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How to not fear your death: An Epicurean perspective

94 points by diodorus 6y ago

nurettin 6y ago
Death is indeed nothing and is nothing to fear. The dread of having minutes, or seconds left to die in suffering on the other hand, is not very pleasant.
deleted 6y ago
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andypi_tech 6y ago
Jesus said, “I am the resurrection and the life. Anyone who believes in me will live, even after dying. Everyone who lives in me and believes in me will never ever die. " This is the only meaningful answer that is practical in the real world. Philosophical ideas don't cut it. Jesus came through death and out the other side, and he offers this possibility to us as well!
winrid 6y ago
A perspective: You don't want to be old and regret wasting time worrying about death.
benji_is_me 6y ago
If you're like me and deeply fear death, and you're curious about how others seemingly ignore the subject entirely, you may be interested in this study posted on HN a while back.[1][2] [1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1053811919306688 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10538... [2]: https://sci-hub.tw/https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1053811919306688 https://sci-hub.tw/https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/art...
sunstone 6y ago
Why not just live in denial like the rest of us?
sireat 6y ago
As a counterpoint: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qX6NztnPU-4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qX6NztnPU-4 where 97 year old philosopher who held similar logical views as OP has a change of heart. Key quote: “In my arrogance, I thought that I could conquer death with logic. But now I know that I only used logic to suppress my fear of death.” What is horrifying to me that his was the best case scenario - lucid at 97.
- rudasn 6y ago
  Is it really a best case scenario, lucid at 97? How bad is it, being non-lucid for the person experiencing it, vs being lucid, when it's time to face your existence?
troughway 6y ago
This should be required reading for doomers.
- MereInterest 6y ago
  Fear and dislike are two entirely different things. You do not need to fear death to recognize that it is a bad thing. You do not need to fear your own death to recognize the pain that death causes on those around the deceased. You do not need to fear death to recognize that allowing or accelerating global catastrophes is not ethical behavior.
- chmod775 6y ago
  Yeah let's take away depressed people's fear of death, that ought to end well!
mensetmanusman 6y ago
I’m excited to see if something happens after death, human bodies are just a cloud of atoms, after all.
- grugagag 6y ago
  Something happens, you cease to exist. You won’t notice anything
  - aschismatic 6y ago
    You say that with such confidence, yet at one point you did not exist, and now you do. Who's to say we won't one day exist again in some form?
    - 2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago
      That's what gets me. It's nothing forever? It was nothing forever once but one day "I" woke up in the universe. Leads me to another point. What are the odds of waking up? I think it's with 100% certainty that you become conscious. Your memories are 100% physical though so that definitely evaporates. Perhaps if you find consciousness again it's as if you awoke from a dream you cannot remember, a new blank slate. You flash forward to the next time you find consciousness.
      - kls 6y ago
        As to my understanding time and distance are two words for the same thing. so should we travel back towards the big bang fast enough stuff started to rewind. Travel fast enough in the other direction and things start to fast forward. So based on this, while the universe changes, it is static in nature, think of it like a ledger where each previous state is recorded and that record is time. Distance is just what we physically take notice of, because it separates us from that reality. Now for a little back story on me, for years I was agnostic and pretty much summed up any thoughts of an afterlife as wishful thinking, but something always troubled me about the universe and what we know about it, and that is the damn thing really looks like it was designed, there are so many open questions that I had like: Why can we explain everything we know with Math, if we met another intelligent species when would most likely be able to communicate with them via math. Math seems to exist beyond humans, we seem to have discovered math and not invented it. Why when we get to sub-atomic does it really start to look like data-storage. To the extent that we now believe that the universe is 2D data-store and we experience the data thru 3D projection, not unlike the data on our computers are on a flat 2D disk, but we experience said data via projection via our monitors and speakers. Why are there programming languages embedded in nature (e.g DNA, Chemistry). So with all this I went from probably a 50/50 position, defaulting to skeptical to probably a 70/30 that the system has a design and that designer has to be intelligent and supernatural i.e exist outside of it's creation, and eternal as it is not bound by the time slices recording of the universe. I am fairly confident the system has a builder, I will refrain from using the word God as that title because it is loaded with a lot of baggage. Now the question becomes are we an ant farm or are we important to that creator. This becomes difficult to answer and I would say it's a 50/50 shot on that one. But if we are important then it leaves open the question why do we not receive communication from this creator. Which becomes really interesting because now we are in the realm of religion. Either this entity left a manuscript for life or it made us and got board. Well if it left a manuscript then it should provide some information as to why the creator is absent. TLDR from here, I am going to delve into religion, I am not going to try to save your soul but if it is not your bag just skip the rest. OK so following my trail, it seemed logical to me that if a manuscript was left the creator would have ensured that it was widely available. Which lead me to my next jump which was 3 of the major world religions base their foundation off of the same manuscript and that is the old testament or the TORA. In it it talks about the fall of man and sin, and how sin much like a virus has infected reality. To the extent that once introduce Adam and Eve saw reality very differently and the veil of heaven was placed. That they no longer had access, visibility or the capability to experience that reality. This was interesting to me, as it is a possible explanation for why we don't have any indication of this creator. It goes on to explain that now that sin is introduced, death is the only way to cleanse it, to the extent that heaven and earth will have to finally be destroyed to cleanse it of sin and end death forever. But in that a book of life will be retained, going back to the universe as a disk or data, it is plausibly that if what is written is true, that, that disk of data is that record of life. What I find interesting is the simplicity of the document which can be summed up as, people don't want a creator that has to be the supreme ruler, that the creator basically allowed them (and us) to experience what it will be like without a creator guiding us and that by doing so it will answer for all time the need for the creators guidance. That at present we are abandoned to our free will and the only way to sever the veil and experience a re-connection with heaven is via prayer. This act circumvents the free-will covenant and allows for the restoration of experiencing pieces of re-connection to the creator. As I said, I have my moments in doubt, and the religious stuff is just interesting to me but it's plausible. I certainly cannot get over the fact that everywhere in nature we find design.
picodguyo 6y ago
Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think most people fear the state of being dead, which is what this essay is centered around. "Fear of death" is more commonly the fear of the approach of the end of life, ranging from the prolonged downward slide into decrepitude or terminal illness on one end of the spectrum to the physically violent moments of struggle against death on the other end. In other words, if you were 100% guaranteed to die by instant vaporization at some random time in the last quarter of life with no forewarning, would you still fear death?
- garaetjjte 6y ago
  Yes, I would. Thinking about that I will cease to exist sometime is most terrifying.
  - grugagag 6y ago
    To me it’s more terrifying to think that I might loose my mind to dementia or alzheimer’s, that I might not know who i am, who i was, who my children are.. that’s terrifying. Though I think this experience is even worse for the others. My grandmother had alzheimers and in the last stage she was serene and smiling..
    - JoshTriplett 6y ago
      > To me it’s more terrifying to think that I might loose my mind to dementia or alzheimer’s To me, that's equally terrifying, in that both are nearly equivalent (you are your mind) and the only difference is that dementia or Alzheimer's might potentially be reversible/repairable.
    - pc86 6y ago
      If your mind is gone, are you still you? Unless you believe that each human has a unique soul, there's not much left to make you you except your mind. And after a disease has attacked your mind, you might as well already be dead physically because you are a completely different person.
svieira 6y ago
> Not death itself, but only the moral preparation for it holds terrors ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
ikeboy 6y ago
More to the point - if you accept strong verificationism, statements are only meaningful to the extent they constrain expectations as to future experiences. "I will die" does not, because being dead is not an experience. It's a meaningless statement. It's silly to be afraid of a literally incoherent "possibility".
- glitcher 6y ago
  > being dead is not an experience But getting there certainly can be. "I will die" is not the same as "I will be dead".
  - ikeboy 6y ago
    Sure, but the reaction to that should be different - one should focus on access to painkillers and such rather than some kind of incoherent existential dread.
- croissants 6y ago
  By this logic, shouldn't a person be indifferent between 1) an accident where they die, and 2) an accident where they and their partner die, since "being dead is not an experience"?
  - ikeboy 6y ago
    Your framing is wrong. Neither of those two textual descriptions represent something that could possibly happen. It's as nonsensical as asking "should you be indifferent between xhskgkrid happening or kwntocusbw happening?" If you take strong verificationism seriously, that is. I can't give the entire theory here, but there are strong arguments for it, and also critiques that I personally don't find compelling.
Rochus 6y ago
Epicurus is great. He represents a very life-affirming and to modesty animating philosophy. Unfortunately he was defamed by all the Christian moral philosophers. This is hinted at in the article.
staticassertion 6y ago
I wish people were more afraid of death. Maybe we'd be doing more about it. Why are we trying so much harder to overcome the fear of death and not death? > No doubt you don’t fear your prenatal existence and logically speaking, given their equivalence, it follows that you should fear death the exact same amount, as in not at all. Prenatal existence is not symmetrical to death, in my opinion. First off, even if they were, neither can be conceived, which makes the symmetry unknowable. But more importantly I don't fear things that have happened, I fear things that are impending - a pretty key distinction here, which I feel fundamentally breaks the symmetry (ie: time is not symmetrical). > doesn’t seem to be the sort of thing that one can reasonably be fearful of because it isn’t anything. Earlier it was described as the greatest deprivation. Of course that's something. This is like saying "why fear starvation? It is only the absence of something - food". It is the absence, the nothingness, that drives that very fear. This is like saying "Why fear loneliness? It is not something that is done to you, it is only the absence of love". Perhaps death is 'nothing', whatever that means. Why is 'nothing' a special 'thing' that I can not fear? It seems just as reasonable to fear 'nothing' as anything else. IDK, I don't find any of it compelling. Fix death please, that's a good way to prevent the fear.
- xamuel 6y ago
  >I wish people were more afraid of death. Maybe we'd be doing more about it. The line has to be drawn somewhere, otherwise logically speaking we ought to force everyone into permanent suspended animation on life support machines. But clearly that would be a very bad thing to do.
  - staticassertion 6y ago
    What line? I didn't say anything about "at all costs". I said we should work to prevent death. If I said "we should cure the flu" would you say "Well sure but we can't just cure the flu by murdering everyone" ? Like yes, I guess there's a line there?
    - xamuel 6y ago
      >I said we should work to prevent death. But we already are, in the sense that medical and safety research is constantly being conducted and there are professionals whose job is to rescue people from fires and similar disasters. There's always trade-offs though. A lot of death could be prevented by banning motor vehicles, should we do that? Of course not. In some ways, it could be argued that we're already going too far to prevent death, for example by banning doctor-assisted suicide.
baron816 6y ago
The universe existed for 14 billion years before you were born, and it’s likely going to exist for some way huger number of years after you die. I expect both experiences (before life and after death) to be the same. Death does seem scary. But having to live for quintillions of years would certainly be worse.
- JoshTriplett 6y ago
  > Death does seem scary. But having to live for quintillions of years would certainly be worse. You have no evidence from which to argue that as a certainty. Let's gather such evidence; you could always make a more informed decision at a much later time.
mekal 6y ago
I like this way of thinking of it...Mark Twain quote: "I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it." Of course you can argue that it could be different after, but still.
tilolebo 6y ago
I don't really fear dying, I also don't fear being dead. But the fact that I won't be anymore, FOREVER: that is what literally gives me the chills everytime I think about it. God, I really hope there's something after death.
- thatcodingdude 6y ago
  I'm terrified that there would be something after. Imagine always being. I need to rest sooner or later.
- JoshTriplett 6y ago
  Hope isn't a solution. This is a solvable problem, if enough people work on it and enough resources are directed towards it. Channel those chills into something that contributes towards a solution.
  - Aeolun 6y ago
    Eternal life?
  - deleted 6y ago
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- freeflight 6y ago
  > God, I really hope there's something after death. There is something, it's the same thing that was before your birth, in that sense so you are very much just returning to your natural state: You have been not born for the longest time and you will be dead for the longest time. In that context this rather short experience of existence is actually the thing that's out of the ordinary, making it that much more valuable.
  - spfzero 6y ago
    This is also how I think of it. Billions of years go by where you don’t exist, then you do, for a tiny slice of time, maybe 90 years, then more billions of years when you don’t exist.
czep 6y ago
I'm not afraid of death because I'm a solipsist. But you should be afraid of my death, because when I die all of you will disappear! That joke and singing along to Monty Python's Bright Side of Life is usually enough to snap me out of the occasional melancholy resulting from contemplating the inevitable. Ok, but seriously, yeah, I'm terrified.
jointpdf 6y ago
