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I've had an overall decent life. I still have a lot of time to live with my friends and family. But I take solace in the fact that I will just cease to exist when I die. Or obviously, that's my opinion anyways.
I don't want to argue my beliefs, but that's how I feel about it.
It seems like a just end. Literally nothing. A final sleep.
Yeah, I suppose I'm being too greedy or something. Thanks for sharing.
adding another comment as I like this woody allen quote. Its not that im afraid of dying its just that I don't want to be there when it happens.
Ha, I think I read that many years ago. I actually might be fine with being there and even dealing with the pain to the end, however it may manifest, but it's the lack of anything after that's bothersome. I hope I'm wrong.
I suppose it depends on how attached you are to this life. The loss of fear, worry, pain, drama, hunger, thirst, illness, etc. It might help to look at scientific talks about time. In particular if it does have a direction. Basically you perceive this thing happening in the future but that is just an artifact of existence as your future is no more separate than the past.
I think of it this way. Do you remember your great grandparents? How about your great great grandparents? How about your great great great grandparents? At some point, you'll go, "Gee, I've never thought of them before."
But do you think they mattered? You may not know what they did, what they hoped for, and the struggles they faced, but had they not existed, neither would you have. They mattered, even if you remember very little about them, and on top of that, you can probably learn about many of them with some effort in genealogy.
You may not have some cosmic importance with the power to change the world, but neither did most Christians, even when you were a believer. But that doesn't mean they didn't matter, and it doesn't mean you don't matter.
Christianity teaches you the lie that to matter, you must have permanence, but consider this:
Your life is like a plate of cookies, warm and sweet and delicious, and it is best when shared with people you love. One day, that plate of cookies will be empty, but the cookies are no less delicious and the sharing no less meaningful just because there is a finite number of cookies.
One day, my plate of cookies will be empty, but if I am remembered fondly, then it will have been a life lived well. I don't need infinite cosmic importance to matter, and neither do you.
if I am remembered fondly
The problem is that this doesn't matter relative to the looming deadline of the eventual, permanent nonexistence of everything—not just your own short life—I mean the entire universe and your memory keepers; what does it matter if one is remembered fondly for a brief few decades or even centuries or millennia versus timelessness? I don't think many people understand just how vast infinity really is. You can tell yourself that your life choices matter, but that's not the truth, given how everything goes to basically science's version of Sheol/the OT "grave." For them, there was no out; that was it.
It may sound cold, but what would it matter to research our ancestors' struggles, hopes, dreams, and experiences? Struggle itself will cease to matter—collectively for everyone/everything—as well as everything else we've mentioned. It would sure be nice, even great, if it mattered, but I can't see how any particular value can be objectively derived from anything given the vast entropy that awaits all things, including the permanent death of knowledge itself. Our own discussion here will crumble. It's maddening that nothing will be untouched; nay, even nothing less than being completely obliterated. Therefore, any "well-living" of one's life would simply be because one wants to do it, with no further basis other than just feeling good (from evolutionistic altruism or whatever provides the dopamine or serotonin, sure)—certainly not "morals," which technically don't exist and were just collectively agreed upon to sustain hive minds' survival. And while I'm certainly not gonna suddenly go immoral...
That severely bothers me.
I don’t need infinite cosmic importance to matter, and neither do you.
It's not about importance to other people or beings; it's just about our own continued experience of experience itself. If you won't be there, why does what anything you struggle for matter? If you cause someone more pain... they'll eventually just die anyway! If you fight to reduce waste and help other people reduce pain in their lives or others'... they'll all just die anyway! "But for the span of their lives, they'll have felt better/worse"—so what? There is no basis for any valuing of one way or another relative to the absolutely immense size of eternity that awaits after such a speck of < a century of some more/less suffering/enjoyment. Am I missing something here? Seriously, I hope I am, but this is all I can conclude.
I feel like the only consolation is that those in massive suffering (whether physical or otherwise) will eventually find "peace" through death, even though nothingness is technically not actual peace, either; the phrase, "lay to rest," seems to ultimately be still more anthropomorphizing and feel-good comfort, to me anyway, for basically anyone who isn't in the height of constant, unavoidable pain.
With that said (and I mentioned this in another comment elsewhere here), the ace in the hole that completely throws my argument for a loop is the potential development of anti-aging technology should we be able to get anything like it, thanks to all the billionaires striving for it these years. It really resonated with me when Seth McFarlane said in The Orville about whether one would choose to live forever or not: "I want to see what happens next." If we can actually achieve that, then there'd be a better argument... in my understanding, anyway.
