Fear of Death

I feel scared of death, Holla Forums. I don't want to have have black picture in front of my eyes and lose all my memories for the rest of eternity just because my time to dwell this planet has reached to an end. Is there any chance for any kind of afterlife, or should I just accept the fact that one day, the "me" will die and I become the scary nothing? How do you cope with fear of death, Holla Forums?

Becoming nothing is scary :ˇ(

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Reincarnation is a thing.

Being dead will be just like before you were born.

there's that unfounded optimism again

This, tbh

When you sleep you die.

When you die you sleep.

It's scary, I admit. But on the other hand, you wouldn't know, because you don't exist anymore. It's gonna be the same like it used to be before you were born - nothing.

What is scary though is the fact that the world practically ends. There is no way to conceive of our universe outside of our own minds. No mind, no universe. Just stay healthy user, and don't do risky stuff

why are you afraid of death?

Wrong.

Just stop taking the concept of "you" so seriously. Life is just another fucking game. Seriousness can make it more fun but anything taken to an extreme will ruin you.

When you sleep you not only dream, you also retain some concept of time. When you sleep short or longer than usual, you will get a vague feeling about it when you wake up.

user, you already are nothing. Here you are, nothinging the quality of this board with your low quality post. Here you are, nothinging with thoughts about nothing in a mind full of nothing. Here you are, nothinging the world as you consume it and produce nothing of value, not even you consider yourself valuable let alone others.

And you are scared of the nothing which will negate your current state of nothing? Please, you're just a baby who is scared of something far less scary than the emptiness you already are. Isn't it the case that all you're really scared of is ending and realizing in that last moment that your while life had only been one prolonged little nothing not just to everyone, but to you as well? Self pitty is all it is.

This implies I would get to wake up again.


Thanks for the heartfelt response, user.


I am actually not scared of dying in old age but rather dying in stupid shit like car crash while still in my 20's since there is so much stuff I want to yet accomplish and when I become nothing, nobody will remember me except my family. Besides that, I don't feel very tempted about losing my entire identity and joining some fascist afterlife where I am only one of the molecules of energy travelling the uniform universe without any consciousness whatsoever. It's scary af, but I feel like christianity is just a propaganda and provides no answer either.


Isn't leftism about "acting in your self interest"? Why do you abandon the concept of "you" so easily?


If I am nothing, then why do I feel, think and do? Get your crap outta here.

RIP OP

when i'm dead just throw me in the trash

Your consciousness is the only thing you can call yourself, memories of past consciousnesses are not the same as the one you're currently experiencing.

Anal water.

(You)
See the top of this post.

literally what?

So you are saying reincarnation or life beyond death exists? What makes you think that? I wouldn't mind this at all, to be honest.

If dying is being how we were before we were born, that ultimately implies there is something after death.

After all before being born we eventually were born.

So either it is different from before being born, or it isn't nothingness.

When you say being dead is like before you were born or going to sleep, that would imply I would be brought back to life after a period of time. Who would guarantee me being brought back to life when I am dead for real.

I never claimed it's like going to sleep, that's beyond retarded. It's like before you were conceived. You being dead is going to be exactly what it was "like" to be "you" in 1700.

Smoke more salvia bruh. It's like a preview.

ask me how I know you're an anarkiddie

That is no guarantee that we will be born again. It might as well just all end. Yet the concept of time doesn't exist beyond death of the consciousness. For you, all the millenias of life on earth before you were born are like one second before you were born, from your perspective. Similarily, every millenia after your death until the death of the universe will be like one second after your death. Time doesn't exist outside the universe.

Either way, I'm going to get frozen into an kyogenic chamber and let bury myself under the Ural Mountains, hoping that in 50.000 years, they discover me and resurrect me. Russian company already offers this for 50k bucks or something.

If you were something you wouldn't care because you *are*. Who are you? What are you? Just some user nobody knows or will remember, because you yourself don't want to be anything other than a passing nothing, and you are this nothing as a result of the nonexistent essence which you are. No passion, no drive, no will, no books to read.

Do you think people who are fulfilled, people who really matter to themselves and others, live in fear of the eternal? Nah. They revel in their nothingness as their own being. Stirner is right: the world is nothing to those who are all to themselves.

I win, you lose..

No, I'm saying for all intents and purposes you die every time you go to sleep.

ITT the case against atheism. Get a spiritual life bros.

Then it isn't like "before being born". It's something different.


What if you lose concept of time and 500 000 years pass when your rebirth appears?

You're focusing on the word "born" when that was only meant to suggest it's going to be like before you ever existed. It's going to be like what it was like before your great grandparents were born. Better?