I’m just gonna leave these here and see if anyone has relevant experiences to share: > ”There is something about the core of this experience that opens people up to the great mystery of what it is that we don’t know.” https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/psilocybin-a-journey-beyond-the-fear-of-death/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/psilocybin-a-jour... > ”Of the participants who received the high dose in the second study, 83% reported feeling significantly less depression and 58% reported less anxiety after 7 weeks. Only 14% of those who received niacin reported less anxiety and less depression.” https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/12/hallucinogenic-drugs-help-cancer-patients-deal-their-fear-death https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/12/hallucinogenic-drugs...
temp0826 6y ago
ITT people who haven't done enough psychedelics. Half joking, but a solid dose of mushrooms or 5-meo-dmt to push you over the edge could leave you excited for your transition.
ineedasername 6y ago
TLDR: don't fear death because you won't know you're dead. Pretty much misses the point when the fear of death is frequently not about what comes after, and much more about the big "nothingness" thing.
- aschismatic 6y ago
  I think that is the whole point. Why fear the big nothingness if it's not possible to experience it? Just like how it's impossible to experience or remember anything before you became alive. I find it comforting to realize that I once wasn't and now I am. I will once again cease to be. We often think death is final, but if we already made the transition from not being to being, who's to say that, in some form, we might once again become something from "nothing."
OneGuy123 6y ago
99.9999% of people in this thread who say "I fear death" are lying: they are afraid only in the intellectual sense. How many of those do actually experience the fear of death so deep in their bones that they actually live life to their fullest? (I'm not claiming I'm one of those).
- benji_is_me 6y ago
  I absolutely fear death — both intellectually and as an animalistic response to the idea (I've had periods of uncontrollable panic attacks from just contemplating my mortality). I don't think actually "living life to their fullest" necessarily follows fearing death.
  - mateus1 6y ago
    I experience the same thing. It's bad. Mine is more related to not knowing where the universe came from and why we exist.
- _jjkk 6y ago
  This doesn't account for those who fear death very deeply but have no coping mechanism but complete avoidance
  - guerrilla 6y ago
    or those who abhor life but fear death more.
- croissants 6y ago
  Why is failure to "actually live life to their fullest" evidence that such people don't fear death?
  - kgwgk 6y ago
    What does that even mean? Death is the great equalizer anyway.
javier10e6 6y ago
Self preservation expressed through fear. Can a movie be enjoyed if told that the film is broken and will end abruptly? Without resolution? Life takes one chair away and death stops the music. We all try to find a seat but there not enough chairs. What a game!
throwaway713 6y ago
In articles like this, everyone crawls out of the woodwork to brag about how they don’t fear death. I don’t believe it for a minute. The number of people who could have a loaded gun staring them in the face and truly not feel the slightest bit of fear has to be minuscule. Humans just wouldn’t have made it this far otherwise. What I think is scarier than the concept of non-existence though is the possibility that our universe might be cyclical; i.e., that its evolution would repeat over and over again an infinite number of times. Imagine all of the suffering that you’ve ever experienced happening again, indefinitely. Or the Holocaust repeating. Or slavery. Just thinking about the idea of an endless, cyclical universe is almost sickening. I much prefer the other theories of how the universe might end.
- oh_sigh 6y ago
  Death is really the only thing I fear. I can't imagine not fearing it. I also don't understand people who say things like "I wouldn't want to live to <500, 1000, some big number>
ivanhoe 6y ago
For me it all fits in that famous Rutger Hauer's monologue: "All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain" - still freaks the hell out of me every time. Not that I think of my experiences as especially important, I mean I certainly had never seen C-beams glitter in the dark, but still the idea of all the stories and people I knew in a way dying with me, it just seems like such a horrible waste...
grishka 6y ago
I'm looking forward to all that life-extension research that's happening right now. Reading all those research papers, it feels as if we're on the verge of being able to actually rejuvenate people for real. We've never came this close to uncovering the underlying mechanics of aging. So, anyway, hopefully, in the near future, dying won't be compulsory.
wnscooke 6y ago
Fearing death oft-times seems similar to the fear that accompanies any act which you’ve never done before. About to be married, going to finish school, going on a trip... fear is part of all of these experiences, at least until you’ve done it. But I think the fear is made worse because of the stories we’ve told, and heard, about it. Modern movies are a prime example where we can watch what might happen if we die and what we might miss, etc. The more tragic a story the greater the fear that that might overwhelm us. The poems, tales, and stories highlight the effects of death. But in a similar vein, I find comfort in the more positive stories too, such as the ones about Jesus in the Bible. How death came as a result of sin, and how, for some reason, a sacrifice was required to pay the penalty of sin - something else had to die in your stead, like a pigeon or sheep. But of course, how could that really pay that price? No wonder sacrifices were needed regularly. That is until Jesus’ death - an eternal life could pay for an eternal death, for good and forever. All I need to do is believe in Jesus and share that payment. This is a good story, preferable to the ending of say, 300, or Gladiator, for me at least. I’m not sure the eternal life to come will eventually be boring either. The story suggests we remain basically the same, and what has been true is that we grow. True, what interested me as a kid doesn’t hold the same power over me now, nor could I as a child really get into fonts or NLP or traveling! So I reckon that eternal life means eternally growing and developing. I can’t picture it, I’ve not lived it yet, there is some fear there, but overall it sounds pretty good.
- deleted 6y ago
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- jbandela1 6y ago
  > I’m not sure the eternal life to come will eventually be boring either. Along these lines, the ending of "The Last Battle" by CS Lewis which ends the Chronicles of Narnia is so beautiful: "There was a real railway accident," said Aslan softly. "Your father and mother and all of you are—as you used to call it in the Shadow-Lands—dead. The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning." And as He spoke He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story, which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.
chrisweekly 6y ago
I appreciate Alan Watts' perspective, loosely summarized as: eons passed before you were born... you'll live maybe a handful of decades... ... and eons will pass after you're gone. Most people aren't freaked out by the "before", so why not take a similar attitude towards the "after"? This only relates to existential dread per se (vs eg entirely rational concern for the well-being of your surviving dependents, for example), but I like it.
- MinusGix 6y ago
  Why take a similar attitude towards the after, though? Just because I do not care about the past event does not mean the future event is not something to worry about? I don't care about the past event as 'I' did not start to exist at that point, but now that I exist I enjoy all the parts of life. I keep trying to think of a good metaphor, like: "I stubbed my toe years ago, but I didn't care that much then, but I still don't want to have it happen again." but that doesn't entirely fit with reasoning about nothingness. I am not freaked out by the 'before' as I did not exist then, and while I won't exist after my death, I exist now and can fear the end of my own existence.