Christianity teaches you the lie that to matter, you must have permanence
Not really; I just want permanence regardless, lol.
The problem is that this doesn't matter relative to the looming deadline of the eventual, permanent nonexistence of everything—not just your own short life—I mean the entire universe and your memory keepers; what does it matter if one is remembered fondly for a brief few decades or even centuries or millennia versus timelessness?
It doesn't. But I'm a cosmic nihilist, so the impermanence of everything we do doesn't bother me. Whether it lasts forever does not change the present, and I will make this one life I know I have as good as I can, since I must experience it, and I will make others' lives as good as I can, because it does not make me feel good to do otherwise. I have no control over death or its imminence, so what good does it do me to worry about it?
I just want permanence regardless, lol.
I'm sure a lot of people do, but it doesn't exist, as you already pointed out. Even anti-aging medicine can't stop the heat death of the universe. Trying to hold onto that wish won't make it real, and it seems like all it's doing is giving you anxiety. Dwelling on those things can feel like trying to solve a problem, but it's one without a solution that only accomplishes frustration and worry.
Life is beautiful, is worth living in the present, because it's fragile and rare. I have the unique opportunity to be the universe experiencing itself, and worrying about permanence won't change that.
Do you fear the void before birth you emerged from?
Same shit.
The 70s happened before I was born, so yes.
That's a different situation because we hadn't experienced life beforehand. Do you not value the memories of your own life experiences? It's that loss that sucks.
thats debatable. There is a fair amount of evidence that the flow of time is an artifact of our perception and that nothing is really beforehand and your death is nor more in the future than your birth.
Really? Do you have any reading that you'd like to link to about this?
Yeah, but by the same uncertainty, maybe you gain all dead people's memories when you are submerged in the void? We all just go back into the pot, so to speak.
Not having to pay rent will feel pretty great too.
Fair, we cannot truly know what happens after... but at this point in my life, I'd be glad to keep paying for everything else I'm getting, so perhaps that's partly where this struggle comes from: net enjoyment > suffering at the moment, which I don't want to see vanish.
There's no use in fearing the inevitable. It will come, whether you like it or not, and no amount of fighting can stop it. Fearing it only makes you focus on some indeterminate time in the future and lose sight of the now.
Practice radical acceptance
There is no benefit in attaching ourselves to the suffering and rumination of that which cannot be changed. We practice radical acceptance in this instance because it, more than any other instance, is unchangeable. Allow yourself to feel the frustration, sadness, grief, anger, etc that you feel when you think about death but allow yourself to let the thoughts pass by rather than attaching to them. If you struggle with it (which of course you will, you’re only human) reflect any analyze your resistance to being able to accept.
It takes practice. There’s a lot more to it, I’m paraphrasing a lot. It’s worth reading about if you’re really struggling
I had forgotten about this phrase, thanks. I had thought "radical acceptance" was just about one's individual, undesirable personality traits or physical appearance, but I apparently haven't read much into this topic! I'd appreciate any resources.
https://hopeway.org/blog/radical-acceptance
I don’t endorse this website necessarily but skimming the content this page seems like a solid overview
The classic therapy book is “Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha” by Tara brach
But that hints at what it really is: radical acceptance is really co-opting the Buddhist concept of equanimity (upekkha), one of the four sublime states. We have co-opted mindfulness from this as well and made it something a bit removed from its original form
https://www.buddhanet.net/ss06/
“But the kind of equanimity required has to be based on vigilant presence of mind, not on indifferent dullness. It has to be the result of hard, deliberate training, not the casual outcome of a passing mood”
Yet many mindfulness “apps” are the opposite of this, promoting indifference. They miss the point. A takeaway from my post, if nothing else, is that this takes effort and diligence
A similar concept is 不動心 or fudoshin, the “immovable mind” from Japanese martial arts
https://www.amardeep.co/blog/how-to-use-fudoshin-the-right-way-to-be-unstoppable
Although a lot of the writings on this are like this, about endless achievement and goal orientation. This is not without merit of course but because of the association with martial arts you get a lot of “dojo people” writing on how to get to the next level, instead of a focus on inner peace. That may align with your goals though and it certainly has its applications
Embrace the void, like the womb it is. Safe, tranquil, forever at peace. Closest thing to a real heaven
We all have a fundamental drive to avoid dying. Our awareness of this inevitability is in direct conflict with this. The solution is often a change in how you think about things and yourself.
