well if it can, and then ends gracefully when its time has come. I feel the same way about my own life. I am part of a whole, humanity at one level, the universe itself at another. I do my best with the limited time I have; I do my duty; and then I die. I have grown quite comfortable with this view of life and death over the years. It gives nonexistence found at the end of life its appropriate meaning. It is the natural end of a temporal life.

ZeroFries 8y ago

Consider Open-Individualism. It's actually very difficult to make a philosophical case for Closed-Individualism (the common sense belief your post seems to espouse). You have to show why subjects would be particular to a group of atoms which are constantly changing. If not, the subject of all experiences is the same across space and time, and it's only the experiences which are different and constantly changing. If so, existence is eternal, which is what relativity suggests. http://www.atheismandthecity.com/2016/02/does-special-relativity-entail.html?m=1 http://www.atheismandthecity.com/2016/02/does-special-relati...

scandox 8y ago

I like existing but I dislike the idea of it continuing indefinitely. Once you accept it will have some limit it might as well be 80 or what have you. The idea of any afterlife in which my personal identity is still coherent fills me with dread, frankly.

gowld 8y ago

The trick is, that barring accidental death (including accidentally falling victim to someone elses intentional killing of you), you will stop wanting to live before you die. So take care of yourself, preserve your health, and enjoy your life -- by the time it's over, you won't want it anymore. So don't fear death; only fear harm in your life. Also, remember that when you're gone, it won't hurt, and you won't miss anything. Everything in your life, from the worst torture to the most minor itch, hurts more than being dead.

zifnab06 8y ago

I am in the same boat. All I've ever known is existence, and the thought of not existing anymore is terrifying.