- coldtea 6y ago
  >Most people aren't freaked out by the "before", so why not take a similar attitude towards the "after"? Because unlike the before the after means the permanent loss of current, living experience.
codr7 6y ago
Having been pretty close to dying several times already; what I do know is that once you're there, once you realize it's out of your hands, there is no fear. The ego is all about self preservation, survival, which is probably a big part of how we got this far.
UglyToad 6y ago
I fear death a lot and it sort of ties in to my weird concept of memory. If we take the idea of consciousness as experienced by the mind as it functions in the present moment, the past does not exist at all. It has never existed. This concept of mind is separate to the biological realities of memories in the brain, it's the unknown bit that transforms the grey goo into me. I have been annihilated an infinite amount of times since I started writing this message. I have only lived because of my memory of the past presents I experienced. By which I mean the sensation of being alive and having lived is intimately tied up with memory. For past events I don't remember I was effectively dead. I only lived my life because I'm able to live all of it currently. Rather than life being a column of infinitely small slices of time building up they're all occurring in the present moment. While I'm lying in bed writing this I'm also at school, at swim classes, on work experience, at university, at my first job interview, etc because they are events I know to have happened and experienced because I don't just replay them, in order for my brain to have knowledge of them they're happening concurrently. If I don't remember these did they ever actually happen? From my perspective of the person I currently consider to be me? What happens after a catastrophic brain injury or during a disease like Alzheimers? I don't think this makes any life worth less but from the perspective of current you it doesn't take the end of life for the death of your current 'life', the impression of an unbroken chain of having lived that forms you, in the snapshot of the present. During temporary short term memory loss do you effectively die? I know it all sounds very confused but the nature of memory, existence and death freaks me out. As a counterpoint during Alzheimers a patient will experience bursts of lucidity so obviously there's a solid state backup of the past, distinct from the present, but I get positively vertiginous thinking it over.
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nlh 6y ago
A collection of philosophical thoughts that I should probably put into an essay at some point, but in the meantime... Some have likened the experience of death to what it's like when you black out (true loss of consciousness) or, to a lesser extent, when you go to sleep at night. One moment you're there, the next moment you're coming back from not being there. (Give me some leeway on the sleep thing - I know that when you're actively dreaming or tossing and turning it's not quite a jump cut). So in that moment when you're coming back to consciousness from a state of previous unconsciousness, what's to say you're the same "you" that was beforehand? Sure, you remember a whole life, but then there's this gap in continuity. Maybe you were someone else and then all of a sudden, you're now "you" with all those memories in that mushy brain of yours. But if that's the case, why is the gap of consciousness needed to separate "you"? What's to say that from any given instant to any other given instant the "you" is continuous, other than for this stream of memories coming from your meat brain. Maybe "you" jumps around all the time. But then - what is "you" anyway? If we're just a collection of meat brain memories, maybe there's no core identifying "you" in the first place, and we're all just part of a big collective pool? Like a piece of code running in an overall shared memory space. The complexity forms (your program / you), and then the function exits and the memory goes back to the collective pool. So then - what if life and existence is all about perspective? I'm me because, well, I'm me. I expeierience this life and remember these memories. And you're you because you experience your life and remember your memories. Is there really a difference from a third-party observer? Maybe life is simply in the eye of the beholder. As long as there is ANY conscious life, then life is being experienced. And so maybe death really is nothing to worry about -- you'll get a chance to experience another life as someone else. But then - why does it even need to be linear? Maybe we ARE experiencing life as someone else -- as evidenced by all the someone elses experiencing life right now :). Just because we can't experience it (hardware limitations - sorry. Brain can't handle multiple sets of inputs ;) doesn't mean it's not happening. Maybe we're all experiencing consciousness in our own ways as part of one big system. That leopard in the zoo is experiencing it. I'm experiencing it. You reading this are experiencing it. Maybe our meat brains and linear single-track memories are just a nice little lie, and we're really just all temporary functions running as part of a bigger computing system. Function runs, exits, memory goes back to the shared pool. New function runs, exits, memory goes back to the shared pool. Many functions run simultaneously - each doing only what it was programmed to do, then each exits and the memory gets released again.... This really gets wild when you start thinking about clone experiments (or teleportation). Make a perfect clone of yourself right now, down to the neuron, and assemble it in across the room. You'll experience nothing other than to see a clone appear 10 feet away from you. Your clone will have the experience of being you one instant, and then waking up across the room looking at you "Holy cow! Cloning and teleportation worked! They're real!" Then your clone will go on with life, doing the same things you want to do, remembering the same things you remember. Then think about whether there's REALLY any difference between that clone of you and any other person on earth....
toomanyrichies 6y ago
Something that film critic Roger Ebert wrote a few years before his death has stuck with me: "I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear. I hope to be spared as much pain as possible on the approach path. I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state." Assuming that whatever comes after death will be a lot like whatever came before we were born helped me deal with my own anxiety around the inevitability of death. If one assumes these two states are equivalent, then we've already experienced death, or at least a death-like state. Whether that's something to be feared or not is up to the individual, and is a separate question. Source- https://www.rogerebert.com/roger-ebert/go-gentle-into-that-good-night https://www.rogerebert.com/roger-ebert/go-gentle-into-that-g...
1nikoalvin1 6y ago
Im not scared of death per se. but this is still a unique perspective
blooalien 6y ago
I was always told as a child "Don't waste energy worrying about things you cannot change when there's so many things in life that energy could be better invested in." Death is coming, but if I waste energy worrying about it, that's energy I could have spent on living.
peter303 6y ago
In an infinite universe you will repeat exactly an infinite number of times. You will repeat with any possible variation even more times. -From physicist Brian Greenes multiverse book.
wwarner 6y ago
I've been reading Seneca's Letters to Lucilious. He says > For we are mistaken when we look forward to death; the major portion of death has already passed. Whatever years be behind us are in death's hands. I suppose I also meditate on christ's suffering. It seems to say that while the end is never pretty for the one who is enduring it, it is intrinsically meaningful and sacred.