My personal view is that I have something analogous to a soul. It is the 'me' of me. It is also fundamentally tied to the structure of my brain (and body). When that structure changes, I change, when it goes, my 'soul' is destroyed with it. Critically however is that it is not alone. I can imagine what friends and relatives would say or do. In some ways, I have a weaker copy of their 'soul' within mine.
I also imprint part of my soul onto others in other ways. I create ripples in the world. Changes that wouldn't happen, were I not alive. Those ripples propagate through others, changing them. Some of those ripples are weak, only affecting 1 person. Others are stronger, affecting several people. A few are strong, able to spread, grow, and change the world (if only slightly). While those ripples, or their echoes exist, part of me does too.
My goal in life is 2-fold. Maximise my happiness and maximise the positive ripples I can create.
A quote by Terry Pratchett put it more poetically.
"No one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away, until the clock wound up winds down, until the wine she made has finished its ferment, until the crop they planted is harvested. The span of someone’s life is only the core of their actual existence."
Right, I've certainly thought about this:
No one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away
Here's my problem: that "finally" will still come, and even centuries or eons of influence are nothing compared to the eternity of experience-less-ness. Death will eventually come for everyone and everything, even stars. Perhaps I was influenced a bit by this graphic about the life cycle of stars, especially the anthropomorphic white dwarf: https://old.reddit.com/comments/1j68uai
This is the core of the issue with Dio de Los Muertos, the idea that your existence will last as long as others' memories of you will; that will still eventually come to an end, so why try so hard from a moral position to alleviate suffering if all suffering itself will also cease anyway?
You can certainly still do it, and I will also still try to reduce others' suffering in whatever ways I feel I can sustainably repeat for my own comfort level, but we then can't claim some kind of moral superiority in doing so versus selfish people if it all comes to an end anyway; you simply do it because it makes you feel good, perhaps fed by millennia of evolutionistic altruism. There is no basis for any moral high ground when everything all comes to an end in this tiny blip of life existence anyway.
The ace in the hold to my view here is life extension and age-reversing technology. If we can actually conquer age-caused death, then that would totally change the ballgame. I guess we'll see if that's possible, with all the billionaires and scientists currently pouring beacoup bucks into this endeavor. But... I don't know...
Anyway, thanks for sharing. It's an extremely difficult topic no matter how you slice it.
There is a difference between knowing and feeling. Rest in the feeling of your life before birth. What do you feel?
From an uncertain genesis to a certain end. You do not remember being born, but you know someday that you will die. This is awareness. And there is some comfort in this.
In the past you have remembrance or memory. The things that you were or the things that happened to you. In the future you anticipate what could come, or what your hopes are. You make plans. And that's fine. It's part of the human condition. But the now is the only thing that is actually happening.
Seize this moment. This moment is where you are. This moment is where you live. Being kind to yourself, being kind to others, being a person that others would wish to be, if they were examining your present person.
To build the world, or at least your small part of it, in the way that you see fit is all that our tiny hands can do. And there is a certain satisfaction in that. To live moment to moment. And to build your station. And to build others stations around you. To empower yourself and others. These are the things that build satisfaction. Gratification. These things are real. And these things do not require anything of the past or future.
Eventually you can stretch this now into the whole of your life. And it will provide wholeness that is not dictated by any sort of belief. For belief is not necessary. Let me repeat. You do not need to believe in anything to have wholeness and fulfillment in your life. But it certainly helps to be kind to others for its own sake. For that is the rule that others will measure you on as well.
I hope that helps.
PS. If you dig on this kind of thing, look into stoicism.
The counterargument that works for me is - why must it be terrifying to return to nothing? It’s something immutable. We weren’t owed anything by the universe - why bemoan what we don’t have, when we could enjoy that which we do?
Take a walk outside. Read a book. Snuggle something furry. It’s perfectly natural to fear death, but if it stops you from enjoying your life, isn’t that a little self defeating?
True, I suppose it could be seen as being greedy, then, given how we didn't ask to be born, either. But we weren't exactly able to, anyway...
All the good times we had, and will have, with anyone or anything ever will totally annihilate into nothingness.
No. They will still have happened. You will still have experienced them. You can only really ever experience whatever is happening to you now. If there is only nothingness after death, then you will not experience it.
Make the most of your life in the way it make sense to you. That could be having more shared laughs with loved ones or dedicate it to saving the critically endangered purple-spotted pygmy shrew.
In short: You will experience your life, you will not experience "the great void of death".
Without trying to sound too metaphysical. I look at it this way. The atoms that make up my body were forged in the hearts of stars. These atoms have existed in some form across the universe for billions of years.