Egoism is alright when it's beneficial. But if it's not, as in your case, then why bother, why cling so desperately to an idea that's not helping you?

Determination, concern, and seriousness are all great things. But sometimes you just have to let go of desire and accept what you have as a beautiful experience, even death.

Amor fati

The horror.

I'm saying I'm going to do this whenever I'm on my deathbed. They are supposed to reanimate me once humanity defeated death. That might be 50k years of 5000k years. I don't care

Atheism doesn't mean anti-spirituality. It just means the absence of god/gods as an abstract concept. There is a difference between the atheism of Feuerbach and Stirner, who were more agnostics, and advocated for a rejection of the concept of a god as an imposer of rules, and that even if there was a god, it would be irrelevant for humanity as a concept. Either way, he either controls everything, which means it doesn't make a difference whether you believe or not, or he doesn't which means it doesn't make a difference whether you believe or not.

Then there are modern atheists with their fedoras. They don't ask these questions, basically their arguments come down to: Muh STEM, no god lmao.

If you think about it, death is the ideal state of being. No fear, no sadness, no wars, no politics.

hoping this is something I can do before I go. If I die I want to wake up to what I hope to be something similar to star trek.

What bro. The OP of this thread and a lot of the replies were the exact opposite and that's what I was commenting on.

Spirituality is just what you're describing here: >soak up enough meaning and enjoyment from the nature of being

The analytical fucks are the ones who let carbon emissions keep them up at night.

People will probably come in this thread saying how "Its like before you were born" or how its a relief from the burden of life or how you have nothing to fear because you never actually experience "death", but all in all its all its just ways to make death feel more comfortable. Death will probably be the most terrifying thing you and I will ever experience and out of all the irrationality of our world it is by far the most rational thing to be terrified of. It is an absolute unknown, a void in our minds, and if death is truely annihilation then it is neither a comfort nor remedy but the very antithesis to the thing we call "me". We will cease to be ourselves, to have memories and dreams, to love and to cry, to be with family and loved ones. We will be gone from the world and as our brains suffocate as our bodies shut down we will either convince ourselves its ok in whatever way we can or cry out in terror begging not to go. To be a sapient human is to be the PTSD patient of existance, to be perfectly aware and able to conceptualize your own being, even up to how vulnerable and mortal you really are. Its not wrong to be scared user. To live is to be scared of death, and know there is no escape.

It's truly astounding that even someone pouring his heart out over a deep fear is reason for you to shit on a person with a synergy autism and narcissism that seems to drive your every interaction. You're not even an idiot savant, but simply an autistic cretin that picked german idealists instead of trains as his idée fixe.

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gotcha, sorry for misinterpreting

Now thats just depressing

Duuuuuuude

Get fucked, retard. There is nothing inherently "rational" in self-interest or desire. The fear of mortality is easily overcome when you stop seeing the self as an ultimate end that must be preserved at all costs.

Life can be a joke, a story, or a work of art. There's nothing rational about consciously choosing to see it as an eternal nightmare because lol self-interest

No problem. I guess I misunderstood you because you were also arguing in favor of spiritualism as well, right?

Too much fedora-whinging on message boards is making me defensive.

C O P E

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Dunno if it helps OP, but I really saw a bright light and felt a total serenity when I overdosed after the terror set into conviction.

Me too, but the light was being dragged back into the world.

Strawman harder

Make an argument first

WAKE ME UP

Wow, you can see the liberal in her eyes.

Cope with it like this-
Things are only bad because you subjectively judge them to be so, if you are not there it cannot be negative. Thereby death, a state in which you are no longer present at all, cannot possibly be construed as negative.

Further, logically we should be afraid of things we can and should avoid. Thereby death, which is unavoidable as a state, should not be feared, avoid dying but do not bother with an inevitable outcome.

Eternal life is a worse fate than death, eventually all possible combination of things, feelings and thoughts will be had and your existence will become recursive, over and over for all eternity.

Lastly, stop ruining your life now because it won't last forever. Cake is delicious, even more so because you don't have infinite cake, the same can be said for life.

When you die you'll return to nothing.
You are your conscience right now and your conscience is generated by your brain structures and your collective memories. Once your brain is gone there is no "you" anymore. You won't have a "black picture in front of your eyes" because there won't be "your eyes" or "pictures" or even any color when you are gone. Without your brain there is no conscience anymore and without conscience you cannot feel or perceive anything, you will cease to exist completely and become nothing. There is nothing to fear because once you are nothing you won't even have what it takes to feel fear or pain or anything really, it's a completely liberating experience.
The only thing you have to fear is living a dishonorable life.