94 points by diodorus 6y ago

Death is indeed nothing and is nothing to fear. The dread of having minutes, or seconds left to die in suffering on the other hand, is not very pleasant.

deleted 6y ago

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andypi_tech 6y ago

Jesus said, “I am the resurrection and the life. Anyone who believes in me will live, even after dying. Everyone who lives in me and believes in me will never ever die. " This is the only meaningful answer that is practical in the real world. Philosophical ideas don't cut it. Jesus came through death and out the other side, and he offers this possibility to us as well!

winrid 6y ago

A perspective: You don't want to be old and regret wasting time worrying about death.

benji_is_me 6y ago

If you're like me and deeply fear death, and you're curious about how others seemingly ignore the subject entirely, you may be interested in this study posted on HN a while back.[1][2] [1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1053811919306688 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10538... [2]: https://sci-hub.tw/https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1053811919306688 https://sci-hub.tw/https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/art...

sunstone 6y ago

Why not just live in denial like the rest of us?

sireat 6y ago

As a counterpoint: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qX6NztnPU-4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qX6NztnPU-4 where 97 year old philosopher who held similar logical views as OP has a change of heart. Key quote: “In my arrogance, I thought that I could conquer death with logic. But now I know that I only used logic to suppress my fear of death.” What is horrifying to me that his was the best case scenario - lucid at 97.

rudasn 6y ago
Is it really a best case scenario, lucid at 97? How bad is it, being non-lucid for the person experiencing it, vs being lucid, when it's time to face your existence?

troughway 6y ago

This should be required reading for doomers.

MereInterest 6y ago
Fear and dislike are two entirely different things. You do not need to fear death to recognize that it is a bad thing. You do not need to fear your own death to recognize the pain that death causes on those around the deceased. You do not need to fear death to recognize that allowing or accelerating global catastrophes is not ethical behavior.
chmod775 6y ago
Yeah let's take away depressed people's fear of death, that ought to end well!

mensetmanusman 6y ago

I’m excited to see if something happens after death, human bodies are just a cloud of atoms, after all.

grugagag 6y ago
Something happens, you cease to exist. You won’t notice anything
- aschismatic 6y ago
  You say that with such confidence, yet at one point you did not exist, and now you do. Who's to say we won't one day exist again in some form?
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago
    That's what gets me. It's nothing forever? It was nothing forever once but one day "I" woke up in the universe. Leads me to another point. What are the odds of waking up? I think it's with 100% certainty that you become conscious. Your memories are 100% physical though so that definitely evaporates. Perhaps if you find consciousness again it's as if you awoke from a dream you cannot remember, a new blank slate. You flash forward to the next time you find consciousness.
    - kls 6y ago
      As to my understanding time and distance are two words for the same thing. so should we travel back towards the big bang fast enough stuff started to rewind. Travel fast enough in the other direction and things start to fast forward. So based on this, while the universe changes, it is static in nature, think of it like a ledger where each previous state is recorded and that record is time. Distance is just what we physically take notice of, because it separates us from that reality. Now for a little back story on me, for years I was agnostic and pretty much summed up any thoughts of an afterlife as wishful thinking, but something always troubled me about the universe and what we know about it, and that is the damn thing really looks like it was designed, there are so many open questions that I had like: Why can we explain everything we know with Math, if we met another intelligent species when would most likely be able to communicate with them via math. Math seems to exist beyond humans, we seem to have discovered math and not invented it. Why when we get to sub-atomic does it really start to look like data-storage. To the extent that we now believe that the universe is 2D data-store and we experience the data thru 3D projection, not unlike the data on our computers are on a flat 2D disk, but we experience said data via projection via our monitors and speakers. Why are there programming languages embedded in nature (e.g DNA, Chemistry). So with all this I went from probably a 50/50 position, defaulting to skeptical to probably a 70/30 that the system has a design and that designer has to be intelligent and supernatural i.e exist outside of it's creation, and eternal as it is not bound by the time slices recording of the universe. I am fairly confident the system has a builder, I will refrain from using the word God as that title because it is loaded with a lot of baggage. Now the question becomes are we an ant farm or are we important to that creator. This becomes difficult to answer and I would say it's a 50/50 shot on that one. But if we are important then it leaves open the question why do we not receive communication from this creator. Which becomes really interesting because now we are in the realm of religion. Either this entity left a manuscript for life or it made us and got board. Well if it left a manuscript then it should provide some information as to why the creator is absent. TLDR from here, I am going to delve into religion, I am not going to try to save your soul but if it is not your bag just skip the rest. OK so following my trail, it seemed logical to me that if a manuscript was left the creator would have ensured that it was widely available. Which lead me to my next jump which was 3 of the major world religions base their foundation off of the same manuscript and that is the old testament or the TORA. In it it talks about the fall of man and sin, and how sin much like a virus has infected reality. To the extent that once introduce Adam and Eve saw reality very differently and the veil of heaven was placed. That they no longer had access, visibility or the capability to experience that reality. This was interesting to me, as it is a possible explanation for why we don't have any indication of this creator. It goes on to explain that now that sin is introduced, death is the only way to cleanse it, to the extent that heaven and earth will have to finally be destroyed to cleanse it of sin and end death forever. But in that a book of life will be retained, going back to the universe as a disk or data, it is plausibly that if what is written is true, that, that disk of data is that record of life. What I find interesting is the simplicity of the document which can be summed up as, people don't want a creator that has to be the supreme ruler, that the creator basically allowed them (and us) to experience what it will be like without a creator guiding us and that by doing so it will answer for all time the need for the creators guidance. That at present we are abandoned to our free will and the only way to sever the veil and experience a re-connection with heaven is via prayer. This act circumvents the free-will covenant and allows for the restoration of experiencing pieces of re-connection to the creator. As I said, I have my moments in doubt, and the religious stuff is just interesting to me but it's plausible. I certainly cannot get over the fact that everywhere in nature we find design.

picodguyo 6y ago

Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think most people fear the state of being dead, which is what this essay is centered around. "Fear of death" is more commonly the fear of the approach of the end of life, ranging from the prolonged downward slide into decrepitude or terminal illness on one end of the spectrum to the physically violent moments of struggle against death on the other end. In other words, if you were 100% guaranteed to die by instant vaporization at some random time in the last quarter of life with no forewarning, would you still fear death?

