How to you come to terms with the fact that you will eventually not exist?
Rant: This has been keeping me up at night for way too long and every time I think about it I feel like am literally choking on my own thoughts. I have other shit to do but everything seems so inconsequential next to this. I just can’t comprehend why or how the universe even exists or how a bunch of atoms can think or that quantum mechanics literally revealed that the world is not loaded when you are not looking like how tf do you know that I am observing something.
Btw I am not looking for a purpose in life although this may be interpreted as me asking for that.
If anyone has the same problem as me good luck my friend just know that you are not alone.
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Personally I find it’s easy to not fret about it because I can’t control it. Also, I didn’t mind not existing before I was born so I won’t mind not existing when my time is up.
Why do you care if you exist. Are you the Queen of england or something.
I have some news about the Queen my friend. Brace yourself
I’m not ready for this
You’ve already not existed before. And then you were born.
I miss the nothing, what I ended up with here isn’t better, and damn sure isn’t as peaceful.
You’ll be back there eventually, don’t worry.
Make the best of what you have in the mean time.
I think you will need to make the transition from negative nihilism to positive nihilism.
Aside from that I don’t think I’m really convinced that interpreting the quantum wave function collapse when observed as the world not being loaded when you aren’t looking at it is accurate. Even our best explanations could likely be a misinterpretation of what is really happening.
This channel is great by the way. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FP6iyVJ70OU
Come to the conclusion that you already havent existed for the previous at least 13.7 million years. Now you exist and after that you won’t exist again.
True! Add do that 13 million the 13 billion years before that too!
Then it gets fun! You can think about whether you didn’t exist before the big bang! Did you not exist, or since the universe didn’t exist and you couldn’t exist can you count that as you not existing?
How to you come to terms with the fact that you will eventually not exist?
I struggle with what happens before that. That’s the only relief I have, knowing that this shit parade will one day end and not matter at all.
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definitely don’t want a slow, miserable downward spiral before my hardware finally can’t sustain the ghost.
And this is why I reserve my right to self-deliverance. When I think my time is nigh, I’ll take a long walk into the mountains, without any electronic devices nor identification, and never look back.
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Haha! Yeah! Though my intention is really one last excursion out into nature. One last sight-seeing trip, one last camp out. No alarms, no surprises, just a nice walk out into the woods, and then silence.
It’d be really sad to go out in a hospital bed, surrounded by white walls, white ceiling, and white floors. I might not even be enjoying shitty hospital food. That’s just too sad.
I see this experience as a once in a universe chance to explore. I try not to worry about the inevitable while I have control of the now. Buddhism has a great philosophy on the impermanence of things and existing in this moment.
I agree. Meditation in general - focusing on existence/experience without your mind’s narrative - would probably be good for the OP. The narrative is what is scary, because it is what’s afraid of not existing. Setting that aside can be very liberating.
I spent a lot of time as a child thinking about this.
I came to the conclusion that there’s not much I can do about it, so I’ll enjoy life while I can, although I am going to enlist in cryonics just in case.
You keep on existing (at least for now)
The same nagging notion sometimes claws at my brain as well.
The notion of consciousness not existing is especially troublesome for me to wrap my mind around. Logic says that no consciousness means nothing to perceive said lack of consciousness, therefore no loss there (for the subject, of course). That somehow… does not make it any better.
First time I’ve been through general anaesthesia I was wondering what it’d be like and a bit fearful of it. Happened in an instant, and I woke up what felt like immediately. Afterwards my conscious mind fixed that with perhaps artificially introducing passage of time to make everything fit. If I think back now, I certainly know some time had passed. But had it? And how much? No idea. Clock said around 3 hours, so I’ll go by that.
Shortly thereafter I had a massive bleed and lost about 1/3 of my blood (by looking at amount of hemoglobin before and after the event). The more I lost, the less coherent I was and the less anything mattered. By the time I got to the ER, I had tunnel vision and survival mode on. But I wasn’t scared for some odd reason… nothing mattered much. Not sure how close I came to actual death then, but it felt pretty close.
What I can advise… enjoy what you can, and don’t waste your hate on anything. It’s pretty much not worth it. Unless your life or the life of loved ones is in immediate danger, screw it. Guy cut you off in traffic? Fuck’em. It’s not worth shortening your life for some rando with not enough respect for himself or others as to break the social contract. Just choose your preferred intensity of sustainable (for you) hedonism and go from there.
I also hope it gets easier with age, but the prospect of becoming more jaded that I am now is not appealing. Though if it makes everything easier…
I will say this, though. Not existing was (probably?) fine. But being brought into existence just for it to be taken away after a blink of an eye (in terms of billions of years of non-existence vs the average lifespan) seems like cruel and unusual punishment.
I can’t help you, but I can tell you that if you hold out for a couple of decades, you’ll eventually stop worrying about it.
One day, you’ll realize that you wake up in pain and suffer through most of the day; that you are constantly annoyed that young people think they’re the first and only people to discover or experience things that you’ve seen people discover and experience countless times - but you are also hopelessly jaded and desperately envious of their naivety and ability to be passionate about something other than injustice. That despite fighting for decades to improve the world, and believing in some cosmic karma, you see evil people succeed over, and over, and have a deep recognition that the world is fucked and getting more fucked with every dollar. When this time comes, the Void will become appealing: a rest and relief from pain and suffering. One day, you will realize that you no longer lay awake at night anxiously fretting about not being alive, but are rather looking forward to it.
Hang in there, man.
You absolutely nailed it. This has been my exact experience.
Thanks pretty depressing. But it’s nice to know that this will get better with time so thanks.
I’ve never been afraid of death and non-existence, I’ve only been afraid of dying without having done or experienced as much as I could. Now that I’ve travelled, made friends, made art, been in relationships and worked and played beside passionate people, I feel like I’ve done things with my time. I don’t want it to end but I’m not afraid of it ending, either.
The thing that helped me was “let go or be dragged”.
Death will happen whether I stress out about it or not. Stressing about it just contaminates the time you have. So I gradually learned to focus more on the “isn’t existence weird?!” than “death is coming”. And when you really get into the swing of it, your limited time becomes timeless.