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These arguments help nobody. Get out.

That's just it, even if your 'soul' or whatever it is that separates living matter from non-living matter survives the body after death the YOU still ceases to exist.

This isn't a new conundrum, Plato grappled with it in Phaedo.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaedo


I don't exactly recommend it, but having scary drug experiences that feel like death takes the fear away. You might be spooked for a few days afterword, but then you realize death isn't going to be all that bad.

People who over do it on edibles often think they're dying, but of course no one has O.D. on pot brownies yet. Peyote is famous showing you your own death in a profound life-changing way.

Datura makes people feel they are in hell. So stay away from that.

They helped me, motherfucker.

just because it is inevitable doesn't mean you can't or shouldn't fear it. The fact that it will be the end of everything for you is the part to be fearful of. Because you cannot stop it doesn't mean you shouldn't be afraid. Not to mention the fact that it may be possible to live on. Though unlikely freezing yourself to be revived later on is a possibility. Or a currently unknown afterlife may also be possible.

Your not an art exhibit user

I love these shitty methaphyctional pseudo arguments. Le death cannot be bad cuz u cant jugg eet xdd ur ded xd do you even realize how stupid this argument is. Of course living is good and being dead is bad, if you are alive you can do things and think and perceive. It's literally the craziest thing that ever happened in the universe. And yet you say being dead is cool? so why don't you just like sleep always. I don't say suicide just go hikki or something. That life must be friggin good I bet? You see how stupid the argument that death is not negative is? When you are alive is the ONLY time you are not a rock. There's eternity to not be a rock why not avoid it as much as fucking possible

losers

there's eternity TO BE* a rock. Fuck

Fam you "die" every time you lose consciousness. Hell, you're constantly in a state of fluctuation between existence and nonexistence with your brain creating the illusion of a cohesive experience. If you don't wanna die you should just stay awake as long as possible because this little spurt of consciousness is all you're gonna get before you go to sleep or get distracted and daydream or something and then when you "come back" is a new instance of you. Look up anterograde amnesia and watch the movie Memento and you'll get a better understanding of what "you" are and just how finite your "life" really is.

The trick is to love yourself, past, present and future and aim to make life better for the future versions of yourself so when they arrive they will thank you. This is what Karma and reincarnation are metaphors for.

I feel that It's an escape. Nobody surely knows what happens, But Anywhere's better than here.

It makes sense you didn't bother to explain your axiom, there is no rational basis for it. Death isn't bad, there is no evil. Life depends of death to exist by definition.

I'm certainly not a pessimist. No reason to be one when I can so easily choose to stop believing my "problems" are real.

lmao read the Bible kiddo

everyone will get what they deserve

I'm autistic so this advice may not be useful to you, but I'll share anyway. Fearing death itself is useless and miserable, just as fearing anything that is inevitable. The choice we do have, and we should pretend that it is a meaningful choice, is how we go out, and how comfortable we are in going out. I choose to not have any anxiety about things I have no control over, under American capitalism I am not very anxious.

Fight for a socialist future without death so that future generations don't have to suffer like we did. That's our place in the historical dialectic, our ancestors struggled and died in the dirt to build industrial society, now it's our job to continue the fight towards utopia.

Your semantics won't work on me, philosopher wannabe!

No you don't, your consciousness doesn't cease when you go to sleep, it's just a reducing of of higher functions, the subconscious and mechanical parts continue to function.

It isn't when you realize:
a. you wake up eventually.
b. your brain is still working and it never shuts down for not even a second.
c. sometimes there's dreams.
d. your consciousness isn't a completely separate entity from your brain. The unconscious as a part of consciousness.
e. a simple break in consciousness doesn't change you from being you.

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except physics works well enough for technology and stuff so probably not

So does your digestive tract. You aren't your brain. You're a small part of what your brain does which is not always active.

And? People have seizures, that's not conscious activity either.

No shit.
No, it's specifically the part of your brain/mind that's not the consciousness.

No, but it puts an end to your stream of consciousness and replaces that with another. The patterns that define "you" in the sense you mean here live on long after your death and persist while you're not actively conscious and in "auto pilot" where you carry out habits. But that's not "you" as in the experience of you that you have. If a copy of you was made mid-consciousness, the experiential you would be uninterrupted but the structural you would continue on in both versions, and the new experiential you would for all intents and purposes be a copy that diverges at a specific point. The original you would only experience what the copying process entailed and otherwise nothing. If this was used for transport like in Star Trek then the original would be destroyed as well. This is functionally no different than going to sleep or otherwise losing consciousness because the structure is fully preserved and fully capable of generating a new experiential you as needed.