garaetjjte 6y ago
Yes, I would. Thinking about that I will cease to exist sometime is most terrifying.
- grugagag 6y ago
  To me it’s more terrifying to think that I might loose my mind to dementia or alzheimer’s, that I might not know who i am, who i was, who my children are.. that’s terrifying. Though I think this experience is even worse for the others. My grandmother had alzheimers and in the last stage she was serene and smiling..
  - JoshTriplett 6y ago
    > To me it’s more terrifying to think that I might loose my mind to dementia or alzheimer’s To me, that's equally terrifying, in that both are nearly equivalent (you are your mind) and the only difference is that dementia or Alzheimer's might potentially be reversible/repairable.
  - pc86 6y ago
    If your mind is gone, are you still you? Unless you believe that each human has a unique soul, there's not much left to make you you except your mind. And after a disease has attacked your mind, you might as well already be dead physically because you are a completely different person.

svieira 6y ago

> Not death itself, but only the moral preparation for it holds terrors ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

ikeboy 6y ago

More to the point - if you accept strong verificationism, statements are only meaningful to the extent they constrain expectations as to future experiences. "I will die" does not, because being dead is not an experience. It's a meaningless statement. It's silly to be afraid of a literally incoherent "possibility".

glitcher 6y ago
> being dead is not an experience But getting there certainly can be. "I will die" is not the same as "I will be dead".
- ikeboy 6y ago
  Sure, but the reaction to that should be different - one should focus on access to painkillers and such rather than some kind of incoherent existential dread.
croissants 6y ago
By this logic, shouldn't a person be indifferent between 1) an accident where they die, and 2) an accident where they and their partner die, since "being dead is not an experience"?
- ikeboy 6y ago
  Your framing is wrong. Neither of those two textual descriptions represent something that could possibly happen. It's as nonsensical as asking "should you be indifferent between xhskgkrid happening or kwntocusbw happening?" If you take strong verificationism seriously, that is. I can't give the entire theory here, but there are strong arguments for it, and also critiques that I personally don't find compelling.

Rochus 6y ago

Epicurus is great. He represents a very life-affirming and to modesty animating philosophy. Unfortunately he was defamed by all the Christian moral philosophers. This is hinted at in the article.

staticassertion 6y ago

I wish people were more afraid of death. Maybe we'd be doing more about it. Why are we trying so much harder to overcome the fear of death and not death? > No doubt you don’t fear your prenatal existence and logically speaking, given their equivalence, it follows that you should fear death the exact same amount, as in not at all. Prenatal existence is not symmetrical to death, in my opinion. First off, even if they were, neither can be conceived, which makes the symmetry unknowable. But more importantly I don't fear things that have happened, I fear things that are impending - a pretty key distinction here, which I feel fundamentally breaks the symmetry (ie: time is not symmetrical). > doesn’t seem to be the sort of thing that one can reasonably be fearful of because it isn’t anything. Earlier it was described as the greatest deprivation. Of course that's something. This is like saying "why fear starvation? It is only the absence of something - food". It is the absence, the nothingness, that drives that very fear. This is like saying "Why fear loneliness? It is not something that is done to you, it is only the absence of love". Perhaps death is 'nothing', whatever that means. Why is 'nothing' a special 'thing' that I can not fear? It seems just as reasonable to fear 'nothing' as anything else. IDK, I don't find any of it compelling. Fix death please, that's a good way to prevent the fear.

xamuel 6y ago
>I wish people were more afraid of death. Maybe we'd be doing more about it. The line has to be drawn somewhere, otherwise logically speaking we ought to force everyone into permanent suspended animation on life support machines. But clearly that would be a very bad thing to do.
- staticassertion 6y ago
  What line? I didn't say anything about "at all costs". I said we should work to prevent death. If I said "we should cure the flu" would you say "Well sure but we can't just cure the flu by murdering everyone" ? Like yes, I guess there's a line there?
  - xamuel 6y ago
    >I said we should work to prevent death. But we already are, in the sense that medical and safety research is constantly being conducted and there are professionals whose job is to rescue people from fires and similar disasters. There's always trade-offs though. A lot of death could be prevented by banning motor vehicles, should we do that? Of course not. In some ways, it could be argued that we're already going too far to prevent death, for example by banning doctor-assisted suicide.

baron816 6y ago

The universe existed for 14 billion years before you were born, and it’s likely going to exist for some way huger number of years after you die. I expect both experiences (before life and after death) to be the same. Death does seem scary. But having to live for quintillions of years would certainly be worse.

JoshTriplett 6y ago
> Death does seem scary. But having to live for quintillions of years would certainly be worse. You have no evidence from which to argue that as a certainty. Let's gather such evidence; you could always make a more informed decision at a much later time.

mekal 6y ago

I like this way of thinking of it...Mark Twain quote: "I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it." Of course you can argue that it could be different after, but still.

tilolebo 6y ago

I don't really fear dying, I also don't fear being dead. But the fact that I won't be anymore, FOREVER: that is what literally gives me the chills everytime I think about it. God, I really hope there's something after death.

thatcodingdude 6y ago
I'm terrified that there would be something after. Imagine always being. I need to rest sooner or later.
JoshTriplett 6y ago
Hope isn't a solution. This is a solvable problem, if enough people work on it and enough resources are directed towards it. Channel those chills into something that contributes towards a solution.
- Aeolun 6y ago
  Eternal life?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
freeflight 6y ago
> God, I really hope there's something after death. There is something, it's the same thing that was before your birth, in that sense so you are very much just returning to your natural state: You have been not born for the longest time and you will be dead for the longest time. In that context this rather short experience of existence is actually the thing that's out of the ordinary, making it that much more valuable.
- spfzero 6y ago
  This is also how I think of it. Billions of years go by where you don’t exist, then you do, for a tiny slice of time, maybe 90 years, then more billions of years when you don’t exist.

czep 6y ago

I'm not afraid of death because I'm a solipsist. But you should be afraid of my death, because when I die all of you will disappear! That joke and singing along to Monty Python's Bright Side of Life is usually enough to snap me out of the occasional melancholy resulting from contemplating the inevitable. Ok, but seriously, yeah, I'm terrified.