I don't remember what patterns my atoms were before they became this one, and I don't know what pattern these atoms will take once I am done with them, but these atoms will remain.
This consciousness that has arisen from this pattern of atoms may give way to a different consciousness in a different pattern of atoms in some untold amount of time. While this consciousness may not know of that one, and that one may not remember this, it eases my mind to know that the stardust that originated these atoms will still exist.
It eases my mind to know that in the infinite void of nothingness, this pattern of atoms and this consciousness have impacted those around me. The short period of time that this consciousness is around gives me the opportunity to experience the wonderful breadth of the human condition, because this will be the only time these atoms are in this exact pattern. Every moment of my existence I am unique.
I am of the universe, I have experienced the universe, and others have experienced the universe through me.
We were never nothing. Matter cannot be created nor destroyed.
I'm talking about our consciousness, though. It doesn't matter what the individual atoms do if we individually end up losing our own capacity to experience the best that our lives have to offer (unless you're beset by some major chronic illness, of course, but that's not what I'm talking about here).
However, if you believe death isn't the end, I'd love to read your thoughts because I'd love for it to not be true. All the evidence suggests that it is, though...
It doesn’t matter to our current consciousness as it can’t perceive anything outside of that. We do not know what is beyond our rudimentary understanding of what makes us who we are.
Something like this seems far more likely to me than consciousness being finite.
Keyword being like this, as in whatever is actually going on is far beyond our comprehension, but it’s a nice palatable story that gives it shape. Consciousness might exist beyond death as part of a universal ‘field of awareness’ and reality could be a holographic projection from a deeper non local field of information. Upon death the quantum information could “return” to the universe (orchestrated objective reduction), Monadism, fractal consciousness, pantheism, etc.
I read that short story years back, yeah. I am also aware of the possibility that we could be in a lifelong simulation, which actually sort of falls back in line with Christian thought about this life just being a prelude to the real one.
I guess I just wish we had to go off more than merely hypothesizing...
For me, it's easy to not fear it when I'm healthy, but as soon as I have health problems, I get this strong fear of mortality. It's a visceral thing though. In my mind, I know it's fine, it's inevitable, and there has never been a better time in history for medical treatment. But the fear I feel is separate from that rational knowledge. That is what's hard for me to harmonize. There is an anxiety underneath it all. And the funny thing is I never used to get that either, but after my brother committed suicide, I have had this visceral, mortal fear.
Daily meditation has helped me identify the feelings, but has not helped much in overcoming them. It has helped me find peace among them, which is a decent middle ground.
The mortal fear also helps me clearly prioritize things in my life, so it does have its benefits.
I used to be scared of death, too, then I realised how terrible life was. Now I look forward to it so there will be no more suffering. Oblivion is better than pain. I'm still scared of the pain of dying, just not of what may lie beyond.
For all we know it’s an eternity of being frozen in whatever instant you were in at the moment of death. The people who die in their sleep literally get eternal slumber but the people who get chainsaw accidents get a moment of limb tearing pain stretched to eternity
Probably not though, probably your thing
It might be anything, we have no way of knowing. Hopefully it's not reincarnation, as most lives on this planet are worse than mine.
Another answer to persistent impact is communality. Your actions echo in the people and places you've shared with others.
The laws, traditions, buildings, sentiments, norms, societal wounds, environment, relationships, etc. all come from people doing things during their lifetime. You can be one of those people, and choose what your contribution and legacy could be.
What will you leave for the next generation?
You can't affect if your consciousness will live on or not, but you can affect your conscience. Maybe start there?
I already am; for half a year now, I've been running regular, even near-weekly, gatherings for the public to try to fight off loneliness in my community and help people make friends. But they will all eventually die; everything you said—these relationships, the environment, law, society, the Earth, the solar system—will eventually fall apart with enough time; I'm talking about going all the way past humanity colonizing Mars, to the point of our sun—no, all such main sequence stars in the universe—eventually becoming a red giant, then a white dwarf, and finally disintegrating into black holes. Eventually it will all collapse in one way or another.
I feel like all morals are shortsighted for not looking far ahead enough (I mean faaaaaaaaar ahead, eons upon eons) at what little basis there is for themselves; we're talking about eternity here by comparison. I guess religion's approach is to just cap it off with heaven and/or limbo and/or hell, but any of these is still tremendously disturbing IMO.
To clarify, I'm not gonna suddenly stop running my social gatherings nor trying to help other people with their problems, but this existential crisis puts quite the dampener on everything.