So it's going to feel like a second until I'm 3-4 years old?
No, not better. You're making leap of faith prophecies on what happens after death.

STEMfag detected

Describe to me what it was like to "be you" in 1600. That's what it will "be like" when you die.

Fear of death is the ur-misery. It is the common ancestor of all bad feelings, and it is the face you see when your hopelessness comes to you whole. Anxiety over the impossibility of your infinite EXISTENCE is something the existentialists really got right.

You can not confront these fears logically, they are not illogical. Fear of death is probably the only discernible logical-atomic fear there is aside from fear of future unhappiness.
What you CAN do is make meaning in your life. Revolution, love, justice, anuddah shoah (for or against,) this sounds smarmy so I want to break it down to a really material level.

If you feel the actions you are taking on a second-to-second level are truly important you will magically find you do not feel so imprisoned by the facts of life and death. You will not care as much, and you will become free in your purpose.

You don't need a new perspective on things or some weak shit, you need to be able to look at your hands and tell yourself "this is important" at any given moment to ward off the fear of death. You will find it works. (This is why soldiers fight bravely for some causes and desert under others.)

this is what I actually believe

inb4 ebin, this is the advice there is. This is the only shelter. Take it or suffer.

What are you, coward that wants to live forever?

Jesus, death isn't like sleeping because of something pretty fucking simple, you don't sleep forever. I don't know how you're expecting to ease OP's anxiety with this stupid comparison.

a coward would be someone who wants to die though, immortality is a fate much worse than death

Congratulations, you have joined the ranks of idiots in this thread that think "every sleep is death" is the same as "death is like sleeping".

In life there are two givens: you'll suffer and you'll die. The only way to prevent yourself from going insane is to artificially cordon off sections of your consciousness, through distractions, anchoring ideologies/religions, etc., so that death isn't constantly leering up at you. Then you cultivate an illusion of progress, gratifying one craving after another, always thinking alongs the lines of "All right, if I can just achieve this next thing, then I'll be truly fulfilled!" but oddly enough never becoming satisfied. The Buddhists diagnosed the problem, but they did not provide the right solution. Ultimately, the only meaningful choice that we can make is to not bring any more humans into this nightmare in which we must engage in the most ridiculous self-deception in order to make it from day to day. In lives overflowing with hunger, thirst, lust, boredom, illness and deformity, it is truly cruel that the only reward we're given is death, and, crueler still, knowledge of death. We must choose to end the subjection of humans to this nightmare.

Thus that which is the most awful of evils, death, is nothing to us, since when we exist there is no death, and when there is death we do not exist.

This is the abstracted suicide created by blackpill retards who have the Autism Level to feel the pain but their pathological psychology frustrates them from seeing the light


this is the serenity of completely fucking missing it. This can be you if you start Believing In something.

This

Being dead isn't good either, it just cannot, logically, be bad. Dying sucks, sure, but that's a few minutes of pain followed by not.
If you really think like this I'd say you're just irrationally afraid of the inevitable, seek meds.

lmao fam, I've got 99 problems but an existentialist ain't one

lmao fam, I've got 99 problems but an existentialist ain't one

You were born once, what makes you think you wont be born again?
Its a real question. I am not the sort of person to ponder these type of things.

Depending on how you die, it can be completely painless. You wouldn't feel any pain if you died by breathing an inert gas or taking a tank shell to the head

gay

how the fuck are you this dumb? nihilism is the ultimate existentialism.

I don't know about you, but something that helped me (that isn't in this thread) is actually Buddhism. I don't know much about it, I don't even believe it. It is my understanding that Buddhists believe in reincarnation, but a state of Nirvana can be achieved. Nirvana is the death of your soul/self/consciousness. It is comforting to me that some people seek out the death of their consciousness instead of seeking out the eternal existence of reincarnation. It reframed the idea of non-existence in my mind OP, and maybe it will do unto you what it has done to me.

Didn't mean to sage, good thread user

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One thing to remember is that although you will definitely die one day anyway, before that you will have periods with intense nauseating panic attacks almost daily when the thought of it will cross your mind, and longer periods when you will accept your fate or maybe even longing for it, depending on your mental health and tolerance for capitalist bullshit.
During my last bout of existential anxiety, I came to the conclusion that God is just the act of creation of this universe, and is, from a human point of view, a deeply psychopathic asshole who doesn't give a single fuck about us. But somehow we are part of its plan, and what you and I think of this plan won't change anything of it (unless you are studying medicine).