jointpdf 6y ago

I’m just gonna leave these here and see if anyone has relevant experiences to share: > ”There is something about the core of this experience that opens people up to the great mystery of what it is that we don’t know.” https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/psilocybin-a-journey-beyond-the-fear-of-death/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/psilocybin-a-jour... > ”Of the participants who received the high dose in the second study, 83% reported feeling significantly less depression and 58% reported less anxiety after 7 weeks. Only 14% of those who received niacin reported less anxiety and less depression.” https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/12/hallucinogenic-drugs-help-cancer-patients-deal-their-fear-death https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/12/hallucinogenic-drugs...

temp0826 6y ago

ITT people who haven't done enough psychedelics. Half joking, but a solid dose of mushrooms or 5-meo-dmt to push you over the edge could leave you excited for your transition.

ineedasername 6y ago

TLDR: don't fear death because you won't know you're dead. Pretty much misses the point when the fear of death is frequently not about what comes after, and much more about the big "nothingness" thing.

aschismatic 6y ago
I think that is the whole point. Why fear the big nothingness if it's not possible to experience it? Just like how it's impossible to experience or remember anything before you became alive. I find it comforting to realize that I once wasn't and now I am. I will once again cease to be. We often think death is final, but if we already made the transition from not being to being, who's to say that, in some form, we might once again become something from "nothing."

OneGuy123 6y ago

99.9999% of people in this thread who say "I fear death" are lying: they are afraid only in the intellectual sense. How many of those do actually experience the fear of death so deep in their bones that they actually live life to their fullest? (I'm not claiming I'm one of those).

benji_is_me 6y ago
I absolutely fear death — both intellectually and as an animalistic response to the idea (I've had periods of uncontrollable panic attacks from just contemplating my mortality). I don't think actually "living life to their fullest" necessarily follows fearing death.
- mateus1 6y ago
  I experience the same thing. It's bad. Mine is more related to not knowing where the universe came from and why we exist.
_jjkk 6y ago
This doesn't account for those who fear death very deeply but have no coping mechanism but complete avoidance
- guerrilla 6y ago
  or those who abhor life but fear death more.
croissants 6y ago
Why is failure to "actually live life to their fullest" evidence that such people don't fear death?
- kgwgk 6y ago
  What does that even mean? Death is the great equalizer anyway.

javier10e6 6y ago

Self preservation expressed through fear. Can a movie be enjoyed if told that the film is broken and will end abruptly? Without resolution? Life takes one chair away and death stops the music. We all try to find a seat but there not enough chairs. What a game!

throwaway713 6y ago

In articles like this, everyone crawls out of the woodwork to brag about how they don’t fear death. I don’t believe it for a minute. The number of people who could have a loaded gun staring them in the face and truly not feel the slightest bit of fear has to be minuscule. Humans just wouldn’t have made it this far otherwise. What I think is scarier than the concept of non-existence though is the possibility that our universe might be cyclical; i.e., that its evolution would repeat over and over again an infinite number of times. Imagine all of the suffering that you’ve ever experienced happening again, indefinitely. Or the Holocaust repeating. Or slavery. Just thinking about the idea of an endless, cyclical universe is almost sickening. I much prefer the other theories of how the universe might end.

oh_sigh 6y ago
Death is really the only thing I fear. I can't imagine not fearing it. I also don't understand people who say things like "I wouldn't want to live to <500, 1000, some big number>

ivanhoe 6y ago

For me it all fits in that famous Rutger Hauer's monologue: "All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain" - still freaks the hell out of me every time. Not that I think of my experiences as especially important, I mean I certainly had never seen C-beams glitter in the dark, but still the idea of all the stories and people I knew in a way dying with me, it just seems like such a horrible waste...

grishka 6y ago

I'm looking forward to all that life-extension research that's happening right now. Reading all those research papers, it feels as if we're on the verge of being able to actually rejuvenate people for real. We've never came this close to uncovering the underlying mechanics of aging. So, anyway, hopefully, in the near future, dying won't be compulsory.

wnscooke 6y ago

Fearing death oft-times seems similar to the fear that accompanies any act which you’ve never done before. About to be married, going to finish school, going on a trip... fear is part of all of these experiences, at least until you’ve done it. But I think the fear is made worse because of the stories we’ve told, and heard, about it. Modern movies are a prime example where we can watch what might happen if we die and what we might miss, etc. The more tragic a story the greater the fear that that might overwhelm us. The poems, tales, and stories highlight the effects of death. But in a similar vein, I find comfort in the more positive stories too, such as the ones about Jesus in the Bible. How death came as a result of sin, and how, for some reason, a sacrifice was required to pay the penalty of sin - something else had to die in your stead, like a pigeon or sheep. But of course, how could that really pay that price? No wonder sacrifices were needed regularly. That is until Jesus’ death - an eternal life could pay for an eternal death, for good and forever. All I need to do is believe in Jesus and share that payment. This is a good story, preferable to the ending of say, 300, or Gladiator, for me at least. I’m not sure the eternal life to come will eventually be boring either. The story suggests we remain basically the same, and what has been true is that we grow. True, what interested me as a kid doesn’t hold the same power over me now, nor could I as a child really get into fonts or NLP or traveling! So I reckon that eternal life means eternally growing and developing. I can’t picture it, I’ve not lived it yet, there is some fear there, but overall it sounds pretty good.

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jbandela1 6y ago
> I’m not sure the eternal life to come will eventually be boring either. Along these lines, the ending of "The Last Battle" by CS Lewis which ends the Chronicles of Narnia is so beautiful: "There was a real railway accident," said Aslan softly. "Your father and mother and all of you are—as you used to call it in the Shadow-Lands—dead. The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning." And as He spoke He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story, which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.

chrisweekly 6y ago

I appreciate Alan Watts' perspective, loosely summarized as: eons passed before you were born... you'll live maybe a handful of decades... ... and eons will pass after you're gone. Most people aren't freaked out by the "before", so why not take a similar attitude towards the "after"? This only relates to existential dread per se (vs eg entirely rational concern for the well-being of your surviving dependents, for example), but I like it.

MinusGix 6y ago
Why take a similar attitude towards the after, though? Just because I do not care about the past event does not mean the future event is not something to worry about? I don't care about the past event as 'I' did not start to exist at that point, but now that I exist I enjoy all the parts of life. I keep trying to think of a good metaphor, like: "I stubbed my toe years ago, but I didn't care that much then, but I still don't want to have it happen again." but that doesn't entirely fit with reasoning about nothingness. I am not freaked out by the 'before' as I did not exist then, and while I won't exist after my death, I exist now and can fear the end of my own existence.
coldtea 6y ago
>Most people aren't freaked out by the "before", so why not take a similar attitude towards the "after"? Because unlike the before the after means the permanent loss of current, living experience.

codr7 6y ago

Having been pretty close to dying several times already; what I do know is that once you're there, once you realize it's out of your hands, there is no fear. The ego is all about self preservation, survival, which is probably a big part of how we got this far.

UglyToad 6y ago

I fear death a lot and it sort of ties in to my weird concept of memory. If we take the idea of consciousness as experienced by the mind as it functions in the present moment, the past does not exist at all. It has never existed. This concept of mind is separate to the biological realities of memories in the brain, it's the unknown bit that transforms the grey goo into me. I have been annihilated an infinite amount of times since I started writing this message. I have only lived because of my memory of the past presents I experienced. By which I mean the sensation of being alive and having lived is intimately tied up with memory. For past events I don't remember I was effectively dead. I only lived my life because I'm able to live all of it currently. Rather than life being a column of infinitely small slices of time building up they're all occurring in the present moment. While I'm lying in bed writing this I'm also at school, at swim classes, on work experience, at university, at my first job interview, etc because they are events I know to have happened and experienced because I don't just replay them, in order for my brain to have knowledge of them they're happening concurrently. If I don't remember these did they ever actually happen? From my perspective of the person I currently consider to be me? What happens after a catastrophic brain injury or during a disease like Alzheimers? I don't think this makes any life worth less but from the perspective of current you it doesn't take the end of life for the death of your current 'life', the impression of an unbroken chain of having lived that forms you, in the snapshot of the present. During temporary short term memory loss do you effectively die? I know it all sounds very confused but the nature of memory, existence and death freaks me out. As a counterpoint during Alzheimers a patient will experience bursts of lucidity so obviously there's a solid state backup of the past, distinct from the present, but I get positively vertiginous thinking it over.

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nlh 6y ago

A collection of philosophical thoughts that I should probably put into an essay at some point, but in the meantime... Some have likened the experience of death to what it's like when you black out (true loss of consciousness) or, to a lesser extent, when you go to sleep at night. One moment you're there, the next moment you're coming back from not being there. (Give me some leeway on the sleep thing - I know that when you're actively dreaming or tossing and turning it's not quite a jump cut). So in that moment when you're coming back to consciousness from a state of previous unconsciousness, what's to say you're the same "you" that was beforehand? Sure, you remember a whole life, but then there's this gap in continuity. Maybe you were someone else and then all of a sudden, you're now "you" with all those memories in that mushy brain of yours. But if that's the case, why is the gap of consciousness needed to separate "you"? What's to say that from any given instant to any other given instant the "you" is continuous, other than for this stream of memories coming from your meat brain. Maybe "you" jumps around all the time. But then - what is "you" anyway? If we're just a collection of meat brain memories, maybe there's no core identifying "you" in the first place, and we're all just part of a big collective pool? Like a piece of code running in an overall shared memory space. The complexity forms (your program / you), and then the function exits and the memory goes back to the collective pool. So then - what if life and existence is all about perspective? I'm me because, well, I'm me. I expeierience this life and remember these memories. And you're you because you experience your life and remember your memories. Is there really a difference from a third-party observer? Maybe life is simply in the eye of the beholder. As long as there is ANY conscious life, then life is being experienced. And so maybe death really is nothing to worry about -- you'll get a chance to experience another life as someone else. But then - why does it even need to be linear? Maybe we ARE experiencing life as someone else -- as evidenced by all the someone elses experiencing life right now :). Just because we can't experience it (hardware limitations - sorry. Brain can't handle multiple sets of inputs ;) doesn't mean it's not happening. Maybe we're all experiencing consciousness in our own ways as part of one big system. That leopard in the zoo is experiencing it. I'm experiencing it. You reading this are experiencing it. Maybe our meat brains and linear single-track memories are just a nice little lie, and we're really just all temporary functions running as part of a bigger computing system. Function runs, exits, memory goes back to the shared pool. New function runs, exits, memory goes back to the shared pool. Many functions run simultaneously - each doing only what it was programmed to do, then each exits and the memory gets released again.... This really gets wild when you start thinking about clone experiments (or teleportation). Make a perfect clone of yourself right now, down to the neuron, and assemble it in across the room. You'll experience nothing other than to see a clone appear 10 feet away from you. Your clone will have the experience of being you one instant, and then waking up across the room looking at you "Holy cow! Cloning and teleportation worked! They're real!" Then your clone will go on with life, doing the same things you want to do, remembering the same things you remember. Then think about whether there's REALLY any difference between that clone of you and any other person on earth....

toomanyrichies 6y ago

Something that film critic Roger Ebert wrote a few years before his death has stuck with me: "I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear. I hope to be spared as much pain as possible on the approach path. I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state." Assuming that whatever comes after death will be a lot like whatever came before we were born helped me deal with my own anxiety around the inevitability of death. If one assumes these two states are equivalent, then we've already experienced death, or at least a death-like state. Whether that's something to be feared or not is up to the individual, and is a separate question. Source- https://www.rogerebert.com/roger-ebert/go-gentle-into-that-good-night https://www.rogerebert.com/roger-ebert/go-gentle-into-that-g...

1nikoalvin1 6y ago

Im not scared of death per se. but this is still a unique perspective

blooalien 6y ago

I was always told as a child "Don't waste energy worrying about things you cannot change when there's so many things in life that energy could be better invested in." Death is coming, but if I waste energy worrying about it, that's energy I could have spent on living.

peter303 6y ago

In an infinite universe you will repeat exactly an infinite number of times. You will repeat with any possible variation even more times. -From physicist Brian Greenes multiverse book.

wwarner 6y ago

I've been reading Seneca's Letters to Lucilious. He says > For we are mistaken when we look forward to death; the major portion of death has already passed. Whatever years be behind us are in death's hands. I suppose I also meditate on christ's suffering. It seems to say that while the end is never pretty for the one who is enduring it, it is intrinsically meaningful and sacred.