Rien ne se perd, rien ne se crée, tout se transforme => "Nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed"

Even when your consciousness will disappear, you will still be a part of this universe, and God knows what will happen to the parts of our body. Maybe we will merge together and create a more intelligent consciousness someday. Or a dumber one. Or maybe we won't. We cannot know. Our minds are way too limited to know, just like a dog can't comprehend all the subtleties of human languages. All we gathered is that consciousness is probably an intermediate state of matter.
If you aren't a deluded fag who believe in a benevolent God, you have to find a way to be satisfied with that outcome. And whenever you are or not, it will happen.

There was also a programmer who choose to be euthanized because of a terminal illness, and said somewhere on the internet that children are the afterlife. It's pretty true in a way too. Doesn't necessarily mean that kind of afterlife is desirable of you and I.

Anyway, nothing else can cure your anxiety than time (i.e. death or growing up/old). Listen to Duster, Beethoven and Stars of the Lid, and don't fall for the regular GABA agonist consumption meme (alcoholism and/or benzodiazepine addiction) because it will only make your life harder, and the anxiety will never truly disappear.

Actually Eliane Radigue is better for cases of death anxiety : youtube.com/watch?v=PnbGirPTgF0

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Death is exciting tbh. Can't wait to find out if there's anything that transcends physical reality.

youtube.com/watch?v=MOY-jJeOeBk

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Post the evidence of afterlife

Nothing wrong with death, in fact, I hope we never get to live forever or nearly forever, since the heat death of the universe is inevitable anyway; the only problem I have is that life is both short and very, very fucking boring. Either living for a few centuries more or having a life that doesn't suck ass would be nice.

Uhh


Life is about who you have and the relationships therein.
You can be ridden in poverty, hated by society, have very little friends or none at all, no real future or qualifications, and if you have that special person your life is blissful and the hunger pains are no issue.

When you've suffered life is long, despite being around twenty what worries me is the idea of living three more of these, and really 5-6 more as what I remember and actually participated in was the last ten years of my life.
Unless you're turned off life is insanely slow. I'd be fine with living hundreds of years if I had someone to love, but that doesn't mean I won't feel like I've lived an eternity before I even begin debilitating in age.

You could always suport trans humanism just in case.

Personally from experiences of friends of mine i think there is some sort of afterlife and it's nothing like the Christian or Muslim version.

Can you show me where to find this documentation and elaborate on how it's proof

The sheer amount of accounts from all different cultures, beliefs, languages, religions, etc, shows clearly it's something real, especially because it's been reported for much of history.
For documentation simply search anything regarding "I died and came back/was revived."

I said an existentialist, as in an existentialist problem

youtube.com/watch?v=HmO8l517TEg
youtube.com/watch?v=KOyZvLAbTAo

It's really just the brain playing with ya.

Live in a way that makes you less afraid of dying.

Last weekend five japanese girls made dinner for me and a friend. That was nice.

That was my point mate

Have you considered memetic immortality, user?


this is the answer I agree with, though I'd go even a step further and say that if consciousness is life, you die and are reborn every moment, and the whole world dies and is reborn with you (internalism).


Newtonian physics 'work' under certain conditions even though they aren't really true.


Presumably you believe in souls or that some ideal essence separate from the material body defines who we are, personhood?

OP here again, read the entire thread and all the replies within from start to finish. Lots of solid perspective here.

This one contains a useful piece of advice I've chosen to prescribe to - nothing is lost or created, everything is transformed. I don't know how to articulate this concept, but the idea of there being no actual death but just transforming from consciousness to becoming some other form of existing in the universe, such as becoming one with the sub-atomic energy sustaining the universe makes sense. I hope I one day find someone who has spoken in length about this concept so I could learn to articulate this concept.

What are you so scared of is not death, because death is unknowable. You fear life itself.

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Smoke some salvia. You'll find the experience you're looking for.

Does it matter? You're going to die one day anyway and you'll only find out if there's an afterlife when you're dead. Unless there isn't in which case you wouldn't notice because you're dead.

There is nothing after death. Chemically induced coma patients note that they did not perceive the flow of time, for them 12 hours of unconsciousness simply did not register. No out of body experience or light in the tunnel either. Mystery solved, nothing at all to fear.

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Take solace in the fact that death is an impossible experience for the human mind to grasp. Assuming the end of your life does not follow a Zeno's Paradox in which the last few moments of your life are stretched to eternity, you can expect to continue your life in some form after "death". Since the mind cannot perceive non-existance, your consciousness will persist after Death in some way.

Become depressed and you will embrace death.

You arent scared of death. Death is easy. Youre scared of dying.

I track my mental state based on whether I'm afraid of or wish for death before falling asleep.